Ned Bitters

[Editor's Note: To celebrate HoboTrashcan's five-year anniversary, we are bringing back five defunct site features for one week only. Check back every day this week to be overwhelmed with nostalgia.]

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … local pride.

An F-4 tornado takes out two Oklahoma towns. (You’d think by now that Tornado Alley, when it comes to home construction, might finally consider the brick.) A category four hurricane obliterates a few hundred beachfront houses. (Always shocking when beachfront property loses another battle with nature.) Another one of those mid-western rivers you learned about in sixth grade floods and displaces a few thousand Iowans. (Who will, once the waters recede, move back into those same flood-prone areas to await the next flood.)

After each of these tragedies, one of the haggard but resilient locals will be seen on TV telling a network reporter how the people from [fill in any area of the country] are special because of the way they help, give to and look out for their neighbors. But like Henry Ford’s take on history, all that geo-specific specialness is bunk.

Before I go off on these self-congratulatory geo-snobs, allow me to dispel any accusations about me being a completely heartless bastard who doesn’t care about people whose lives have been rocked by nature, terror or corporate incompetence. The tiny portion of my heart that is not yet cold and dead does have sympathy for those people whose lives have been rocked and turned on end. Even I, a crusty curmudgeon numbed by cynicism and scotch, can’t imagine the trauma these people experience. Your house is there, then it’s not. Your family of five becomes a family of three in an instant. The town you loved yesterday no longer exists today. That’s a pain most of us will never know.

What gives me a case of severe eye-rolling is how every area of the country likes to think that, when hard times hit, they possess some special quality that allows them to handle adversity better than people from twelve states away. Sorry, all you sturdy New Englanders and hearty mid-westerners and good ol’ boy southerners. You’re just like the rest of us. You’re not tougher, you’re not more generous and you’re not more neighborly than anyone else. People are people, period. Mostly asshole-ish, sure, but mostly stepping up and doing right by others when bad times come.

Consider the absurdity of some of the self-congratulatory comments I’ve heard or read.

“New Englanders know the value of a hard day’s work.” Right. And the West Virginia coal miner doesn’t, nor does the Long Beach longshoreman or the Oregon lumberjack. That 40-ish mother of three who just spent 11 hours running Grand Slam breakfast plates around the east Baltimore Denny’s all night? Lazy mid-Atlantic bitch. Ever shake hands with a man whose palm feels like burlap? It didn’t get that way by goldbricking it through easy five-hour days. I’ve yet to see a UPS or FedEx driver make a delivery without pretty much running from the truck to the door and back to the truck. But those New Englanders, boy, they are the special lot who really know about hard work. It’s a wonder anything gets done south of New Hampshire.

“Midwesterners can always be counted on to help their own in a situation like this.” Right. I never saw or read any stories of heroic selflessness coming out of post-Katrina New Orleans. When the annual wildfires ravage southern California, why, it’s every selfish bitch for himself, if I remember Nightline correctly. I’m still waiting to see some stirring video of panicked New Yorkers helping unknown fellow pedestrians escape the debris of the fallen towers. Nope, didn’t see any video like that, because it wasn’t the Great Midwest.

“Thing is, people need to know that Jersey girls don’t take no shit.” Right. We all know you can walk to up a girl from the other 49 states, call her a skanky, cum-guzzling whore and she’ll just hang her head in tacit agreement. If you, dear reader, are not at this time living in New Jersey (congratulations, by the way), think about five random females you know well. How many of them just passively “take shit”? Exactly.

“Long Island girls really know how to party.” Right. I’ve never heard a shrill Pittsburgh girl piss-drunk on shots screaming for someone to play some “fucking Skynyrd on the goddamn jukebox!” No girls ever drink half a fifth of tequila and then get video-ed pulling a fraternity train in Arizona. Hell, they certainly don’t have male strip clubs in Nashville where Tina and her 12 sloshed girlfriends can yell “Whoooo!” all night while their friends get sweaty stripper crotch jammed into their too-heavily-made-up faces. (Of course, New Jersey girls would never stand for that shit.)

