Enrico!

When a pollster or a surveyor phones, I interupt their robotic spiel to inform them that my rate for participating in the process is $200 per hour, with a one hour minimum, and all partial hours rounded up to the next whole hour. 

When I first started doing this, several years ago, I often had to repeat two or three times before the caller grasped the concept that I wasn’t going to answer the questions.  Just recently, though, in the last few weeks, I’ve had several callers counter-offer with a $20 FourBux gift card.  Shocking.

I don’t buy FourBux coffee, so even a $200 giftcard from Fourbux wouldn’t tempt me, but it is rather mindblowing that these guys are now actually offering a kind of payment.

My refusal to participate is one reason I don’t put much faith in political polls.  What kinds of deviants are actually answering the pollsters’ questions?   I think I’m quaintly old-fashioned for even speaking to them.

I am tempted to claim to a political pollster that I am all for Lyndon LaRouche, and to offer them a pound or so of raw liver.   I don’t know what the raw liver is all about, but I remember many years ago seeing video of a LaRouchie trying to give a pound of raw liver to some politico.  Maybe it is some kind of twisted homage to “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

Enrico wishes to draw your attention to this article in the Houston Comical, an increasing rare article in that it is actually written by someone on the Chronicle’s staff. Enrico has perused the virgin issue of Open, just for the articles, and pronounces it “well done.”

I have not yet checked out Virgin Mawrtyr, from Bryn Mawr, but I will have make time to evaluate its literary merits.

Apropos of nothing whatsoever, when Enrico was at Williams, the 10th anniversary of the admission of women to the college was commemorated by a tee sheet with the the caption “A Decade of Men and Women Copopulating.” That was awesome.