Ho hum February

In December everyone gets excited about the weather and the hope that there might be a traditional white Christmas.  Then January comes and the temperature gets below ten degrees and everyone panics.  Then it snows and everyone gets excited and talks endlessly about the six inches of snow we had to deal with.

Now it's February and the novelty has worn off. I've stopped watching the weather reports on TV. If it's cold it's cold. If it snows it snows. Ho hum. Let's talk about Bruce Jenner instead. When we look back on the year 2015 in our dotage, we will remember this as the year that the Kardashians got even more bizarre. Bruce Jenner will become the first woman to have won gold medals for men's track and field. Much more exciting than the weather.

Tax season

It's tax season again. I didn't do too bad this year. All that extra pension money and health care money I had to kick in this year seems to have rewarded me with a better tax bill. This year Amazon took out sales tax so I didn't have to pay that on my state form. Even Turbo Tax upgraded me to Premium (they no longer accept 1099 - B forms on Deluxe) and it doesn't look like they charged me for the honor. I should be getting a nice refund which I can use to fix my dripping shower.

Like driving, doing taxes is one of those things most of us learn from the old man. My first year to pay taxes he gave me the forms and we went through them line by line. He said always do them in pencil first. Then a few days later transfer them to pen. When you are finished always put it away for a week then come back to it. Like wine, tax forms apparently have to age a little. When the time comes, go over the forms again and send them in March.

My father, an accountant, used to get tax receipts from his brother. He didn't like doing his brother's forms. He always suspected he was cheating but my uncle was probably just disorganized.

They always say "do as I say not as I do". My father always had to drive down to the post office at 10 PM on the night of the fifteenth of April and have the guy postmark his letter so he wouldn't be late. The next day he could celebrate the end of tax season and his birthday.

As a librarian I also have many memories of tax time. The IRS is no longer giving public libraries instruction books. You would think they could find another way to save money.

Editor's note: A cute blog on the demise of Radio Shack is in my Sixties blog. If I took advertising this would be my first sponsor.

Parenthood and money

Just finished watching the last episode of Parenthood. I think one thing most of us like about Parenthood is the idealized picture it gives of the American dream. In Parenthood if you are in the hospital you will have twenty relatives sleeping in the waiting room. Are families really like that?

It also presents a world where average people can start schools, run for mayor, start construction companies, recording studios, photography studios, dance studios,  and on top of that hire their relatives. Is it really true?

Look at Hank. He runs a photography shop in Berkeley, where the rent is $30 a square foot. An average photographer makes less than $30,000 a year according to the Occupational Outlook Survey. He eschews digital. I know he gets outside jobs but I've never seen a customer in the store. Yet he can afford to hire Sarah and at the end of the show gives a job to Max.

I would imagine it would be very hard to run a successful recording studio in Northern California yet Crosby and Adam do it, and can hire their niece to boot. Camille could afford to go to art school in France for a month but Zeek never mentions the money. Kristina had enough money to run for mayor, hire her niece, and then start a school.

How can Crosby and Jasmine afford a house? How are Drew and Haddie able to board at college? How can Amber afford to have a baby?

Okay, okay, there is a little bit of "television magic" involved here. Since the start of television people have lived in nicer houses than their careers seemed to be able to support. However, Parenthood purports to show a typical American family. My theory is that all of the Bravermans have trust funds that are helping to support them. That is why everyone is so nice to Zeek.

Hank got money when he was injured photographing the war and has a nest egg from that. That is my theory and I'm going to stick to it.

Duh I thought it was funny

This ad was pulled from the Super Bowl. I though it was funny.

Girls Season 3

I have been reviewing Girls every year and now I am onto Season 3. Yes I know they are showing Season 4 now but I'm too cheap to get HBO and have to rely on Netflix (the DVD version). Anyway, I finally saw Season 3.

In this season the "girls" seem to be moving on from adolescence to adulthood. They are starting to grow up. Adam, especially, is becoming a more mature person (although "I must concentrate on being an actor" phase is a little much). Hannah had a real job working for GQ, Shoshanna is aging from a cute college kid to an annoying young adult, Marnie is becoming the musical one (I see her with a real career in sitcoms after her Peter Pan debut). Jessa is the oldest but also acts the most immature. Still she is the pretty one and the edgy one, the one who is always the center of interest in any scene she is in. One new character who is weird but loveable is Caroline, Adam's sister. Sorry Lena but she is directly out of a Woody Allen Movie. 

I guess not wanting to imitate Sex in the City, the summer place scene took place on the North Shore of Long Island rather than the Hampton's. One feature of that episode is we got to see Hannah in a bathing suit.

Editor's note: I wonder if this is product placement for a cellulite removal system. 

Young girl's living in New York is one of the standard genres of tv and the movies. Sort of like westerns. In the sixties there was That Girl and Breakfast at Tiffany's. In the 90's and early 00's there was Sex and the City. In the teens there is Girls and Broad City (I don't count Too Broke Girls).  To be young, hip, female and living in the city. Us older men have to watch tv to discover what life is like for this trope.

Oh Mother you wouldn't believe the dive bar I go to now

Recently, The Star Ledger of New Jersey had a poll where it asked viewers to vote for their favorite dive bars. I recognized some of the places, but to be honest, although interesting places they weren't really "dive bars". Real dive bars would not find their way into a poll. It reminded me of the time I was in a bar (the sort of place my father would go after a game of golf with the boys) and I could hear a young twenty something lady on the cell phone telling someone "I'm in my favorite dive bar!"

Young middle class women love to frighten their mothers at holidays and tell them that now they hang out in dive bars. Poor mother will worry nights now, perhaps now that Lisa in on her own in Philadelphia she is hanging around with the wrong sort. Of course in reality the places she goes are far from being true dives. Even Yelp has a category for dive bars that probably includes places that are far from true dives.

I guess most of us like to have a little mystery about us and make the people around us think we are having adventures, perhaps disreputable ones. Sort of like exaggerating the events of a college trip to Mexico. 

The Huffington Post has a cute article about dive bars. Would people who write for the Huffington Post go to such places?  I see the ghost of Charles Bukowski nursing a beer in a bar in Baltimore. A dive bar. 

To surplus

Last night I listened to the Slate Culture Gabfest and they talked to someone from Merriam Webster about how new words or new uses for older words come about. I realized that for the past five years, in my job, I have been hearing and using a new use for the word surplus. It is being used as a verb, at least in my narrow parochial world.

Mrs. A: All these old computers are on the floor. Can we get rid of them before I trip over them?

Miss B: Yes, but you'll have to surplus them. Get Mr. Mustache to surplus them.

Mrs. A: Can you surplus them?

Mr. Mustache: Yes I'll surplus them tomorrow morning.

Surplussing usually means getting on my hand and knees, finding the inventory number, the serial number and the model and writing it down and e-mailing this information to Mrs. A and Miss B. Then someone turns up in a few weeks with a hand truck and carts them off to surplus where they are dismembered or otherwise recycled. That is the process of surplussing. It is used as a verb.

Surplus is a transitive verb. I surplus, he surplussed, my back hurts because I have been surplussing all morning.

I have not seen surplus used as a verb in my quick Google search. Being clever, I sent this information off to the Merriam Webster website for new uses of terms. .