Posted Mon, 02/08/2010 - 12:46 by chuck
To regular long-time readers, it might seem like I'm repeating myself, but as I've said before, some things deserve to be said more than once, especially in the blogging world where old posts sometimes sink deep into the abyss.
This is important.
Posted Thu, 02/04/2010 - 23:51 by chuck
I made this video about my favorite Italian restaurant in Bayside, NY. Primo Amore does not serve fru-fru food like you get in Manhattan. (One should never leave an Italian restaurant hungry, and that used to happen to me in the City, back when I had a few coins in my pocket.) It's also not the spaghetti-and-meatballs goombah (no offense to our Italian-American brothers and sisters -- I'm hopelessly in love with that word) fare of Staten Island. It's just right, like Queens.
Posted Tue, 02/02/2010 - 23:03 by chuck
A couple of people have asked if unemployment benefits are taxable. Yes, if you live in the U.S. I don't know about other countries. Cruel and unusual as that might seem, your income from UI is subject to taxes.
Are taxes taken out of your unemployment insurance payments?
Posted Sat, 01/30/2010 - 09:43 by chuck
If you read this blog because you are interested in my personal trials and tribulations, you might be interested to know that my fingers work again. The knuckle is still a little inflamed, and it still hurts -- quite a bit sometimes -- but I have 90+ percent movement and use of the fingers.
Posted Thu, 01/28/2010 - 09:51 by chuck
In physics, "work" is defined as:
...the amount of energy transferred by a force acting through a distance.
So when a baseball player hits a home run, his swing is producing a lot of work by causing a large reaction on the ball. A foul tip produces less work. A swing and a miss produces no work (on the ball), just the expenditure of energy.
Posted Tue, 01/26/2010 - 13:12 by chuck
I pay attention to the referrers that bring people to this site, especially the search strings. Lately I have seen something in the logs that breaks my heart: Lots of people are looking for things like "unemployed and homeless."
Posted Fri, 01/22/2010 - 15:57 by chuck
This might end up being one of those posts that I wish I had written in my notebook instead of sharing it with the world, but I'm tired of writing in my notebook after seven weeks of being unable to type. Thinking that the world gives a crap about my problems is vain, and creating a document that only I will see is masturbatory. Maybe I'm about to make a big mistake by posting this.
Fuck it. It damn sure won't be the first big mistake I've made.
Posted Thu, 01/21/2010 - 00:10 by chuck
I'm not saying we're not a great country, but if we're honest with ourselves (and truly great) we need to take an serious look at things, see where we fucked up, and get to work fixing it.
This is the utmost patriotism, the utmost love: to look at things as they are and as they should be and to strive to make them as they should be. I also happen to think that this is the best and easiest way to be a virtuous person in general, to live by that cheesy corporate catch-word, kaizen, which means "continuous improvement" in Japanese
Posted Mon, 01/18/2010 - 16:57 by chuck
I've been writing about the vile creatures who prey on the jobless since the inception of this blog a couple of years ago. It's no big surprise to me that these types of scams are on the rise. Predators prey on the weak, and desperate times loosen morals where getting money is concerned. (I wonder how many of the scammers are, themselves, just trying to feed a family while unemployed.)
Posted Mon, 01/18/2010 - 15:28 by chuck
This day means more this year than it has in previous years. It is hard to imagine that less than 50 years ago, people were arguing over whether African-Americans should be allowed to attend the same schools as Caucasians. It is hard to imagine that just a few decades ago, a restaurant was within its rights to deny service to people on the basis of race.