“We’re from Chicago. We like to eat!” Right. That might be my favorite. In America, Land of Lardass, only Chicagoans really like to eat. Those midnight south Philly slobs who inhale cheesesteaks like Paris Hilton inhales cocks? Prim pikers in the eating department. There’s an Old Country buffet in every town in America filled with 300-pound behemoths currently on their fourth heaping plate of gravy-covered goodness. You ever watch that Guy Fieri show – Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives – where he travels all over the U.S. finding restaurants that specialize in overstuffed, overtopped and over-crammed foods? They ain’t all in Chicago, I can tell you that. Have you ever looked at the people in a Walmart? Trust me, my Big Shouldered Brethren, people all over this broad beacon of obesity love to eat.

“Family is important to us here in Tennessee.” Right. In Cleveland, if a relative needs a kidney, he’s shit out of luck with the cousins. In Seattle, mothers are always selling their babies for triple mocha latte money. And isn’t the Southwest famous for euthenizing elderly relatives once every third fart becomes a shit-ccident?

Note to all Americans who think your geographical zone makes you special: We’re all pretty much the same. Most of us are selfish pricks who like to keep to ourselves, interacting with a few close friends and relatives. We don’t really care to know our neighbors. We tolerate our coworkers and they tolerate us because we all like getting paid. When the shit turns bad, most of us jump to help out our fellow bipeds, but not because we’re loving and altruistic. It just gives us the opportunity to suck ourselves off by crowbarring into every conversation the epic tale of how we donated three old shirts and 17 bucks to the relief effort. Our generosity and benevolence is nothing more than an innate desire to maintain our species. It’s self-preservation, not Kentucky cordiality.

So ease up on the “Southerners are so generous” stuff. We all give when people are in need. Whoa there on the “Northern Californians can always count on each other in tough times” malarkey. A neighbor I never spoke to just did me a major solid last weekend when a small water line in my kitchen burst when I was out of town. Scale back that “Everything is bigger in Texas” crap. On second thought, let that one stand. Those Texans really are the biggest assholes in the country.

Ned Bitters was a regular contributor on HoboTrashccan from September 2006 to March 2009, writing both The Teachers’ Lounge and Overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

Similar Posts:

• Overrated – Thanksgiving
• Overrated – Diners
• Overrated – Smoke-free bars and restaurants
• Overrated – Outdoor dining
• Overrated – Buffets

Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … the buffet.

No, not the Jimmy Buffet, although an equally strong case could be made for that industrial-strength pop star who has made millions rewriting the same two songs for the past 30+ years. I’m talking about the American restaurant buffet, be it breakfast, lunch or dinner, be it at the greasiest Bob’s Big Boy knockoff or at the highest-end resort that gets away with charging 40 bucks a head because their just as flavorless eggs are a little less runny.

Not being a world traveler, I don’t know if the restaurant buffet is a strictly American phenomenon. I’m guessing it’s not, as the rest of the world seems to understand the concept of eating until one is full and then – snotty Eurotrash! – stopping. But many Americans need a daily caloric intake comparable to the size of the average AIG bonus check, and these Old Country Buffet-addicted superslobs are the same human beanbag chairs who have to wedge themselves into the seats beside me on planes or at sporting events.
I could almost understand the appeal of eating yourself into buffet nausea if the food was great, but it never is. It’s not even good. (Note that I’m talking strictly about restaurants and not weddings or family gatherings, where the buffet style meal is actually preferable.) Regardless of the variety of foods or of the noble but always failed attempts to add a gourmet flair to the slop they dump in the endless string of stainless steel bins, buffet food is a lot like an Angelina Jolie movie. It might look good, but afterward you feel queasy and rooked out of 10 bucks.

While any buffet scene disgusts me, the one that makes me sickest is the breakfast buffet, loved by the fattest of the buffet-loving buffoons. These people don’t walk to the food spread. They waddle, often unshowered and unshaved, the women draped in mumus and the men wearing whatever ratty shorts or sweatpants allow for the maximum elastic waistband stretchage, allowing them to blow out their bellies with minimum discomfort.

