Note – I actually listed to the original versions that he offered off of his blog when he did Thing a Week so many moons ago, but this seemed a little easier to post in a playlist-type format, so you end up getting a mix of live performances, fan music videos, and more – enjoy!
I grew up as a Gobots kid.
At the time I honestly didn’t really think much of Transformers – I think Gobots were just what I ended up with because that’s what they had on the shelves in the toy aisle of our local grocery store, so that’s where my allowance and whatnot went when I had money to spend. In hindsight, it’s clear that one is pretty much a direct rip-off of the other … even though technically my beloved Gobots actually came out a few months before the stupid Transformers did! 😛
Anyways, I bring this up tonight because whenever these alien robots wander back into my head from my childhood, I’m always reminded of one particular series of episodes that I’ve never been able to find online … until tonight. It’s a five-episode arc called The Gobotron Saga that featured the original creator of the Gobots, The Last Engineer, being sought out to save the Guardians from an evil Renegade invasion. The very last part in the series (5 of 5) features him showing off the new power suits that he created to give the Guardians the upper hand against their enemies which were totally awesome … and yes, I absolutely had every last one of them to complete the set…
…although it’s really hard not to look at the final “Power Warrior” that is formed and not think that it’s just a blatant rip-off of Voltron… 🙄
I also found it somewhat intriguing to look through the actual cast of the show and come to realize that several of the voice actors were actually involved in a lot of the cartoons that I used to watch growing up!
Anyways, here’s the full miniseries – all 100 minutes of it across five parts! I tried to track down another one that I liked as well – it was actually a miniseries of the first five episodes of the show, but the only copy I could find was on some really crappy video site that literally played commercials every five minutes and was nearly unwatchable. Rumor has it you can still get that one as a print-on-demand DVD from Hanna-Barbera, so if anyone needs an awesome nostalgic Christmas gift for me this year… 😉
In a perfect world, I would say all three of those things are important, in that order, but we don’t live in a perfect world and at least here in America, where corporate profits are at record highs while welfare, unemployment, and distribution of wealth also cite unprecedented spikes in all of the wrong places, I think taking a step back to examine the true role of businesses in our society shines a bright light on the root cause of many of our problems today…
There’s two ways to look at this arrangement, in my mind – from the perspective of the individual … namely, those who own the business, and from the perspective of the society … or all of us together, whether we have any vested interests in a given business or not.
Society’s perspective is the easy one – we want businesses to succeed, make enough money to pay all of their employees well, and have a little leftover afterwards as profit to grow the business and help compensate any financial investors who make the business possible. Paying its employees well is especially important because if they don’t compensate the people who work for them well enough to be able to support themselves, they either need to seek additional work elsewhere, which is a drain to society because people working multiple jobs don’t have any time to participate in community, or they’re forced to turn to social programs like welfare to fill the gap between their actual income and a livable wage.
The individual’s perspective, on the other hand, is a bit different … although it doesn’t have to be.
Back in perfect world, the individual’s view wouldn’t really be much different than that of society because, well, the individual is part of society, too, of course! And yet the way many business owners see their roles today is quite different – they want their businesses to succeed so that they can maximize profits for themselves and for investors, pricing their services at whatever our capitalistic markets will bear and paying their employees just enough, but not more than they have to in order to keep the ship afloat. They see their employees as resources rather than people, and when the budget needs a little trimming in order to maintain their financial targets, those resources are the quickest way to cut costs … nevermind, once again, that they are actually people.
And of course, I’m not talking about all businesses here – there are plenty of companies doing the right thing that completely contradict what I’m saying here, but there are also more than enough that don’t.
Those don’ts have made themselves quite clear in the last couple of months, whether they’re arguing against raising the minimum wage or they’re reducing employees’ hours to 29 hours/week to avoid healthcare mandates. These are companies that are putting their profits above the general welfare of their own workers, which although it’s great for their bottom line and it keeps their investors happy, to me as a member of society it’s more important to make a reasonable profit and keep your employees happy than make an exorbitant profit despite their well being.
