Buyshit Elves Profiles: the Heroes of the Buyshit Season #2

Here is the second installment of the Elves profiles. This time we learn about Sharon Lundegard, a fatass who sells craft shit at malls.

Name:Sharon Lundegard
Hometown:Fridley, Minnesota, USA

Background:
Oh nothin' much, I just grew up on a farm down by Albert Lea. I got married 12 years ago and moved to the big city with my husband Greg. Now we have two boys, 11 and 12, and a cockapoo. I got into craftin' when I was pregnant with my first. My mother would bring over some supplies and we'd watch the baby and make ornaments and things.

What Do You Make?
Oh lotsa things. Every Christmas I look through the magazines for ideas and then go to the store to get some supplies. This year I made cute little Rudolph ornaments out of pretzels, pipe cleaners, little bells, and red candies. I sell those for $1 each at the craft shows. I also made some nativity scenes out of Chex Mix, craft moss, wood shacks that Greg made out in the garage, and little plastic figures. Those ones are $12 but I lose money on them. Most of the stuff I make I lose money on, but it keeps me busy.

What Is Your Job Like?
I love it. Me and the girls get together to sell our wares at Northtown and its a hoot! I shouldn't be tellin' ya this but there's one woman who sells there, I can't repeat what we call her here, but every year she steals our ideas and we see her selling them for less than us. Ooh it just burns me up. So this year Greg took a dried up poop from our dog Skeeter and glued it on some Ritz crackers with some little "Noel" sequins and then I snuck 'em into her Chex Mix nativity scene that some lady bought. The lady came back and yelled at her and she thought her kids did it. It was the funniest thing when Amber the Dumb Sow (oops that's what we call her) went over to the KB Toys where her kids were playin' and started yellin' "who put the poop in my nativity scene?" but she was saying the s-word where I said 'poop.' I don't know maybe we were too mean to her but she deserved it.

What Do You Do for Fun?
Besides craftin'? Watch TV.

Thank you Sharon for sharing your story with us!

Buyshit Elves Profiles: the Heroes of the Buyshit Season

With the Buyshit season nearly at an end, I thought it would be appropriate to profile some of the underappreciated elves who make it all possible. If it were not for their hard work, we would not awake this coming Christmas morning to a plethora of goodies under the tree. Here is the first installment of Buyshit Elves Profiles: the Heroes of the Buyshit Season.

Name: Weidong Liu
Hometown: Foshan, Republic of China

Background:
I started as an agrarian worker at a factory farm outside of the small southern Chinese city Foshan. In 2006, I moved my wife and son to Guangzhou to seek a better life in one of the city's growing number of factories. There, I found work at Guangzhou BYD, Ltd., a plastics molding company in Guangzhou Industrial Park, where I remain employed to this day.

What Do You Make?
I don't really know what this shit is. Guangzhou BYD is a contract injection molding and assembly company. Most of our shit is exported to the USA. Actually, I have a funny story about that. I was working a line where we would make these clear plastic apparatuses that look like test tubes. I would imagine scientists in the USA mixing chemicals in them and inventing amazing things. I wanted to go to the USA to work with them. One day I was goofing around, wearing my white factory worker smock and some safety goggles and pretending to mix chemicals in two of the tubes. The guys started laughing at me, but after I stopped the joke the laughing didn't stop. All day they were teasing me and giggling behind my back. So the next day I come in and they're still laughing. I didn't get it. Finally my buddy Changye put me out of my misery. He was walking a stack of pallets back to the shipping dock and when he passed my station he leaned over to me and said, "it's for your pecker, dude." I was so embarrased. I looked on one of the packages and saw the silhouette of a sexy man and woman and realized it was some kind of sex toy. I later found out they call it a "penis pump." That is supposedly what the package says, but I don't know English. Anyway, I was embarrassed but I laugh about it now.

What Is Your Job Like?
It beats the farm job I had before. Sometimes I just don't get it though. I mean, I can go home and fuck my wife and I don't need a special pump or a thing stuck in my ass. But if someone somewhere in the world wants the shit I make so they can get off, I will continue to make it. We're making these things now where there's this rubbery shit with glitter suspended inside. I work the glitter injector. I don't know what it is for, they say they are called butt plugs. What the fuck is a butt plug? I drink tea to unplug my butt, so why would I want to plug it with a glitter thing? So I can drink more tea? I tried searching the internet to see butt plugs or penis pumps in action, but the government blocks all the sites that would have that sort of thing. I took some butt plugs home to see if my wife had any ideas, and she just gave them to my son and he chews on them. I hope they don't have lead paint on them, but I'm sure the government would warn us if they did.

What Do You Do for Fun?
Before I got the job at the factory, I liked riding my bicycle and painting. I also liked to take my son to the carousel in the city. Now I mostly just work late and watch TV.

Thank you Weidong for sharing your story with us!

Have you ever wondered what the world would be like if the Macintosh had turned out to be the dominant PC platform? To get an idea, take a look at the situation with the iPhone. Its proponents are unable to see the faults in the product. Every new phone that comes along gets compared to the iPhone and invariably fails the test. And iPhone owners seem to have this air of superiority about them. What we end up with is a nice phone with a slick interface and a user base that is so smug that it turns me off to the product. Thankfully there is no single dominant player in the cell phone OS field. Can you imagine what we would have to endure if the iPhone held a majority market share?

With the way the world seems to be going tits up lately, I feel bad being negative about anything. I am usually optimistic about things and I like to look at troubling situations as opportunities for improvement. But yesterday I read a trajic story in the StarTribune. It was about an elderly woman who was hit by a car near her home in Northeast Minneapolis. As if that isn't bad enough, the really tragic part is the reaction from the woman who hit her: "The driver, a 46-year-old Minneapolis woman, stopped after she 'heard a thud,' according to a police report." I can't help but imagine someone yackin' on a cell phone or munching on some potatoes and lard. I spend a lot of time walking and biking, and I notice a lot of people doing things other than focusing on their driving. With as clueless as most people are about how cars, gas mileage, and traffic actually work, it is further insult that they don't devote enough of their attention to driving. And so I am going to conclude that the elderly woman died because someone wasn't paying enough attention. That makes me sad, and I decided that I am going to pay extra attention to cars when I am out walking because I don't trust them any more.

Tits Up News: Kick 'em When Their Tits Are Up

It is a bit premature to be calling tits up on Chrysler, but after reading a Jalopnik report on their "bridge loan" proposal I can't help but extrapolate a path to their ultimiate demise. To recap Chrysler's recent history, the company was bought by an investment firm named Cerberus in 2007. If you read between the lines in what CEO Bob Nardelli outlines as the company's recent accomplishments, you might summarize that he has cut costs and positioned the company for resale at a profit, as investment firms often attempt to do.

The problem is that in the middle of their plan, the auto industry really, truly has gone tits up. Chrysler is a ship lost at sea. There are no substantive product plans for the next couple of years. I have no doubt that Cerberus had intended to sell Chrysler off, either as a whole or as its individual parts: Dodge, Chrysler, and Jeep.

Sadly, I don't think it is worth saving. The Chrysler brands have been tarnished and the current lineup doesn't really make sense. I say let it go. Even if the government gives them an $11 billion bridge loan, the company could still fail. Or Cerberus could try to take the money and run. There are too many automotive marques in the world and this one is not worth $11 billion. Let Chrysler fail.