There’s nothing new in politics, as this marvelous little quiz attests rather successfully. One example question follows.

Barack Obama’s novelty isn’t in his words, and we certainly shouldn’t laud him for his skin color. Like Jack Kennedy, Obama has a way with words. Like Jack Kennedy, Obama is weak on specific policy measures. Like Jack Kennedy, Obama’s strength is in that he has a created something of a movement.

Whatever you think of his high-falutin’ eloquence and his vagueness, the Democrats could use that movement.

From XKCD, via my sister:

Normally, I’d try to paraphrase what this comic says, given the obfuscation of the middlemost panel, but the last three panels sum up my attitude pretty well.

I politely declined today’s job offer.

Technically, to say that I was offered a job is an overstatement. I hadn’t actually received any formal offer — only an interview — but I’m sure that had I gone to the interview, I would have received a job offer. I declined it, anyway. I’ve heard of American Insurance.

When their receptionist called, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise before she let loose with her spiel.

My name is Kira, and I’m from American Insurance. We came across your resume on Careerbuilder, and we thought you’d like to come to the interviews on Thursday.

Well, I’d like to, but …

Before we get started, I’d like to talk a little bit about our company. We’re an insurance company, and we’ve been around for 50 years. We won’t be asking you to cold-call anyone, or to sell insurance to your family.

That’s very interesting, but …

We work with local labor unions, and we have a variety of positions open — from sales to management, depending, of course, on your experience.

I cut in.

How do I get paid? Is it wage or salary, or is it commission?

Pregnant pause. I think she could tell that I wasn’t just any desperate, jobless loser.

Sales positions are paid by commission.

I’m not sure I want to do this. I would really prefer having a stable income, with at least some base wage or salary.

I pretended to take down her number in case I decided to show up to the interview, because here’s no point in being rude to someone who answers phones for a living. A few verbal sidesteps later I thanked her for her time and hung up, and I assume she did likewise.

Generally, one good way to ferret out Internet scams involves asking yourself whether or not an employer called and you hadn’t heard about it in advance.

Here I thought cold calling wasn’t one of the jobs on the menu.

San Francisco is full of good intentions, and San Franciscans in many ways must think of their city as a model for the rest of the country. Not the least of San Francisco’s triumph has been the response to its once-growing problem of homelessness.

Via Neatorama, I found a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed detailing how well these good intentions leave behind most of their working citizens.

But while the city spends hundreds of millions of dollars to house the extremely poor, there is a large segment of its population — hard-working, fully employed and stable - that makes too much money to get the help they need to find affordable housing. …

A family of four that makes more than $24,850 — which is 30 percent of San Francisco’s average median income — will be unable to find any subsidized housing, according to local experts. Instead, the family can either cram into a tiny studio or flee the city — along with the better-paid teachers, firefighters and police officers who have already done so.

Unfortunately, all of these people made a single, critical mistake: They got a job.

Homeless in San Francisco are taken care of because enough San Franciscans above the poverty line pay their taxes, and enough don’t mind paying. They figure: if San Francisco can fix poverty by tacking on to the municipal tax rate an extra few fractions of a percentage point, and if much of the cost will be covered by tourists, then it’s a worthy sacrifice.

Yet — hasn’t San Francisco created a new kind of poverty by eliminating homelessness? The lower middle class can’t afford to live in the city, and must either commute from outside communities or cram into tiny one-room apartments. It’s a fine line between adequate housing and inadequate housing.

The unemployed have reasonable homes in San Francisco; many employed don’t, and can’t. To wit: If this op-ed has its facts straight — big if — then homelessness has only barely been fixed.

Much worse, once living in subsidized housing, what incentive would the laziest of the unemployed have to break out of the cycle of poverty if their basic needs are already taken care of? Much less, what incentive would there be to get a job if having basic needs taken care of already requires no personal effort?

Even if my conjecture doesn’t pan out, I have a feeling that San Francisco isn’t half the model its well-meaning residents think it is.

Prototypical date movies should inspire the warm fuzzies, whether or not you actually like the person you’re watching it with. This is all well and good, but there are those of us who’d rather avoid the second date. For that, the solution is simple: choose a movie without the warm fuzzies.

Great films work especially well — more often than not, they’re just as effective as that Date Movie/Epic Movie double feature, and not as needlessly painful. Case in point:

Schindler’s List

Pitch the movie: Liam Neeson, a German man living through World War II, overcomes overwhelming odds.

Don’t say tnat: Nazi-affiliated profiteer Liam Neeson risks everything to save more than a thousand Jews from the death camps. Includes some graphic Holocaust images.

During the movie: Suggest a drinking game. Be imaginative.

Girl, Interrupted

Pitch the movie: Winona Ryder struggles with growing up at the turn of the century. An emotional rollercoaster with a feel-good ending.