Once they have plate in hand, they begin the obscene heaping o’ the vittles, taking not only too much soggy bacon and watery eggs, but also both kinds of sausage (flat hockey pucks and shriveled midget cocks), cold underdone toast that could serve as damp wash cloths for the fever-stricken, a stale mini-bagel left over from the Battle of Antietam and a not even remotely edible English muffin limper than a eunuch’s pecker. And of course, in an attempt to move that Kilimanjaro sized plate of colon-clogging goo through their no doubt already impacted colon, they fill up a little bowl with canned fruit cocktail. They shovel the contents of the plate down their gullets, then, somehow, repeat the process, sometimes twice, because after all, it’s “all you can eat!” Watching these cretins powereat is like watching frantic colonial insurgents cramming their muskets with powder and bullets at Lexington and Concord.

Even the supposedly fancy buffets at resorts and finer restaurants are gross. They create an air of class and fine dining by adding a few overrated gimmicks, but the food is never that good. Take the omelet station, where some halfwit, coke-addicted cook one job removed from the Applebee’s grill dons a chef’s hat and becomes the maestro of the egg, cooking omelets to order just for you. And what do the buffet bozos do at this omelet station? Ask the Eggman to include thirteen items in their omelet, rendering the whole thing a sloppy, overstuffed mess in which none of the flavors can actually be tasted.

Mr. High-falutin’ Omelet Maker is also the non-chef who mans the roast beef or ham slicing depot at the higher end dinner buffets. He is invariably stationed at the end of the buffet line, meaning he must slap a 3/4 inch thick, Texas-sized slice of heat lamp warmed roast beef or ham atop the twelve other items the buffet buffoon has already plopped onto his first plate of the evening’s gorging.

The industrialized presentation of the grub helps quash any enjoyment of the meal. No matter how meticulously prepared the food (and how careful can a cook really be when making food by the vat), it loses its taste-bud oomph when it has to be scooped, plucked or tonged out of a metal tank which has already been picked through and coughed on by the virus-spewing slew of diners who trudged past and poked and prodded the food before me. When I select my lukewarm, no longer moist but now-incubating-hepatitis-germs glob of chicken cordon bleu (an item included in every chichi gourmet buffet by law, I think), I know I’m taking a piece of food that was shunned by everyone else that preceded me in the grazing line. Yum.

These gourmet buffets do have higher quality food, but they leave you just as unsatisfied. I once had the Sunday brunch buffet at one of the country’s highest rated resorts, Nemacolin, located in southwestern Pennsylvania. Options included lobster tails, sushi and caviar. It still sucked. Oh, the food was as good as you’ll find on a buffet, but that was the problem. When free to eat as much as you can of very good food, the sensory onslaught renders the whole experience an overdone exercise in Caligula-like gluttony (without the gang-banging, no less). I’d have much rather enjoyed another room service breakfast of a pineapple muffin and fresh fruit plate. (Only $18!)

Which brings me to my next gourmet buffet gripe: the price. Why am I paying $29.95 to serve myself? Walking should never be part of any eating experience that I am paying for. I understand that it at least allows the fat folk to get in a little exercise while they play “Watch Me Try to Fill the Empty Voids in My Life with Plate after Plate of Food That, Like My Life, Lacks Flavor, Zeal and Originality.” If I want to exercise while I eat, I’ll enter the Tour de France. Otherwise, please have some sweet-assed young waitress serve me my meal so that I can leave a ridiculously inflated tip in the pathetic hope that she’ll see through my grizzled middle-aged ugliness and the little matter of my sitting-just-across-the-table wife and insist on following me to my car for a post-dessert, thank-you hummer. With a buffet, I lose that dream, and anything that kills dreams is no good.