One of the biggest examples that still sticks out in my mind is the Papa John’s blunder over the Affordable Care Act, where founder and CEO John Schnatter expressed his opposition for the new law and said that he believed that many of his franchises would likely cut employee hours to avoid the mandate, then later citing that the mandate could end up costing them an additional 11-14 cents per pizza. Apparently that was a big deal to the investors behind Papa John’s, but to someone who frequently (up until this stink, anyways) bought their pizzas at an average of $10 a piece, an extra 1.4% cost is a steal for being able to ensure healthcare for all of the company’s employees.
If I was running Papa John’s at the time, I’d have made a promotion out of it, raised prices by a quarter a pie, and bragged about how it was the right thing to do because Papa’s puts its employees first … but instead, Papa’s took a beating in the media for it and ended up having to do a lot of backtracking and apologizing, all the while giving away thousands of free pizzas for their annual Super Bowl promotion.
It’d like to think that if you asked the average man on the street, they’d be more concerned about a company supporting its employees than its investors, and those who cite the opposite had better not be the same ones who then turn around and complain about spending for our social programs going through the roof because you can’t have it both ways. If you’re not going to insist that businesses do right by their workers, then you either have to allow the government to step in and help or you have to commit those people to starving.
So whose side are you on?
The math itself seems pretty simple – pay your employees a livable wage and they won’t have to rely on social programs to close the gap. Walmart, among other entry-level service companies, is often under fire for exactly this because minimum wage itself just isn’t enough to cut it in America anymore. Consider where the poverty line currently falls in 2013:
1 person household – $11,490/year
2 person household – $15,510/year
3 person household – $19,530/year
4 person household – $23,550/year
A minimum wage job at $7.25/hour pays $15,080/year, assuming 40 hours/week; if you work for an employer looking to duck the healthcare mandate, 29 hours/week puts you at $10,933/year. So a single person working a minimum wage job can fare ok, but also remember that minimum wage jobs aren’t reserved for high school kids anymore – almost half of those earning minimum wage today are over 25. If you’re a single parent working a full-time job with part-time hours for minimum wage, you’re really hurting at that point, so it should be no surprise when we see how much is spent on welfare programs when we consider just how underemployed a significant portion of the country actually is.
And of course, the poverty line is exactly that – the estimated minimum level of income needed to secure the necessities of life … food, water, some sort of roof over your head, and that’s about it. I know that a very common complaint from the anti-welfare crowd is that they don’t think someone on welfare should have cellphones or nice cars or pretty much any other luxury aside from rice & beans on their plate as a form of punishment for living off the public teat, but really, is that how you would want to live – pulling in the bare minimum needed to survive???
Sure, the original idea of minimum wage was for entry level jobs and that through your career, you would work your way up through the ranks as you strive to achieve The American Dream, but with 10% of the country unable to even find a job and another 10-20% above that underemployed even with the jobs that they have, people are forced to stay at the lowest tier longer and longer, and really, what have we done for ourselves as a society if collectively we can’t enable a system where people can put in an honest day’s work and feel like they’re doing more than just barely getting by at the end of the day?
I’ve said it before – it does no good for society for wealth to accumulate at the top of the scale and leave millions of Americans just scraping with barely enough to survive, let alone pursue any type of “happiness.” I guess that’s my biggest problem with capitalism as a whole because while you can’t force a business owner to be kind to the people that work for him, it sure creates an awful lot of problems when someone’s priorities don’t align with the greater good of society like we’re seeing today. When 10 people are scrambling for the same job, there’s no incentive at all for an employer to do anything in the employee’s favor – they can fight it out among themselves and the losers will just be deemed too lazy to want to work. As a result, society in the form of social programs ends up supporting the other 9 who didn’t get the job in addition to supplementing the one that did because he’s being underpaid, so as far as I see it, we can either have a society free of social support where businesses do more to share the wealth or we can continue to let capitalistic greed drive social support into the stratosphere, but we can’t have both.
Maybe my thinking is a bit Utopian to suggest that employers should care about their workers, but my personal view is that running a business is a responsibility. If you’re going to take responsibility for someone’s livelihood by trading their time for your financial support, just as I think businesses need to be not nearly as quick to let people go to balance costs, I also think that paying them enough is more important than the pile of profit that’s leftover at the end of the day. To me, that’s extra and should be subject to fluctuation based on how well the company is doing. If the company’s employee base fluctuates while its profits remain steady to keep the investors happy, to me that’s a sign that its priorities are out of whack and it’s not really doing a very good job of being an employer.
