naming blogs is easy

hey, i wrote the below for kali’s awesome site. go read the rest! lots of good ‘what would you do for money’ fodder within.

livewrongandprosper:

IT’S GUEST BLOGGER FRIDAY! TODAY’S QUESTION WILL BE ANSWERED BY MAURA JOHNSTON, THE EDITOR OF IDOLATOR (WHICH I’M PRETTY SURE ALMOST NEARLY EVERYONE READS). SHE *JUST* ENTERED HER MID-30s (LIKE YESTERDAY, IN FACT. SEND A BIRTHDAY GREETING TO HER IF YOU HAVE A MOMENT), SO QUESTIONS LIKE THIS LOOM EVEN LARGER THAN THEY MIGHT HAVE WHEN SHE WAS FIRST GALLIVANTING AROUND THE WEB. ALAS, NONE OF US ARE GETTING ANY YOUNGER (INCLUDING YOU, McHIP REPLACEMENT).

I have been masking my gray hairs since I was 19; I’m overweight; when
I smile in the vicinity of a mirror, I can see little lines forming at
the corners of my eyes; I stagger around the apartment any morning
that follows a late night out with a few friends and a few bottles of
wine. So aging “10 years” in one as opposed to, say, the seven I’ve
aged over the past three sounds, frankly, like it’s keeping pace with
my current rate of maturity. And it’s kind of fascinating to think
about what that acceleration would entail, honestly. Would I develop a
hunch from my admittedly crap posture? Would my hair start falling
out? Would I develop more embarrassing problems, the kind that are
advertised during airings of The Price Is Right?

Not to mention that if I knew I’d be aging 10 years over the course of
one, I might very well be motivated to live, well, right. And I might
even prosper as a result! Fewer alcohol units, fewer meat-on-meat
meals, fewer late nights, less time spent sitting in front of my
laptop’s drab glow waiting for something on the Internet to shock me
out of my day-to-day existence, more exercising, more
vegetables-qua-vegetables. Would the money be a factor as far as this
change in behavior goes? Sure, although not for the scalpel-related
reasons you might think; instead, the promise of that $10 million
would be a great incentive for me to teach myself how to live more
ascetically for the 365-day length of the experiment, because I’d hope
that I’d pre-emptively — if slowly — drop so many of the vices that have
prematurely aged me already from my life. After all, growing up
mentally is much more of a trick than physical aging — and it’s
ultimately what’s more important.

- Maura J.

I really struggled with this one and I’m still not sure I’ve settled on an answer. On the one hand, who cares about getting wrinkles if you also get $10 million dollars? I mean, that’s plenty more than enough to qualify as fuck you money, I think, so basically, you can tacitly be like, fuck you to anyone who has a problem with your pruney face. On the other hand, there’s vanity, and mine weighs enough that I’m not sure it doesn’t tip the scales in its favor (that’s not my favorite thing to admit but, fuck it. We’re all friends slash adults here, aren’t we?). Since I don’t wanna chump out or seem all milquetoasty by not giving an answer I’ll say yes to this because dolla dolla bills, y’all. But my firmness, honestly? A little bit shaky.

- Kali

Two of the nine pilots fired by Continental Airlines in an alleged pension scam say that if Continental believes their divorces were phony, the carrier should tell that to the state court judges who granted the divorces.

Instead, Eddie Lindsey and Cindy Ernst said in interviews Wednesday with the Houston Chronicle, they were subjected to intrusive investigations under threat of termination during which Continental attorneys asked intimate questions about their marital relations, finances, children and living arrangements.

The airline alleged in a suit last week that the pilots got divorces so their ex-spouses could collect early pension benefits, then remarried.

“The courts didn’t ask me the type of questions that the company was asking me; I felt like it was an invasion of privacy,” said Lindsey, who rose to the rank of senior captain during a 29-year career with Continental and its predecessor before being terminated in April 2008.

The questioning went so far as to ask whether pilots were sleeping in the same beds as their spouses. “I just kept thinking, they can’t do this; this is my personal life,” said Ernst, a 24-year Continental employee fired last month. “It’s against the law for them to harass me like that. They said they can and if I don’t cooperate, then I likely would be terminated.”

And at the conclusion of Continental’s probe, that’s what happened.

i’m willing to give these people the benefit of the doubt, since they’re pitted against  an airline that pats itself on the back for trying to pass off malodorous microwaved cheesesteaks as “meals” on its flights.

A former Indiana funeral home director whose license was revoked in 2006 after clients complained that he forged signatures, failed to deliver death certificates and in one case took more than a year to deliver cremated remains says he is not responsible for four badly decomposed bodies found at his now-vacant funeral home.

Darryl Cammack, the owner of the former Serenity Gardens Funeral Home in Gary, said he let another funeral director use the facility after his license was revoked and doesn’t believe the bodies were left from when he ran the funeral home.

“Definitely not. Definitely not. I’m almost positive,” Cammack told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Wednesday. “I’m sure they’re not.”

But the state board that regulates funeral homes said it has no record of anyone running Serenity Gardens after Cammack’s license was revoked. Tracy Hicks, director of the state Board of Funeral and Cemetery, said Indiana law requires that the state be notified if a funeral home is sold or if a new funeral director takes over an existing facility.

“We were never notified of that,” she said.

Leaders of the Northlake Church of Christ made the gruesome discovery Sunday after buying the vacant building in a tax sale. Lake County Coroner David Pastrick and his staff found one body in a bag on a table, another in a corrugated burial box and two in caskets.