Things I Know

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the Boston bombers’ mother says she regrets ever moving her family to the United States. We regret it too.

When I met my wife’s parents it was no big deal. She was still in high school. I went to their house to pick her up and take her to a movie. We said hello. If you start dating someone as an adult it can be more momentous. My son is going to meet his girlfriend’s parents and it involves a trip to where they live in Europe.

I was talking to a psychiatrist I know the other day and he said that the bombing at the Boston Marathon and the positive test (possibly a false positive) for the deadly poison Ricin on mail to the President and a US Senator were crazy. He should know, right?

The proliferation of fees in the airline industry continues. My friend Wes Richards has now proposed a fee-collection fee. Just brilliant! I fear Wes will now become the head of a major airline as a result and if the fee-collection fee gets implemented and Wes gets royalties for this idea he will soon be the only person able to afford to fly commercially.

Myself, I’m working on the fi-fo-fum fee.

If you use Facebook, you know that every once in a while your news feed will say one of your friends commented on an issue and so did 415,773.134 other people. Fine. But if you’re interested in what your friend said about that issue, you might click on it. And there’s no way you can find your friend’s comment among the 415,772.134 others. If you click on one of those through your friend, I think Facebook should take you to the page, but highlight your friend’s comment.

Our obsession with celebrity has gone too far. It’s been reported, far more widely than necessary, that when pop star Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank house while in Amsterdam on a European concert tour earlier this month, he signed the guest book, “Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.” In case you’re not a young teenage girl, a beleiber is someone who’s a fan of Justin Bieber. Some people went nuts criticizing the kid. Maatje Mostart curator of the museum didn’t. She retained some perspective. While acknowledging that the remark was insensitive, she said, “He’s 19. It’s a crazy life he’s living, he didn’t mean bad… and also it’s nice that he made the effort, he didn’t have to come.” That’s about the size of it and that’s about the amount of coverage this gaffe deserves.

Things I Know

If someone tells you this April 15th is the 100th anniversary of the federal income tax, that’s not exactly true. The feds have been collecting income taxes for the past 100 years, but first, there was also an income tax during the Civil War and second, in 1913, your federal income tax deadline was March 1st, not April 15th.

I understand that telling a prospective employer what you make on your current job is a stronger bargaining position than telling them what you made on your last job. Still, I went on a job interview recently where the salary offered was well below the pay grade of the responsibility of the job opening. So, I withdrew myself from consideration. I’m willing to work for less than I used to make, but not for less than what the job typically commands.

The NY Post website on Wednesday had an article headlined, “One-Third of Air Force Including Blue Angels Grounded by Sequester.” Okay, except the Blue Angels are the Navy’s aerobatics team. The Blue Angels have been cancelled too, but the Air Force’s aerobatics team is called the Thunderbirds, so the headline should have said something about the Thunderbirds and so should the article.

If you have a car with a keyless entry system, don’t lose your keys. At the dealer, the remote for my truck costs around $100 without programming. I’ll be searching on Ebay in the next few days for a cheaper solution. Not only the remote. The key also has a transponder and has to be programmed to the car by a dealer or a locksmith with a reasonably expensive piece of equipment to do the job.

How come Jay Leno calmed down about being replaced by Jimmy Fallon? Money is my guess.

Like a lot of people, my garage is full of junk and I can’t park a car there. So, I don’t go into it much in the winter time. I went in on Saturday. I knew the car wasn’t parked there. I didn’t know the dead squirrel was, but now I do.