Don’t say that: After a six-month stint in a mental hospital, Winona Ryder is diagnosed with a borderline personality order. The film includes candid — and merciless — presentations of sexuality, drugs and suicide.

During the movie: Wheeze heavily, and mutter under your breath. Say you identify with Ryder’s character.

The Elephant Man

Pitch the movie: In this madcap drama, producer Mel Brooks asks questions about life and the worth of living.

Don’t say that: A former circus freak wants only lives peacefully and alone, but is caught forever in cyclic and brutal encounters with humanity.

During the movie: Cheer.

D.O.A.

Pitch the movie: In this thriller, one man tracks down a killer, with only a single tip from an anonymous source.

Don’t say that: At the beginning of this classic film noir, a man about to be married is told during a vacation to the big city that he’s been poisoned and has less than 24 hours to live. He spends the rest of the movie tracking down his killer.

During the movie: “Look on the bright side: He’s dying a single man.”

American Psycho

Pitch the movie: In a manic farce, the well-to-do Christian Bale enjoys himself by visiting a fantasy world of his own creation.

Don’t say that: In a bloody film worthy of its title, businessman Christian Bale finds himself killing again and again, more and more brutally, for absolutely no reason.

During the movie: “I know exactly how he feels.”

****

You might run into a little snag if she’s seen all of these movies. In that case, she’s a keeper.

Bachelor pad food comes in three overarching varieties. First, food inspired by the microwave:

Bean and Tapatio Burritos

1 can of generic-brand refried beans
3 flour tortillas
12 oz. Tapatio sauce

1. Empty Sunny Select refrieds into a cereal bowl.
2. Add Tapatio to taste.
3. Cover bowl with three tortillas for use as a splatter screen.
4. Cook in microwave on high for three minutes.
5. Fold beans and Tapatio sauce into tortillas.
Alternate instructions: Dig in, monster style.

Cost per meal: 60 cents.

Second, food inspired by nostalgia:

Peanut Butter and Jam Sandwiches

chunky peanut butter, as desired
strawberry jam, as desired
cheap loaves of wheat bread

1. Make a sandwich. You should be able to figure this one out.

Cost per meal: 25 cents.

Third, nostalgia food that serves more than one:

Macaroni and Cheese

milk, I think
ridiculous amounts of butter
box of macaroni and cheese

1. Boil water; scald yourself instead.
2. Put macaroni in boiling water.
3. Realize you don’t have a strainer.
4. Knock down neighborhood doors, asking for a strainer. Give up, as desired.
5. Make Peanut Butter and Jam Sandwiches.
Alternate instructions: Follow the instructions Kraft provided.

Cost per meal: 80 cents.

I’m also a huge fan of the 88-cent-pizzas from FoodMaxx, and I could eat pot pies until the cows come home.

Any other favorites out there that I missed?

The Bill of Rights is an essential part of most social studies curricula — in California, you could squeeze it in during practically every grade from the eighth on. While mnemonics were probably the most effective part of the unit, by far my favorite activity involving the first ten amendments were my marvelously subversive video clips.

So very helpfully, Rotten Tomatoes compiled its own list of ten movie clips, each corresponding to one of the ten amendments. Some of them are obvious — The People v. Larry Flynt, 12 Angry Men.

Some of them are far-fetched — for quartering soldiers, they turn to Chevy Chase. Nonetheless, it was solid list, and the commentary was at times excellent.

It’s impossible to wrong with nuggets like this:

In The Godfather Part 2, … Michael didn’t get to the top of the criminal world by being a dummy, and his knowledge of the Constitution is particularly astute. “I have not taken refuge behind the Fifth Amendment although it is my right to do so,” he tells the Senate, before evoking the Sixth Amendment. “I challenge this committee to produce any witness or evidence against me.” The government’s case falls apart, and Michael eventually violates his brother Fredo’s Sixth Amendment rights by exercising his Second Amendment rights.

However hard it might have been to stretch your brain to collect examples of third, ninth and tenth amendments, Hollywood overflows with examples of the second amendment and violations of the fourth and fifth.

Hardest part of writing about those must have been to choose just one clip for each.

My one-sentence review: WALL-E is an excellent adult love story, and, though it is appropriately G-rated, it will probably bore the most impatient kindergartners.

Though it’s a movie I found to be a little heavy-handed with its message, I thought well-done, anyway. As we’ve come to expect from Pixar, this film’s message is handled with greater panache and insight than most studios use over twelve films, a quality which more than makes up for WALL-E’s overwrought focus on having a message.

This film’s themes are environmentalism and slothful consumerism — I don’t give anything away to say that one is shown as good and the other is shown as bad — and, even so, the film doesn’t quite flesh with any single political ideology. Not that it matters — nothing could ever stop political ideologues from bickering.

Due to the nature of their bickering, spoilers ahead. I paraphrase in blockquotes.

