I know, a lot of people make sacrifices just to make ends meet, but it seems like maybe we should make better decisions about what we choose to do with our lives -- we spend a lot of time at work!
The survey finds that only 30 percent of American workers are "engaged or involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their workplace," meaning that
70 percent are not. Of those, 20 percent said they HATE going to work.
HATE.
That's a strong word.
OK, I will allow that on some days I don't want to go to work. I would rather go to the gym, get something done around the house, or go to my son's school to have lunch with him.
And heck, I will always take an extra vacation day over a raise or other monetary incentive, because above all things, I value my time.
But I love what I do.
I love the people here at the station and I love the fact that I get to talk about current events for a living.
I guess I am lucky that I always knew what I wanted to do.
I never wanted to go into sales or try medical school. I wanted to watch news, read news and write news.
And the old saying, do what you love, worked out for me.
I found what I liked to do and the job and therefore the money, followed.
But if 20 million Americans HATE their jobs, we're missing out on a lot of productivity. And a lot of people's short lives are feeling even shorter.
Maybe everyone who hates their job should get a week or two to "job hunt" and ask themselves tough questions about their passions and figure out if they really hate their jobs, or the fact that they have a job at all.
In the get-a-life file today, I must place the One Million Moms group. I am not sure what these women are after, except possibly the complete extinction of fun.
The One Million Moms, which has famously gone after JC Penney in the past for using Ellen DeGeneres (gasp, a lesbian) in its ads, is now targeting Kraft Foods for its hilarious zesty salad dressing ads, which feature a very good-looking shirtless guy, holding a bottle of the dressing.
Some of the other ads feature the guy cooking on a barbecue grill or lounging on a picnic blanket with a towel over his parts.
Silly? Maybe. Sexy? Sure. If you can make salad dressing sexy, he succeeds.
But here's the thing.
Women have been objectified in movies and television -- heck, everywhere -- FOREVER. Why is this ad anything but hilarious?
I am not sure if the One Million Moms have ever experienced a sexy moment.
Or a funny moment.
Or any fun whatsoever.
That's too bad.
The guy who plays the part of "Zesty Guy" (and how fun is that name??) is named Anderson Davis. He has said the campaign is entirely tongue-in-cheek and because salad dressing is inherently NOT sexy, they have fun with it by injecting some humor.
Signs show the campaign is working too, by the way -- it's all over Twitter and other social media. Davis has said he doesn't mind being a piece of meat and that he leaned heavily on his women friends to craft his role, and women seem to love it.
Obviously his friends have a sense of humor unlike the One Million Moms.
What the best advice your dad ever gave you? I mean, real wisdom. The kind of stuff you thought was silly when he said it (over and over) but makes total sense now.
My dad used to say two things a lot.
"My dear, [speaking to me or one my sisters, whom he always referred to as dear or love,] people are stupid."
I used to think he was just being flippant. You know, like he didn't have an answer so he said that people are stupid.
But I realize he was so often just saying what we say when we just can't understand the way some people behave: Why the Jodi Arias trial had people who didn't personally know either the victim or the defendant living at the courthouse for weeks on end just to see the trial, why people making $50,000 a year would by a $500,000 house and a new car and wonder why they couldn't pay their bills and why a politician would risk his career and marriage by texting self-porn to his constituents.
You just can't figure that out, can you? Dad was right.
His other favorite saying was "It all boils down to economics."
Again, I thought he was just trying to get out of giving us money, but the older I got, the more I realized what a great truth his economics line was.
You can talk all you want about how "We SHOULD have a law that" does this or that but no matter how good an idea is, if someone who doesn't like it has enough money, your idea will probably lose. And the candidate with the most money usually wins.
Depressing? Yes, but it's true.
And speaking of fathers, Phil Mickelson is getting an awful lot of credit for flying back to his daughter's eighth grade graduation the day before the U.S. Open. A nice move, to be sure, but considering the way Phil travels, it wasn't that big of a deal!
Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there, especially those who are really sacrificing!
A new study out said that 70 percent of Americans have credit cards. Back in the 1970s, only 20 percent of Americans HAD credit cards.
Remember the days when pulling out a credit card was a big deal? My dad used to pay in cash whenever possible.
He did business that way for a lot of reasons.
One, he didn't ever buy anything he couldn't afford.
Two, he didn't like leaving a paper trail behind when he made a purchase, no matter what it was.
It wasn't that he was hiding anything, he just didn't think it was anyone else's business what he spent money on.
