Quote of the day,
Let her who is forty call herself forty; but if she can be young in spirit at forty, let her know that she is so.
Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington.
Welcome to The Bad Hair Blog.
I chose the title inspired by my current haircut, since I was recently at the mercy of a bimbo who cut at least 2″ more than I wanted, and left me with the right side shorter than the left. This is, aside from a bad haircut, a metaphor for a lot of things we face now as consumers or as residents of any town. I’ll refer to my town as The Principality.
To give an example,
Yesterday’s headline in the local weekly newspaper (delivered free to my driveway), read “Borough, Township Face Tax Hikes for 2004. Borough Projects $22 Million Budget. Township Budget Remains ‘In Flux'”.
What happened to cause this ‘flux’?
Both the Borough and the Township went on a 10-yr long spending spree. A new Township Hall was built (everything in this town has to be duplicated, with two police forces and two city halls) and furnished at top-of-the-line expense, the public schools got a $100 million bond issue for repairs and improvements (mercifully there’s only one school district), an $18 million downtown redevelopment project was authorized, a $19 million library’s in the works, and on and on, which means the average resident of The Principality “can expect an increase of approximately $700 in property taxes for 2004”.
Which brings me back to my haircut. Since the streets are in deplorable condition, I use the township hall only to deposit my tax payments, no one in the house attends public school, rarely go downtown because of the traffic and lack of time to be going downtown to get stuck in traffic, and order my books through Amazon because the library is downtown, the bad haircut describes this taxpayer’s situation: Fewer services (cut 2″ too short), “in flux” (one side longer than the other), and stuck with the bill ($60 for the haircut, unknown amount for the taxes).
It’s all about the haircut.
posted by Fausta