To me, that’s the definition of how business should work around here. You provide goods or services to the public, then if that goes well you expand and take responsibility for additional workers beyond yourself, and after all of that is done, you share any profits with your investors and stakeholders in the company. Businesses that are purely in it for the profit don’t do anything to serve society as a whole, and if anything here in America today, they’re primarily what’s driving us into the ground.
And no, just leaving the rest behind because clearly they’re too lazy to work in a system that’s very clearly broken is not an acceptable solution. Society means everybody, and if you don’t think that the system is broken, as defined by having a very small few making billions while millions of others rely on public assistance to survive, then I’d love to hear your definition of what our social system is supposed to look like… 😐
I’m not really sure why I still have “expectations” for reality TV shows. There aren’t really any that I watch regularly anymore – they’re pretty much a guilty pleasure at best in my life at this point, but for several hours last night for some reason I had stumbled upon South Beach Tow – a show (allegedly) about a towing company out of Miami, and because apparently there was absolutely nothing better on TV to put in the background while I was writing, it stayed fixed on this and I watched probably a dozen episodes before the night was through.
Again, I don’t know why…
So anyways, this morning I was cruising around the InterTubes and I found this video:
In hindsight, I don’t know why this is the least bit shocking to me, considering that the scene was absolutely ridiculous when I was watching it play out during the episode last night. The more I thought about it, I started to realize that these guys must run a terrible tow truck company because they’re constantly getting their keys stolen, or getting caught by the person whose vehicle they’re trying to repo, or getting assaulted!
Apparently there’s no such thing as a boring day at Tremont Towing.
…feel free to use that one on the house, TruTV… 8)
Yeah, I get that these TV shows have to be edited to show the highlights because otherwise most days at pretty much any job are likely going to be pretty boring. I guess I just wish that more of these shows were actually neat glimpses into a world that we wouldn’t otherwise see as opposed to over-dramatized garbage that’s produced solely because it’s super cheap compared to regular scripted TV. I wouldn’t mind the pawn shop show where most of the time it’s just highlighting the weird stuff that comes in and every once in a while we see the crazy person … because I’m sure that they do get crazy people from time to time, and the same goes for every setting whether we’re exterminating snakes or towing cars or picking through people’s junk piles…
The thing is, if I wanted to watch something that had been completely scripted, I’d just watch regular TV. Except that I can’t. Because your stupid show about a tow truck driver getting forced inside a giant bouncy ball that eventually gets thrown into oncoming traffic is on instead.
Harrumph.
(link: Pizza Place Geography)
I kind of wish that you could zoom in on the different maps, especially the smaller ones – a Google Maps overlay would’ve been a bit more interactive, but it’s pretty clear that Pizza Hut & Papa John’s are the two dominant forces in my neck of the woods. That said, I would imagine that most folks – including myself – that live in metropolitan areas pretty much have most of these options within 15 miles or so of them … the only one not for my case would be Papa Murphy’s, which I’ve never even heard of.
As for Godfather’s, that still counts if you can buy it in a gas station, right?
Mind you, I wouldn’t, but you could.
Here’s my own personal ranking, as long as we’re on the topic…
Sometimes I wish that there was a really good, local place that I could embrace, but I honestly haven’t cared for anything I’ve tried that’s not chain places thus far. I’m not at all a fan of New York-style pizza – to me, that just means thin, dry, burnt crust and ultra-greasy cheese, and any of the top 3 above make a far better pie in my opinion. The 800-degree wood stove just doesn’t do anything for me – instead, just gimme some nice, doughy crust, a nice variety of cheese, and if you coat a little garlic butter on the outside edge of the crust, I’ll love you forever.
Man, now I’m hungry… 😀
I saw this getting shared around last night (originally by Brian Krewson) and despite anyone who wants to pick holes in the analogy about how “They don’t want to drink the soda” or “We can’t afford the soda – Bill is the only one looking out for the company’s best interests,” I still think that it’s a pretty good high-level overview of the BS that’s currently holding the nation at a standstill…
So imagine that the company you work for held a poll and asked everyone if they thought it would be a good idea to put a soda machine in the break room. The poll came back and the majority of your colleagues said “Yes” indicating that they would like a soda machine. Some said no, but the majority said yes. So a week later, there’s a soda machine.