So spare me the rave reviews of the recent buffet experience that allowed you to make a embarrassing mess of yourself. The best meals provide an intriguing complexity of flavors, some intense, some restrained, but always interesting and delicious. Foods and spices are combined with a combination of care and daring, complementing each other with their flavor, texture and even color. The final products are artistic in their presentation. And a great meal has one more characteristic: You can’t go back for seconds. Or thirds. Or …

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

Similar Posts:

• Overrated – Diners
• Overrated – Outdoor dining
• Overrated – Smoke-free bars and restaurants
• Overrated – The following foods …
• Overrated – Local pride

Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … Dan Rooney.

As a lifelong Steelers fan now living in the DC area, I get to spend a lot of time gloating about my team’s superior ownership (and subsequent success), especially since billionaire brat Daniel Snyder took over the team and began entertaining Redskins haters with his annual off-season, salary cap shredding spending sprees on big-name future Hall of Famers whose hall-of-fame play transpired in another team’s uniforms during the previous decade.

Once again this year, he and yes-man general manager Vinnie Cerratto went and promised Skins fans that their plan was to build a winner from the inside with wise draft choices, then last Friday, Daddy Long Pockets, apparently unable to resist hearing the Redskins name in the off-season news, went and signed superstud Tennessee Titan Albert Haynesworth to a $100 million contract. This after committing 50+ mil to DeAngelo Hall, a player so allegedly cancerous that Al Davis booted him off the thuggish Raiders in mid-season.

Steeler fans revel at news like this, especially while still euphoric over our second Super Bowl win in the past four years. And I, like most other Steeler fans, in my post-Super Bowl frenzy, sucked the black and gold dong (figuratively, of course … ahem) of long-time Steelers owner Dan Rooney, whose steady leadership and fiscal restraint have kept the Steeltown studs competitive on an almost yearly basis for the past 37 years.

Our Danny Boy deserves every bit of the credit he gets for the way he runs the franchise. He has let big stars go free agent instead of paying them more than what they’re worth. He’ll still pay huge fair contracts to star players. He builds through the draft. His free agent signings are never of the big name variety, but instead are of good players who fill team gaps. He has had three coaches in the past 40 years, none of whom, when hired, has the name recognition of a Steve Spurrier. He didn’t hire the latest whiz kid assistant from whatever team won a recent Super Bowl or two. (In other words, no Norv Turner or Romeo Cremel or that fat bastard who has led Notre Dame to a delicious mediocrity.) He has stayed humble, walking to Sunday’s home games and driving himself around town. (No helicopter arrivals at practice for our Danny.) The Burghers love the Roonester, and with good reason.

But even with all those positive attributes and bust in the NFL Hall of Fame, Dan Rooney (and his lovable pappy Art, Sr.) can’t escape induction into the Ned Bitters Overrated Hall of Fame. Here are a few reasons why we might not want to grant sainthood to the old man just yet:

• Where was Dan Rooney’s voice of reason and leadership when his dominant teams of the 70’s were winning four Super Bowls behind a slew of offensive linemen with bodies the size of Checkered cabs? You won’t find any records of admission any of them “enhancing” their physiques with more than just steak, greens and barbells, but do you think that the Rooney family didn’t find it suspicious that 550-pound-benching, 6′ 2″ Jon Kolb could push Ed Too Tall Jones up an down the field in two Super Bowls? Maybe he was blinded by the glare of those four Lombardi trophies, which apparently were won at any cost.

• And while we’re on that syringey subject, why does the Rooney family get a pass on the treatment of Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, a member of the NFL’s all-time team, protector of Terry Bradshaw, and gaping hole opener for Franco Harris? Iron Mike, demented of mind and brittle of body, died almost penniless after spending a few post-retirement years living in his car and in train stations. I don’t know if the Rooney family offered Webby any help. I heard Webster refused help from some former teammates. It took two prolonged court battles to get the NFL to award Webster’s family the disability pay he was owed, since his problems were a result of his NFL career. I wonder which side of the suit Rooney was on. Something tells me he sided with the NFL.

• And while we’re on the treatment of former NFLers, why isn’t St. Dan at the forefront of the fight to get retired players a bigger chunk of the mega-billions the league makes? Seems that the Rooneys love their boys when they’re busting heads on national TV every other week, but once they’re out of the black and gold, well, time to get on with your life’s work, fellas. Thanks for destroying your body for 10 years in this no-guaranteed-contract league. Good luck finding meaningful employment, what with those wrecked vertebrae and arthritic joints and multi-concussioned brains.