I wish my dad was still here so we could talk about the state of money in this country. I think the way he did it was right for a lot of reasons.
First, the idea of not buying something you can't afford is pretty basic, really, yet we don't seem to get that in America anymore.
We see our neighbor driving a new car and all of a sudden WE want one. Not only that, we think we deserve one. Never mind the fact that we don't know what he paid for it or how much money he has in the bank.
Nope, all we know is that car is shiny and new and we want it too.
Add to that the fact we are willing to pay MORE to borrow money to by that which we can't afford. And don't think you don't leave a paper trail when you buy on credit.
Most Americans value their privacy and say they will do ANYthing to safeguard it.
But they use Visa or MasterCard to finance their purchases, including groceries, entertainment and medical.
It's a real contradiciton, if you think about it.
But most of us don't. Think about it, that is.
Does everyone NEED a credit card? No.
Does it make life easier? It can.
But the housing crisis of 2008 was brought about in large part because somehow we decided that ALL Americans should have the opportunity to own a home. Remember that?
We found out the hard way that wasn't the case.
In Detroit this week, a group of automakers, engineers and tech experts are getting together to talk about the future of driverless cars.
Before you think that sounds like science fiction, recognize that a lot of the technology that is in the Google driverless car, (so far the only one functioning) is already in cars we are all driving: Leading car makers have already implemented collision avoidance, assisted braking and sensors that avoid objects in the road.
It's a slippery slope we are on toward driverless cars, and with the pace of technology, we'll be more driverless than less driverless, very soon.
I'm glad someone is paying attention.
Diamondbacks and Dodgers play basebrawl
Wow, what a brawl last night in the seventh inning of the Dodgers amd D-backs game.
You knew it was going to be bad after the second hitter got beaned, but when the benches cleared after the third, it was ON.
I was actually doing laundry and had seen the first two batters hit but when my family started reacting to the fight I figured it would be over soon, so I didn't stop folding. Little did I know it would go on for 10 minutes!
Look, every once in a while, you need one of these. I hope no one gets hurt, but in a rivalry like this one in the NL West, I think a little brawl every once in a while clears the air.
It's like a marriage: Every once in a while someone has to slam a door. That way, no one actually ever moves out.
LA gets the last laugh, by the way, with a win. These two meet up again Wednesday in LA. Lots of love there, for sure.
Basically, in the future, we will all look like anime characters... we will have big, intense eyes, larger nostrils to make it easier to breathe on other planets, and bigger heads to hold all of our brains. They also say we'll have more pigment in our skin to protect us from UV rays.
Could I have a little of that now?
The bigger eyes part seems like a no-brainer. We are being subjected to more and more information each minute of each day. Much of it is on computer screens, so our eyes are working harder just to grasp it. No matter the lighting or atmospheric conditions, we will be able to see it. We will look like humanoid ET's!
And the bigger brain part seems to make sense, too. More information, more thought processing, and more simultaneous calculations... but what will happen to our feelings? Will there still be room inside for those?
And the bigger nostrils part will come in handy, not just on other planets, but right here on earth. And, maybe some sort of air filter, as well.
Have you checked out our air quality?
But with all this texting we are doing, will we still have the same thumbs?
Paris Jackson was hospitalized after a reported suicide attempt.
The daughter of the King of Pop is, according to family and friends, doing well and resting. I don't bring it up because I am fascinated with the world of celebrities like the Jacksons. Not at all.
I bring it up because here is an example of a teenager who is famous for no other reason than that she had a famous father and, having lost her dad in such a public way, you have to think this 15-year-old girl (is there a harder age to be, by the way?) had a lot of emotional things going on in her life. Michael's crazy family has taken her and her brothers in, and you have to imagine that's a weird set up.
When Michael had his kids, all of America speculated who the mother was, what life was like at their house and whether or not they were actually HIS kids. Remember the great lengths he went to to protect his kids' faces when they were out in public? He made sure that no one could publicly comment on the way they looked or behaved. We thought that was so weird, and we criticized him for it.
Sure, Michael was odd, but as it turns out, perhaps it was for the best.
Now the kids are teenagers and are having a much more public life. Paris is on Twitter and recently posted a selfie video. That was the night before a reported call to a suicide help line and suicide attempt.
So, while you have to acknowledge that being a teenager is tough, and being a teenager in the Jackson family, who is constantly followed and photographed and gossiped about, do we think she's better off with the Jackson family than she would have been with her overprotective dad?
Mental health is getting a closer look by Hollywood and the White House.
