It’s bad enough when public officials misappropriate funds. (“Misappropriate” being jargon for “misdirect” — or “steal.”)

But when the money you’re “misappropriating” is from low-income people, and is intended to assist them with housing, when, in other words, the intention of the money is to help keep families off the street, and so therefore your ill-gotten goods may be shoving people out into a life of homelessness — then you’re loathsome. I’ve seen what despicable is, and it is you.

Here’s what it looks like.

In which the band Atomic Tom compensates for having their equipment stolen — by substituting it all with iPhones. (Wish we’d had that option in the ’80s — would have saved a lot of effort lugging around all that heavy band equipment.)

Thanks to Joe Stafford for making me aware of this.

In which a certified trainer takes down Jillian Michaels as “not actually a real fitness trainer — she’s an actress playing the role of fitness trainer on TV and in a line of popular DVDs.”

Choice excerpts:

• “Typical viewers think she’s great, yet the collective jaws of professional trainers hit the floor after witnessing her regular displays of poor technique and unsafe training practices.”
• “The biography on her website goes on and on about her multimedia endeavors, but there is not a single mention of any health-and-fitness education or credentials.”
• “…a bubble on the cover exclaims, ‘Lose up to 5 pounds a week!’ … Sure, if you start off weighing more than a Smart Car.”

I’m forwarding this to my son the weight trainer, and my friend writing the play about the unhappy housewife trying to get fit. I think both of them will love this.

It’s not just hot, it’s sharp! And it’s only a hundred bucks! Get on this, friends. (But be careful when you do.)

In our last installment, I saved $72 by reading my auto service bill. Here’s the story, and as cautionary tales go, I think it’s a timeless one.

In today’s episode, I catch the supermarket overcharging me — twice — and go and get $37 back on just two items.

I do the grocery shopping once a week. I don’t mind doing it, and I get the added benefit of making sure that high fructose corn syrup doesn’t come into the house, at least not on my watch. On Sunday, I asked the supermarket butcher for the large flounder in his display case ($3.39 a pound), and a roast ($3.99 a pound). This particular butcher was a young guy I didn’t recognize. He got those two items together, along with the rest of my order, and soon the kids and I, having completed our shopping, checked out. Whereupon I learned that the total came to $186.44. This was a surprise. Every week, the groceries run me $150, give or take a couple of bucks. I’ve pretty much got it down to a science. Sometimes, as when we’re going out of town, it’s far less. But 20% more? I couldn’t figure out how.

Later, when I had already begun cooking dinner, I figured out how. Here’s what I discovered after comparing my groceries against the receipt:

• While, yes, there was flounder wrapped inside the one paper, just as I requested, it was labeled as Wild-Caught Coho Salmon. Price: $10.99 a pound — more than three times what it should have been.
•  Also, the roast was indeed a roast, but it was labeled as “Beef Loin New York Steak Bone In” at $9.99 a pound — more than twice what it should have been.

So I called the store. The phone rang and rang and rang and rang and rang and rang and rang and rang. And rang. And rang. I refused to hang up. I left it ringing away merrily on speaker phone for about 15 minutes while I prepared dinner. Finally someone picked up, and I got a manager on the phone. I explained the problem — at that point, I knew only about the overcharged flounder/salmon — and said that my kids and I would really like to eat now, rather than drive back to his supermarket. He said no problem, just to mention his name and say he’d cleared it, and anyone could help me whenever it was convenient for me. After I got off the phone, I then discovered the mislabeled roast/steak, and decided to take photos as evidence. Here they are.

This is the wrapped meat:

And this is what was inside. See a bone in there? Does it look like steak? No.

So I’m just back now from taking my receipt, and this photographic evidence, to Albertson’s and a brief meeting with Patrick. Total refund: $37 and change. Which brought my original bill down to — you guessed it — almost $150 exactly.

Remember kids, always check your receipt. There wasn’t any duplicity involved. This was a simple human error. But it’s still humans who are generating many of your receipts.

(With apologies to Al Jaffee and Mad magazine.)

Today I had to drop off a prescription at CVS. (No, it wasn’t so I could cook meth. I could’ve just bought the stuff for that.)

When I handed it over, the order-taker (I’m not sure she was a pharmacist), who never bothered to say hello or even look up at me, said, “When do you want this?”

To which I said, “Instantaneously. Doesn’t everyone?”

Which finally got her to look at me.

Among friends and family, my antipathy for cats is well-known.

Let me put it succinctly:  Cats are worthless.

This isn’t just an opinion. It’s a scientific fact. They don’t greet you at the door, they don’t guard the house, they leave their hair everywhere, they climb onto countertops and tables and other areas associated with food preparation, they shit inside your house but you have to clean it up, they’re picky and demanding about their food, they make you itch and sneeze, and they leave your home smelling like cat and internal cat fluid. I didn’t like Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, except for one section:  the section where bird-lover Walt goes on an interior-monologue tear about how worthless cats are. That page almost made the other ten million words worth reading. It was funny and it was true. Here’s what I say to friends here in Southern California when they complain about their cats: “Remember, coyotes need to eat too.” To me, it just seems like a win-win.

But now I can see one reason to, if not live with a cat, at least associate with them for brief spells. And that’s because I now see that you can humiliate them.

Just a quick comment:  Ten years after switching to Microsoft Word, I still hate it. What I hate most:  how it “autocorrects” formatting that isn’t wrong — thereby creating problems that I have to find and fix. Secondary to that:  menu items that don’t do what they promise. Example:  the menu item “reveal formatting” — which I think should, well, reveal the formatting in the document so that I can find the source of the frickin’ problem that Word has created and hidden in there — becomes a little icon of a word balloon that I guess you’re supposed to point somewhere for an answer.

(And no, please don’t email me solutions to this problem. No matter how well-intended.)

My son has been praising Apple’s program Pages. Maybe I’ll try it.   Ten years ago I was using Clarisworks or Appleworks or whatever it was called that week and absolutely loving it. But the files didn’t translate correctly, and the Macintosh install base of users was down to… 3%? So, afraid that the program I was using was going to go the way of WordStar and that I’d have no way to share documents, I switched. And ten years ago, I still prefer the old one. That’s not a good thing.

Brian Eno’s new album, Small Craft on a Milk Sea, comes out November 2. More information on the album can be found here.

If you’d like to hear the advance released track “2 Forms of Anger,” click below.

Brian Eno – 2 Forms Of Anger (taken from Small Craft On A Milk Sea) by Warp Records

Sad news for my wife: I can’t get enough of this.

I will try not to play it when she’s home or in my car with me.

Yes, you can call your new single “Traffic Jam 101.” But no, you cannot create Traffic Jam 101 or you will be arrested. No one in LA has any tolerance for intentionally created traffic jams.

Plus, your music sucks.