Now imagine that Bill in accounting voted against the soda machine. He has a strong hatred for caffeinated soft drinks, thinks they are bad you you, whatever. He campaigns throughout the office to get the machine removed. Well, management decides, “OK, we’ll ask again,” and again, the majority of people say, “Yes, let’s keep the soda machine.”
Bill continues to campaign and management continues to ask the employees, and every time, the answer is in favor of the soda machine. This happens, let’s say… 35 times. Eventually Bill says, “OK, I’M NOT PROCESSING PAYROLL ANYMORE UNTIL THE SODA MACHINE IS REMOVED,” so nobody will get paid unless management removes the machine.
What should we do???
Answer: Fire Bill and get someone who will do the fucking job.
Bonus: Bill tells everyone that he was willing to “Negotiate” to come to a solution where everyone got their payroll checks, but only so long as that negotiation capitulated to his demand to remove the soda machine.
Bill is a fucking jackass.
Again, whether you like the Affordable Care Act or not, this shutdown is an irresponsible way of trying to kill it, especially considering that repeals have failed 40 times, and our president got re-elected based on it, and its validity was even upheld by the Supreme Court. Let it go, do your fucking jobs and fund the government so that 800,000 people can get back to work, and then come up with a solution that’s not simply get rid of Obamacare because we don’t like Obamacare because … OBAMACARE?!?!?!?!?!
What’s happening right now is petty and embarrassing and we should all remember this next year when these people are up for re-election. Anyone in business knows that sometimes you have to learn when to let things go and when JOBS have been such a huge issue the last few years, how can you honestly collect a paycheck knowing that you’re keeping 800,000 government employees out of work because you refuse to admit that you lost this one?
Stop being a jackass and just do your jobs.
So apparently I broke into a house last night.
My wife and Cleo, too.
And Cleo’s puppies, because even though she’s been spayed in real life, somehow in this dream there were puppies at one point!
Anyways, we were in the market for a new house and came across one that was just perfect. It was huge, it was on the water, it had a big pool on the patio overlooking said water … very awesome.
What was weird was that we talked to somebody on the phone to setup a tour – a young-sounding guy, and yet when we showed up at the house itself, nobody was around. And I don’t recall the logic that took us to this next step, but for some reason we happened to find a door that was open, so for whatever reason we decided to stick our heads in for a little peek…
…followed shortly thereafter by the rest of our bodies…
…and the puppies, too.
So of course, after falling in love with the house from the inside, and apparently somewhat making ourselves at home, the owners showed up and they were none too happy to find strangers walking around inside when they arrived! It seemed that their son had arranged the tour and then just forgot, as teenagers tend to do, though that certainly didn’t justify the whole breaking and entering-thing on our part.
We scrambled to collect our belongings … I was missing a shoe and the family seemed to have dozens of pairs of shoes that were almost like mine, and Sara was taking a shower … who takes a shower when they go to tour a house to buy?! We also had a whole slew of puppies to round up, both indoors and out, during which time I also took the opportunity to meet a couple of the neighbors!
They had said that the family had only lived there for a year and were looking to move already because the husband had to move for work, so our chances of getting the place for a really good price were pretty high…
Anyways, as we finally were ready to leave, I started to chat with the woman of the house, profusely apologizing for our incident and telling her how much we really loved the house if they were to still consider selling it to us. She was pretty angry about the whole ordeal, and yet ironically also turned out to be quite the fan of my writing, and so when I mentioned that I’d be happy to autograph a copy of my latest book for her, the tides turned and she said that she’d consider our offer after all.
The dream closed on my saying that if she sold us the house, I’d sign as many autographs as she wanted, though it faded on the vision of her literally delivering hundreds of cards for me to sign at Christmastime… 😯
![MV5BODQ1ODA3MzY1MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwODY2NzEyMDE@._V1_SY317_CR12,0,214,317_[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/MV5BODQ1ODA3MzY1MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwODY2NzEyMDE@._V1_SY317_CR120214317_1.jpg)
So I reluctantly watched the first two episodes of the new Michael J. Fox Show that aired last week. I say reluctantly because although I’ve always been a huge fan of his, I just had a bad feeling that the entire show was going to be exploitative of its star’s Parkinson’s and our desire to see him as his good, old fashioned hilarious self again.