One called it a movie that Al Gore would like, because of its environmentalism, making a cheap shot that forgets that global warming is never mentioned in this movie; another countered that WALL-E was quintessentially conservative, because it criticized the marriage of business and government, missing the entire point of the movie.

Ideologue the Third reported that his 5-year-old child was whining to leave within the first 15 minutes, proving that the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree; another observed that this Disney film was hypocritical for preaching against consumerism, even though, by contract, Disney has exactly zero creative control over a Pixar film.

It’d be worth noting that all of the quoted ridiculous observations come from conservative critics if left-wing pundits weren’t regularly guilty of equal or worse sins.

WALL-E is one of the most elegant arguments for stewardship of our planet in ages — it doesn’t argue that pollution hurts the Earth, rather that pollution intrinsically hurts humanity — and the film serves as one of the best-executed arguments against pursuing easy convenience at any cost.

Each of those arguments apparently clash with simple, narrow-minded conservatism. It may not clash with simple, narrow-minded liberal, if only because they’ll inevitably focus on the simple, surface-level message against pollution, skipping entirely the attacks on the perils of our culture of entitlement.

Simple, narrow-minded ideologues from either side could ever make heads or tails of this movie. Their loss.

Just when I was about to regain faith in humanity and my gender. If The Sacramento Bee is to be believed, a UC Davis researcher has found that, when on dates, men are explicitly susceptible to wishful thinking, thinking that’s measured in degrees of getting some.

Nearly every woman Motley questioned answered that when she tells a partner “it’s getting late” during intimate situations, she means she is putting up a stop sign. But most men interpreted “it’s getting late” to mean either that she wanted him to “skip the preliminaries” or that she wanted him to go forward and was politely informing him about the late hour.

The vast majority of women questioned by Motley told him that when they tell a man during an intimate moment that “I am seeing someone else,” they mean that they want to stop “making out,” he said. The vast majority of men interpret the comment to mean, “Keep going, but let’s be discreet,” or “Keep going, but I want you to know that I’m not making a commitment.”

Here I was thinking that “It’s getting late” meant that my date was tired. Most men, apparently, disagree, seeming to translate what women say into more pleasing constructions.

I’d think it would get confusing after a while. After all, if “It’s getting late” meant “Get your lips off me, greaseball,” then what does it mean when your date says, “Get your lips off me, greaseball?”

Not that I need to know.

Sometimes, however, men and women do speak in code, when “It’s getting late” actually does mean “let’s skip the preliminaries.” It happens enough that men delude themselves into making it a stereotype, as measured by this survey. Confusion reigns, and all because of codetalking.

Therefore, I am no codetalker. I try to be perfectly honest when so many others skirt around the truth or embellish. Whether I’m faced with a first date or a second interview, it hasn’t yet hurt me any.

Trust the word of an unemployed bachelor: No harm at all.

As part of yesterday’s Big Blog Swap, I wrote a guest post for Amanda’s blog. Here’s what I wrote.

9:56 a.m. — Wake up.

At first, the prospect of waking up whenever I felt like it, making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches whenever I feel like it and taking a shower whenever I feel like it seemed like absolute freedom. By the third week, this schedule revealed its true nature: absolute tedium.

11:03 a.m. — Roll onto floor from bed.

My anxiety isn’t even financial in origin. Because I, bachelor, didn’t spend a dime that I didn’t have to all last year, I have enough saved up to coast until well past Labor Day. Past that, if need be.

11:04 a.m. — Turn off alarm.

Once I’m awake, I remember how much I hate coasting.

11:32 a.m. — Stumble toward Internet. Eat instant oatmeal. Make sandwiches as needed; play Guitar Hero as desired.

Really, I can’t even call it coasting. I’ve been interviewing when possible and dropping off resumes when not — it just feels like coasting, in part because I still haven’t the slightest lead for a job. Journalism around where I live has exactly zero positions available, and substitute teaching won’t warm up until school starts again.

4:23 p.m. — Shower.

That means six more weeks of joblessness; six more weeks of Deep Space Nine reruns; six more weeks of migrained boredom. I need to do something.

4:52 p.m. — Apply online to big box retail and national chains. Touch up resume or work on cover letters, if needed. Repeat until tired.

I find something to do.

4:53 p.m. — I’m tired; I keep up the job hunt.

Even though I exhausted all my leads yesterday, I try to come up with new ideas. For me, idly looking for a summer job is better than futzing around on a feed reader, or on the blog, or on the forums, or playing Tetris, or organizing my iTunes.

7:09 p.m. — Exhaust all leads. Go back to Guitar Hero.

I’d give up the chance to get five stars on Through the Fire and Flames if it meant I would have something more substantial to do. However idyllic doing nothing might seem to the guy from Office Space, I can report, firsthand, that it isn’t all that he cracks it up to be.

11:02 p.m. — Go to bed.

Doing nothing is, at first, an instant high, but really it’s just empty calories for the brain — I feel my brain atrophy already. I grow restless.