• While St. Dan gets some deserved eponymous credit for the Rooney rule, which ensures that NFL teams interview minorities for coaching and front office openings, I wonder how many African Americans he interviewed before settling on Chuck Noll in 1969, when the NFL coaching ranks had fewer African Americans than a Jonas Brothers concert. (Okay, this one is borderline unfair, what with him having the big Irish balls to hire Mike Tomlin, but the Equal Opportunity Commission was onto this stuff long before the NFL, who caught the Up With Black People only after years of being bashed in the press with scalding editorials.)

• Finally, this past fall, Dan Rooney broke a long-standing tradition of shutting the hell up about politics and openly endorsed and campaigned for Barack Obama. He even thanked Obama in his Lombardi Trophy acceptance speech, a bizarro moment for which he got a stunning free pass from both the media and Steeler fans. Perhaps Rooney backed Obama because he was genuinely moved by the Obama tidal wave. I know I was. But there have been whispers that an ambassadorship to Ireland might be in the works for his public Obama backing. If so, it’s an in-front-of-the-curtains act of politics that should have been beneath someone of Rooney’s reputation as the best owner in pro sports.

If this last item comes to pass, perhaps he and the Redskins’ Danny Boy will have more in common that we Steeler fans like to think. Rooney might bleed black and gold, but like every other NFL owner, he lives for a different color: Green.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

Similar Posts:

• Note to self – Susan Lucci trivia
• Overrated – The NFL’s drug policy
• Overrated – Updates
• Note to self – A Cardinal mistake
• Note to Self – No controversy

Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … the feel-good aspect of that US Airways Flight 1549 reunion.

Hell no, this isn’t going to be a borsch-belt comedy club rant on the tiny bags of peanuts, the screaming toddler in row six or the nonstop chatterer who sits beside you on that Seattle to Miami red-eye, enthralling you with every stirring detail of his humdrum life. The writing might suck, but I’m a bit more original than that.

When Mrs. Bitters and I saw the third or fortieth story about the reunion these lucky crash survivors had, I asked her, “[Wipes martini residue from lips] Even after being part of a miracle like that, do you think you would want to get together with those people ever again?”

Mrs. Bitters, always the voice of reason, said, “Hell no, because after every flight I hate every motherfucker on the plane.” The Bitters abode is a bastion of class, it is.

Flying makes me homicidal. My mood progresses – or deteriorates, if you’re one of those level-headed Buddhist types (pussy) – from irritation during baggage check-in to brooding anger in the waiting area to blood boiling wrath while boarding the plane to “give me four Valium and a syringe of heroin before I stab every prick on this plane with the nail cutter they so generously let me keep in my bookbag, which, yes Miss Leatherskinned 32-year veteran of the flight attendant world, is securely stowed under the seat of the jerk in front of me who I just know is going to slam his seat into my knees the second we hit cruising altitude, which will cause me great discomfort pain but will not, in fact, wake me up, as Captain Constant Update will feel the need to waken us every six minutes with the not-to-be-missed vitals on our cruising altitude, our cruising speed and the barometric pressure in Peoria, even though we’re headed to Dallas.

Yes, I really do hate every person on the plane.

I hate the phony-assed flight attendants. I don’t hate their safety spiels, and I don’t blame them for the pathetic snacks and soft drinks that I never eat or drink. I don’t hate the fact that their 27 trips up and down the aisle keep me from sleeping and instead serve only to distract this ADHD-afflicted moron from the too-easy in-flight magazine crossword puzzle I’m breezing through. (“Let’s see … 12 down … ‘Heston Movie ___ Hur’ … hmmm …) I don’t hate that they were last hot back when flight attendants were called stewardesses. What I hate is their phony, joyless smiles, smiles performed with the mouth but never with the eyes, those condescending empty grins that confirm that I am one more infinitely hate-able blob of airborne protoplasm crammed into smelly tube. You hate me, ma’am? Well, right back atcha Tiffani, or Melodee, or Barbi, or Misti …

I hate the pilots and their useless wind reports from our destination city. Gale force winds I want to hear about, but the fact that the winds are out of the southeast at five to seven miles per hour (oh wait, sorry, I mean knots … the pretentious pricks) is information I need only if I’m headed to Chicago for a kite-flyers convention, which unless I make some major lifestyle changes, that probably won’t be happening any time soon.

