Ten Years and Fifteen Bucks

« Pigs are pigs all the world over. »

Happy 40th Conrad and 30-*mumble* JJ! I think we have all earned the joy of good single malts and reading pandering crap like this knowing we're too old for the target market. James Earl Jones might have been cool, but RMS? Paging Brad Kuhn, paging Brad Kuhn....:) 'Tis a pity I gave up such ancient technology as the answering machine years ago.

When I came home tonight there was a big package from my mother who sent a few gifts, a few bags of dried cranberries and load of mail from the last few months which mostly consisted of quarterly retirement fund reports noting how much money they've lost this quarter and a slew of credit card offers. In contrast, the banks in Finland will mostly tell you to piss off if you want a MasterCard unless you have a job, even with a decent amount of money in the bank and no debt, and will give you a low line of credit and make you pay an annual fee. Of course, there's nowhere near the problem of personal debt here either.

After chopping up most of those I found an envelope from the City of St. Louis which struck me as odd since I've not lived there in almost a decade. I opened it and much to my amazement I found a harsh letter for a 10 year-old $15 parking ticket. Yes, TEN YEARS. Jesus christ in a merry widow with a cat 'o nines, even criminals enjoy a shorter statute of limitations on far worse crimes than being busted by the meter nazis. Fifteen whole dollars, which is something like 5 euro these days, induced them to send a threatening letter of doom.

Our records indicate that parking tickets issued to a vehicle registered in your name are delinquent. Your failure to satisfy this matter immediately will result in the forwarding of this debt to a national collection agency and may result in additional collection fees equal to 20 percent of the amount due. [emphasis theirs]

Holy shit, I'm in for a whole $15 and the $3 for collection. I'll bet Trump never got a lame letter like this when he was in the hole for a few billion bucks and I'm getting busted for a lousy $15?! The only thing worse than the US Postmaster on your ass is the parking ticket collective, even the parking nazis in Helsinki have an Orwellian logo to remind you that there is no escape from the everseeing eye of the "Time Expired" vultures. Why can't they just send me a letter that says something like that they're sorry that it took them 10 years to notice that I have one whole parking ticket outstanding and that they'd like me to pay up instead of the dramatic language of doom? I doubt that Finland would extradite me for a parking ticket back home, but I wonder if the US Customs guys would bust me if I ever reenter the US and send me to Gitmo as a parking terrorista. Who knew living on the edge could be so easy and so dreadfully dull at the same time?

Speaking of pigs, I found out about kinkkubingo [ham bingo] today at work. Bingo makes me think of old ladies [sorry mom] in church basements obsessing on their cards to win pocket money. Ham bingo is, apparently, a Christmas tradition of bingo or a raffle for a Christmas ham. I say 'apparently' as Google doesn't turn up much and my close Finnish girlfriend upon whom I rely to keep me informed on such important bits of cultural ephemera had never heard of it. DTM has a Kalkunnabingo [turkey bingo] every Sunday with Miss Bitch but, being a former fag hag supreme, I get a little suspicious when gay clubs start raffling off meat. :) It sounds like a bit of harmless holiday fun and might even be combined with a drinking game for pikkujoulu entertainment.

And, just in time for Christmas tree trimming, the paper lomo that you can cut out, glue together and enjoy. The Lomo people also have a cute advent calendar, too. Maybe I'll send one of the paper lomos to the parking crusaders with the pysäköinninvalvonta eyeball glued onto the front of it for grins.