But the thing is, he’s not his good, old-fashioned self that we all fell in love with from Back to the Future and Family Ties and Spin City from decades ago.
And believe me, it pains me to say that because I get that this is a very personal thing for him and it’s been a personal struggle for a long time now, but as I watched his new show, I must admit that I cringed as exactly what I was concerned about unfolded before my very eyes.
I mean, seriously – the first episode’s writing process basically started and ended at “let’s make a show about Michael J. Fox!” Even the name is uninspired! I couldn’t believe what I was watching, as if they were purposefully parodying themselves – a show about a star coming back onto TV after getting Parkinson’s and the network being more excited about the potential ratings than his actual return … it was so blatantly EXACTLY WHAT NBC DID that it didn’t even feel like comedy.
It just felt wrong.
Some of the jokes were funny, but not really funny, to the point where a lot of them felt more like pity laughs than actual enjoyment. It’s probably in the network’s interest that they ordered the entire first season upfront simply because that way they don’t have to be the ones looking bad for pulling it off the air after only a few episodes.
Even the reviews I’ve read are very light handed, as if they feel the need to cut the guy a break after all that he’s been through. And maybe Michael J. Fox does deserve that – the man is no doubt a legend in his own right. If The Michael J. Fox Show is intended to be his gateway back into entertainment* and maybe also help bring awareness for Parkinson’s to the mainstream, then so be it … but the show has to be a lot better than its first two episodes because so far it’s been about 90% pity / 10% comedy … at least for me.
And the sad thing is, I actually think it raises the question of whether we the people can actually handle a “comedy” with his disease at the forefront because if we’re being honest, the majority of us likely tuned in to the premiere episodes out of curiosity, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to keep us coming back. Nobody’s going to watch a 30-minute comedy each week consistently just because they feel bad and they’re nostalgic for the old Michael J. Fox. And I would hope that Michael himself doesn’t want that to be the reason why people are watching, either, but they’ve got a long ways to go to get past all of that because the first two episodes were very lazily “written” and certainly didn’t do him any favors.
I get that the idea was to write Parkinson’s into the show so that his symptoms look natural for the character, just as they’ve apparently done with some of his other guest appearances on shows, but I don’t think that it really works. The laughter feels forced when the jokes are about his disease, and when they’re not actively being addressed by comedy, the symptoms are still there and just make me feel uncomfortable.
Maybe that’s my fault for not being able to look past the disease – I don’t know. For what it’s worth, I could never see the humor in the Retarded Policeman webseries, either, and a lot of people loved that … though it’s still hard to discern why they loved it.
I guess we’ve got 20 more episodes to see if anything changes.
*And for the record, I’ve got to say that I was actually surprised to read over his IMDB page and see that he’s guest starred on a handful of shows over the years since his disease took its turn. Aside from his appearance on Curb, which I totally forgot about, too, I haven’t really seen anything with him except for the occasional interview, which was always really hard for me to watch. I do sincerely hope that this show turns around because he’s still an amazing guy, but I was very not impressed by what I’ve seen so far…
![TTrA9KS[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/TTrA9KS1.jpg)
Giant. Asian. Hornets.
The ones pictured are technically queens, but the regular-sized ones don’t sound like any picnic, either, on account of how they’ve apparently been terrorizing the Chinese countryside over the last couple of months, killing 28 people after stinging them upwards of 200 times!
Reminds me of that episode of Futurama where they have to collect honey from the space bees that are bigger than they are, and the really touching story that was building up to a proper finale until they made those stupid DVD movies to bring the show back at 40% of the original comedy.
But look at that photo!!! These giant bees will haunt your dreams, as they will rightfully haunt mine, too… 😯
Looks like I might have to reconsider picking up a Wii U one of these days after all! Seems reminiscent of Mario Galaxy … which admittedly I still haven’t played the 2nd version of yet.
Granted, I have no idea what the deal is with Kitty Cat Mario… 😯