I hate the selfish asshole in the wing seat by the emergency exit door who assures the flight attendant that he for-sure-you-betcha can handle the door removal duties in the event of an unplanned landing (or, to put it in CNN Newspeak, “a fiery crash with no survivors”) when we all know good and goddamn well that he’s going to go all George Costanza on our asses and save his own lucky-to-be-in-a-row-with-no-middle-seat ass and forget the rest of us.

I hate the hot chicks. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. They strut through the airport with that born-beautiful sense of entitlement, reaping the probably-paid-for-by-some-moneyed-boyfriend-plane-ticket benefit that comes from the genetic lottery strike of a sweet little ass and a stomach flatter than Hugh Jackman’s singing voice.

I hate the fuckers in first-class. No, not because they’re in first class. They probably deserve it by having worked their asses off. I’d sit in first class if I weren’t such a shiftless blob of free-time craving sloth. What I hate about these bastards is their sense of first-class shame. When you walk through first class on the way to your seat (and I know no one reading this has ever sat in first class, because the people who sit in first class are too busy FUCKING WORKING to read poorly written online diatribes), no one in those seats ever looks up and makes eye contact with you. They pretend that they are busy, fiddling with their seatbelts and stashing magazines in the seat pocket and firing up their laptops. They don’t look at the coachbound unwashed for fear of inciting some sort of Tale of Two Cities-level class upheaval. I’d like these people so much more if they’d just glare at me with the sense of disdain and superiority they’ve earned in life, sipping their white wine while awaiting their smoked salmon appetizer. Their gesture of humility is worse than the gloating they are entitled to.

I hate everyone in the waiting area, or the pre-boarding area, or whatever the hell it’s called. It’s the Land of Flip Flops Showing Stumpy or Badly Gnarled Toes. It’s the Land of People Wolfing Down Shitty Airport Sandwiches, Doing that Ferocious Head Dive into Each Bite, Apparently Unaware that Their Fellow Flyers Can See the Disgusting Display of Ravenous Eating They Are Perpetrating on the Rest of Us. It’s the Land of Pointless Phone Calls Informing Some Bored Shitless Relative that You Are Now, At This Very Moment, Waiting for Your Flight. It’s the Land of Too Loud Phone Calls Aimed at Impressing the Rest of Us as to Your Business Acumen. (We’ll all see you in coach with the rest of us, so your bellowed phone stunt fooled no one.)

I hate the model quality blond chick who sat next to me on the flight from Florida, repeatedly bumping her bare luscious (and long, hence the incessant bumping) leg into mine for two straight hours. I hate her for her sense of entitlement, thinking she deserved whatever space she wanted because she was so hot she could be the “good looking sister” in the Aniston family. She wasn’t doing it to turn me on or to toy with me. She just wanted the space that was awarded her by the same cosmic forces that made her achingly gorgeous.

So, should I ever survive a plane crash, I’ll be forever grateful to the pilot (that is, if it wasn’t his fuckup that put us down in the first place), the flight crew (that is, if their septuagenarian asses were somehow able to assist me in my selfish, tossing-aside-of-all-smaller-bodies dash to safety) and any passengers (but not the first-out-of-the-plane douchebag with the well-stretched-out legs who was fortunate enough to land that cushy wing seat, always making him the winner in the People I Hate Most on This Fight contest I hold in my obviously sane mind) who aided in my miraculous avoidance of a premature death.

But damn it, I will not be grateful to the model quality with the long luscious legs, even if she does pull from the frigid waters and give me mouth-to-mouth. How dare she make me fly all the way from Florida with a zipper-stressing hard-on …

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

Ned Bitters

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … tax debt relief.

