As some of you may recall, back on February 4th I put up a post which began:

It’s February 4th, assholes. Do you still actually think the city garbage men are going to pick up your Christmas tree?

Why mention it again, lo these many months later? Yes, I’m afraid so:

At this point, I’ll give these neighbors the minimal benefit of doubting they still think the garbage men are going to pick up their tree. The question, however, remains — what the fuck, you guys?

Maybe they’re colorblind, and can no longer visually detect the tree’s discolored corpse against the neutral tones of the street and the barren weed patch it lies upon. It would be nice if they turned out to be forensic botanists, conducting an experiment to find out how long it takes for a Christmas tree to completely decompose. Unfortunately, that scenario’s pleasantness doesn’t make it any likelier to be true. That leaves only the Ockham’s razor (commonly, “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one”) explanation, which is that they simply don’t give a shit.

As long as I’m tossing out eponymous adages, I think I may have hit upon a new spinoff of Hanlon’s razor (“never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”). Dig it:

Never attribute to either malice or stupidity that which is adequately explained by apathy.

Whaddya think? I’ve gone back and forth on whether to have the last factor be “laziness” instead of “apathy,” or the compounded “laziness or apathy,” or maybe “indifference.”

Also, if this little semi-invention is worth keeping, then what should it be called? Wood’s razor? I’m tempted to dub it something cheekier (no pun intended), like Wood’s razor burn, or Wood’s disposable razor, or (in the spirit of apathy) Wood’s saying thingy.

Suggestions? Votes? Palin-esque “refudiations?” Put ‘em in the comments!

It’s February 4th, assholes. Do you still actually think the city garbage men are going to pick up your Christmas tree?

Let’s see… there have been about ten or twelve garbage pick-ups since New Years, and for some darned reason they’ve ignored your discarded tree every time. Oh wait—I know: it’s because they don’t pick up Christmas trees! They never have! You have to take your own tree to one of the handful of places around town where the city stations a guy with a wood chipper, up through the first weekend of January or whatever. Even I know that, and I haven’t had a Christmas tree for at least five years.

Is this any way to to treat your cherished symbol of Jesus’s birthday, even if it does originate from paganism? The farm-grown Monterey Pine or Douglas Fir that you bought at Target, propped up in your living room, festooned with decorations and enjoyed the festive scent of for the better part of a month? Well, just look at it now: quite literally kicked to the curb. There it lies, denied and disowned, spurned by sanitation workers, peed on by neighborhood dogs, retaining only the capability to incinerate the entire neighborhood should it come in contact with a cigarette butt flicked from the window of a passing car.

Do the right thing, you jagoffs. All of you (the disgraced tannenbaum pictured above is not the only one still curbside around here). Pick up your trees, put them in your cars and take them wherever they need to be taken. If you don’t want them shedding in your car, tough shit—you didn’t let that stop you when you brought them home.

Merry Groundhog Day. Don’t save the trees.

Peter Gammons (Flickr/Trev Stair)

Sagely baseball writer Peter Gammons, asked by MLB Network analyst and former big-league pitcher Mitch Williams whether he will now vote for Mark McGwire’s induction into the Hall of Fame:

I think it’s going to be hard now to vote for Mark. I reserve the right to change my mind. I voted for him this time because, you know, he never was suspended… but once you’ve admitted [to using steriods], I believe that… I mean, you guys know how hard it is to be a Major League player. The Hall of Fame is an honor, not a statistical right. I really do look at it that way, and for [you] and all the people we know that did not use any performance-enhancing drugs, I find it hard to vote for him.

What’s going to be fascinating to me–and I hope it doesn’t impact–but I think there are going to be some people that just because writers say, “My eyes tell me he must have done steroids,” that there are going to be one to five people that were innocent that don’t make the Hall of Fame because of the people that did cheat. And that really breaks my heart, knowing how hard all of you worked to get where you are.

The following is text I composed for the “Additional message to President Obama” field, after I had signed my name to CredoAction.com’s petition “Tell Obama: The public option is not optional.” I urge all of you who read this while the health care reform issue is still current to do the same. Unless you don’t agree with me. No, fuck that — if you don’t agree I still want you to sign it.

Health care reform has been the issue of greatest concern to me for a long time. Therefore, in the following I will make every effort to temper my vehement language and trust that you will pardon me if a mild profanity or two do creep in.

If you punt on the public option, this whole initiative will have been in vain. All that would be left in the bill would be the window dressing. Window dressing, without a bloody *window*!

Regional health care co-ops? Are you kidding me? Guess what: I’m already in one, and it absolutely sucks. It’s called a “discount program.” The discounts are extremely minute, and limited to only a very few services. It’s currently the only kind of health coverage I can get, and for this fig leaf I pay $200 per month.

I and millions of other Americans like me NEED the public option. As it stands, and would continue to stand without a public option, only the wealthy are not at the financial mercy of the insurance and pharma companies. The rest of us are being bled dry (sometimes quite literally). Big Healthcare’s very business model pays off for them by *treating* patients — NOT by *making them well.* It may be profitable, but it is also amoral. It is malignant to the ideal of a well-functioning society.

The anti-reformers are flagrantly playing politics with our health. I expect you to call them out on it. I voted for you because I believed that you would take this kind of bold stance if it became necessary. Well, it is absolutely fucking necessary. It’s getting more necessary every day.

Do you want to go down in history as the President who bailed out Wall Street to save the economy, only to let us all go slowly bankrupt because of the unchecked cost of health care? I for my part don’t want that for you, or for the country.

Again, here’s the link to the petition at credoaction.com.

Another day, another eighty-five billion dollars.  If you’ve had your back turned, or your earbuds in, or you’ve been transfixed by Sarah Palin’s boobs the last week or two you may not have noticed the Federal Reserve opening its checkbook.  $85 billion for insurance behemoth AIG, $70 billion more to feed into the market so that credit won’t totally evaporate, and last week’s credit lines of up to $100 billion each to bail out mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Congratulations, fellow taxpayers – for the low, low price of $350 billion we are now the proud owners of three huge, insolvent companies.

If you’re wondering how this is a good investment, the answer is, it’s not. It’s not so much an investment as it is a protection shakedown.  We propped up three massive entities with over a quarter of a trillion dollars in ballast to prevent them from toppling over and squashing us all.  So what do we do with our still-unsquashed selves now?

Hell, I don’t know. Consult somebody smarter than I am – namely, former U.S. Department of Labor Secretary, current U.C. Berkeley Professor of Public Policy, frequent economic commentator for NPR, CNBC and other such outlets, Robert Reich.  Fortunately for my purposes, Dr. Reich also keeps a blog (newly added here to the C&B blogroll), whereupon he posted about this spate of bailouts back on Monday, while AIG still teetered. The crux:

What to do? Not to socialize capitalism with bailouts and subsidies that put taxpayers at risk… the best way to rebuild trust is through regulations that require financial players to stand behind their promises and tell the truth, along with strict oversight to make sure they do.

We tell poor nations they have to make their financial markets transparent before capital will flow to them. Now it’s our turn.

Read his entire post here.