The president has been linked closely to Hollywood by his critics, but I think a good relationship between the two could be a really good thing when it comes to the mental health discussion.
Think about the first time you heard the word autistic. Was it in the movie "Rain Man?" If so, you're probably 30-years-old or older and you probably first thought people were saying the word "artistic." I know I did.
And while not every autistic child behaves like Ray, played by Dustin Hoffman in the film, the simple fact is the movie brought national attention to the disorder of autism.
For the first time, Americans showed an awareness and an understanding of kids who were different because of autism. The dialogue was open and all of a sudden, families with kids who have autism were able to talk about their kids' condition without having to explain from the beginning, every time, what it is.
What if we could do that with mental illness? What if parents of kids who are bipolar or depressed could talk about the illness in their family and finally be understood? What if, out of that discussion, we learned as a society how to best deal with mental illness and determine which of those who suffer from it are likely to act out violently? And ,what if, as a result, we could guarantee we wouldn't ever have another Sandy Hook or Aurora?
Wouldn't that be worth it?
Make the movies and destroy the stigma around mental illness.
And speaking of Sandy Hook, is there anyone who thinks that releasing the crime scene photos is a good idea? I can't imagine why. Please don't.
The residents of Oklahoma have got to be at the end of their rope.
The injury count after Friday's tornados topped 75, and there are more storms possible. After the tornadoes in Moore killed 24, including 10 children, many in the Oklahoma City suburb are homeless.
We have been asking why people continue to rebuild in tornado alley, when it seems like these deadly storms are inevitable. I used to think it was like any place you choose to live... each city or region has its good and bad. You deal with the bad and wait for the good.
Like in Arizona, where we put up with July, August and September for the other nine months out of the year. In California, they are dealing with wildfires right now. In New Jersey, they are just re-opening the beaches eight months after Superstorm Sandy. And in the Pacific Northwest, severe weather comes in the form of eight months of wet and fog.
Summer doesn't even start until the Fourth of July. But if our Mother Nature continues to get more and more extreme, some of these regions where people "put up with the bad while they wait for the good" might not have enough good left.
And my amateur review of the Fleetwood Mac concert goes like this.
Stevie Nicks looks amazing. It's hard to believe she is 65. Now, she doesn't have nearly the vocal range she used to, and I couldn't help but wish I could go back in time and hear the band as they were in 1978. But she still sounds great on most everything. And as I watched her interact with her band, and I thought about the history between all of them over the years; the love affairs, the fights, and the amazing music they created together through it all, I was glad I got to see them at all.
But Lindsey Buckingham stole the show. That guy looks and sounds like someone half his age. You could feel the chemistry between Nicks and Buckingham as they played and sang together.
Move over Taylor Swift, there's a big-time concert Thursday in Phoenix, as the Valley's own Stevie Nicks is playing with Fleetwood Mac at the US Airways center.
I know, I know, Taylor Swift is really cute and a great role model for young girls with her wholesome good looks and modest, elegant wardrobe. All the moms (and dads) I know who took their girls to the show can't stop talking about how great a message Swift imparts to the crowd about "not hating" and just being who you are.
But Stevie Nicks was making music nearly 40 years before Taylor Swift was even born. In 1977, Stevie and her band released "Rumors," which was the best-selling album of that year, and of all-time the year it was released. It's still in the top ten and that was back in the day when you had to shell out money for the whole album, not just the single on iTunes.
You think your relationships are difficult Taylor? Stevie had one romance with her bandmate, Lindsey Buckingham. After that messy breakup, she had another romance with her drummer, Mick Fleetwood.
When her best friend died from leukemia shortly after giving birth, she married the father to be a mom to the baby. She later said, of the marriage, "We didn't get married because we were in love, we got married because we were grieving and it was the only way we could feel like we were doing the right thing." That lasted three months.
She even did some time at Betty Ford for rehab and has been clean since 1986. Talk about "Trouble." But she kept it together and kept on writing and performing some of the best music we had in the 1970s and 1980s.
Taylor Swift, with the number of love songs you've written and stories of life's angst that you have shared, one would think you had been through five decades worth of heartbreak and drama. Stevie Nicks actually HAS. I am really looking forward to the concert.
Hitler Tea Kettle
By the way, I checked out the Hitler Tea Kettle from the expansion segment with Mac Watson at 12:40.
I think the picture of the tea kettle might be mistaken as Hitler-esque, but in person? JCPenney has removed the billboard AND the kettle from it's website.