No, this isn’t going to be some political rant in the wake of two – count ‘em, two! – of Barack Obama’s cabinet nominees having to withdraw from consideration due to tax issues, although the Prez did take a well-deserved smackdown on that one. The person who really needs to lose his job over this is his Secretary of Vetting. How did both of those tax situations slip by unnoticed? I sure hope the people in charge of doing the Cabinet nominee background checks aren’t the ones keeping tabs on Al Quaeda. But those aren’t the people I’m pissed at this week.

The people who piss me off are these ramrods who don’t pay their proper taxes and then play the “poor me” card when they find themselves saddled with a massive tax debt they have almost no hope of digging out of. You’ve seen these reprehensible scum-sucking dogs gloating on those commercials for the skeezy firms that specialize in negotiating tax settlements.

Just how in the hell is this legal? Many people, famous or not, go to jail for tax evasion. Yet these delinquent dildos not only rip off the government (and in effect me and you), they go on TV and brag about how much money they “saved” by going to Seedy, Smarmy and Oily, Ltd.

I saw another one of these ulcer-inducing commercials today. One triumphant person said he owed the IRS over $100,000, but thanks to so-and-so’s help, he paid only $20,000. Another woman proudly stated that she and her restaurant owning husband owed “millions,” yet they settled for just a fraction of that.

Assuming these ads are true (and that might be quite an assumption), I can understand the government’s willingness to settle, at least to a point. Better to get some money out of these deadbeats than none at all. God knows it would cost big bucks to track down these bastards, convict them and then foot the entire bill for their jail time.

I just don’t want these people on my television boasting the sweetheart deal they cut and how many thousands they saved. Why can’t other criminals cut similar deals? Let’s say I anally rape a woman and then behead and dismember her. (Pause here for heavy breathing at the thought.) While I’m on the run, maybe I can go to some company that “specializes in getting your rape and murder charges reduced!” Instead of doing life or getting the chair, I can have a company of slick talking legal types bargain my rape and murder charge down to “a forced tongue kiss with cigar breath and two unsolicited ass gropes.” Then I can go on TV in my bloody clothes and vouch for my lawyers’ mad skills, all while somehow playing the victim card.

Another aspect of this whole thing that puzzles me is how these knuckleheads let themselves get into such a massive debt situation in the first place. Most of us are lucky enough to have jobs where some unseen accounting department takes care of all those deductions on every paycheck. But if you choose to be self-employed, it’s your responsibility to figure out how much tax you’re going to owe each year. You might not hit it exactly right, but at least be in the ballpark, for fuck’s sake. (That’s in honor of my new hero, Christian Bale.) I’m sure they have tables and charts and ciphering grids that allow the self-employed to make a fair guess at how much to take out of his and his employees’ paychecks each week. The same holds true for the business taxes. If you can’t figure this all out, then maybe you shouldn’t run your own business.

I used to be friends with a Methodist minister. He was technically self-employed. He had to pay himself every two weeks and was responsible for taking out taxes. He managed that Einsteinian feat just fine, and believe me, he was no math whiz. (Example: The dumbass used to refer in his sermons not to the Holy Trinity but to the Holy Quartet of “the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit and a guy named Eddie.”) I never remember him screaming in horror every April at the realization that he owed the IRS thousands of dollars.

If I’m not understanding some basic element of this, please elucidate my cloudy thinking, because I’m tired of yelling at my TV every time these smiling scofflaws crow about ripping off the government to the tune of $70,000. It taxes 100 percent of my patience, and I don’t know if there are any anger management companies out there who can help me bargain it down to a more manageable 20 percent.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

Similar Posts:

• Outside of the In-Crowd – I’m helpful: Four recession-proof jobs
• Outside of the In-Crowd – Courtney throws a political/relationshipital tantrum
• Positive Cynicism – ‘Tis the season to piss me off
• Outside of the In-Crowd – Vote or die … unless you shouldn’t
• Note to Self – No we can’t