Review of Latest Credit Card Offer

Credit Card offer from "First PREMIER" Bank of mythical Sioux Falls SD arrived in my mailbox, boasting "60 second online credit approval." This is the worst one yet. They keep getting worse. It could be interesting to see how bad they eventually will get. I guess someday some men will arrive in person with a shackle, ball and chain -- the choice being to work on jack-hammering the street without food or water until I perish -- or simply be killed immediately.

Anyway, this offer requires a $175 Annual Fee for the first year, and after that the annual fee dips down to only $49 a year -- though there is a $14.50 a month Servicing Fee. As bad as that sounds it is nothing compared to the APR for purchases -- 38%!! My Shylock offers better rates!

Using my math skills, a quick calculation of this offer projects me, by the end of the year, taking a second job for sub-minimum wage at the last remaining Port Authority district "Male Room" poop eating matinee just so I don't get my 3G Smiley repossessed.

THE AMERICAN EARTHQUAKE by Edmund Wilson

In the newer part of town, the East Forties, looking down from a high upper window, one takes account of the monstrous carcass of the Grand Central Station and Palace, with its myriad skylights and its zinc-livid roofs, stretched out like a segmented seaworm that is almost unrecognizable as a form of life. Beyond it rise the upright rectangles of drab or raw yellow brick----yellows devoid of brilliance, browns that are never rich----perforated, as if by a perforating machine, with rows of rectangular windows; the stiff black fingers of factories; blunt truncated meaningless towers; a broken scrambling of flat roofs and sharp angles which is yet a compact fitting-in; and then the lead-silver river strung across with its skeletal bridge. In the middle distance, the sky itself seems to be overdisplaced----like a pool in which a large safe has been dropped----by a disagreeably colored hotel, brownish yellow like a bronchial trochee and so immense that its cubic acres seem to weigh down the very island, almost to make it sag. A flock of pigeons that fly below have the look, in the dull light, of wastepaper blown by the wind.