Gripes and Grumbles

Apr132007

Further Evidence That Human Beings Suck

So, I get on my train this morning at my usual station, the end-of-the-line terminus at the south end of the valley. The train sits at this stop for 15 minutes or so in between runs, to give people time to actually walk across the immense park ‘n’ ride lot and get on board, which means that on mornings when I’m one of the first people on — as I was today — I get to sit in a mostly empty train car and observe what human beings do when they think no one’s around. And today I saw a corker:

There was this corpulent, sour-faced old man in cheap velcro-fastened shoes who apparently doesn’t know or doesn’t care that you’re not supposed to eat on the train. I watched as he pulled a leftover KFC drumstick out of a plastic grocery bag and commenced to chowing down, dropping bits of Extra Crispy coating all over himself and the bench seat on which he’d parked his immense rear. This was mildly annoying, but I see people eating or drinking coffee fairly often in the mornings, so I could let it slide. No, the thing that really got me was that when he finished his breakfast, he carefully placed the bone under the seat in front of him, then got up and moved to another seat.

I debated for some time over whether to go tap him on the shoulder and ask him if he really thought no one had seen him commit his tiny act of ignorant, inconsiderate crappiness, but he looked like the sort who would escalate the situation into something truly ugly. In the end, I wussed out and chose to avoid confrontation. And it’s been bothering me ever since… I really should have just faced the argument and let the stupid old son of a bitch have it with both barrels.

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Apr122007

The Stupidity of Local TV News

Kristy Kruger is an award-winning singer-songwriter from Texas whose older brother, Lt. Col. Eric Kruger, was killed in Iraq a few months ago, on only his second day in the country. Kristy has since written a sad, sweet, deeply moving little song of farewell to her brother, and she’s now on a 50-state tour of the U.S. to pay tribute to Eric’s memory (she says she’d like to see what he died for, i.e., the whole of America). The tour has brought her here to Salt Lake, where she’ll be performing tonight at a venue called Kilby Court.

Continue Reading…

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Mar242007

Yin and Yang

It rained a few nights ago, and in the morning, after the storm had blown away, the sky looked as if it had been scoured and burnished. As I walked across the platform toward the light-rail train that was waiting to take me to work, I stopped and looked to the west. The slumped and rounded contours of the Oquirrh Mountains stood out clearly in the sparkling air, as if they were only yards away instead of miles, and all the houses and trees that blanket the valley floor were crisply defined as well. In the northwest corner of the valley, out over the Great Salt Lake, I could see a mass of leftover clouds piled up in a tall, gray heap that was shockingly dark compared to everything around it, and beautiful for the contrast it provided. The world looked clean and refreshed, and it suddenly struck me, as it occasionally does, that I really, really love living in this place where the mountains are so near and the sky so far above.

Unfortunately, the downsides of living in Utah often make an equally strong impression.

Continue Reading…

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Feb282007

A Thousand-Dollar Brownie?

Via Boing Boing, evidence that we have become a hopelessly decadent society:

…a restaurant in Atlantic City has come up with a $1,000 brownie… Brûlee’s “Brownie Extradordinaire with Saint Louis” is a chocolate brownie made with Italian hazelnuts, dusted with edible gold powder and served with a very rare port. After each bite, the dessert captain squirts a mist of the vintage port on your tongue with a $750 atomizer, which incidentally is yours to keep.

The online menu for this place can be found here, if you want to see how the better one percent lives.

I can’t begin to describe how offensively vulgar I find this. I am utterly disgusted by the thought of rich, spoiled bastards with more money than sense ($1K is equal to four payments on my Mustang!) eating a precious-metal-encrusted brownie while a lackey (no doubt dressed in velvets with a powdered wig, just like they did in the good old days before the guillotine spoiled the party) silently stands by to squirt wine into their lazy mouths because they can’t be troubled to soil their fingers by lifting a frakking glass. I wonder if the restaurant also offers to complete the whole experience by sending a perfumed peasant home with the diner to wipe their tushy with a napkin of fine Egyptian linen? I imagine the gold powder does improve the aesthetics of the inevitable conclusion, at least.

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Feb132007

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

Another entry in the “People Suck” category: The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Maltese Falcon has been stolen.

More specifically, an authorized reproduction of the prop from the 1941 film classic The Maltese Falcon, one which was used for publicity stills for the movie and which was signed by actor Elisha Cook, Jr., was taken from a locked cabinet in John’s Grill, a well-known San Francisco bar where Falcon author Dashiell Hammett and his fictional alter ego Sam Spade used to hang. Several vintage and signed Hammett books were taken as well.

A reward of $25,000 has been offered, but I have a hunch the owner of John’s will never see the Black Bird again. Bastards.

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Feb122007

You Never Think It’ll Happen in Your Neighborhood

About four hours ago, a man walked into Trolley Square, a quaint, relatively tiny Salt Lake City mall, and opened fire with a shotgun. The details are still sketchy, but, as of this writing, six people are confirmed dead, including the gunman, and an unknown number of injured people are in nearby hospitals. The victims have not yet been identified, and authorities have not even specified their genders or ages.

Continue Reading…

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Feb012007

Whose Brilliant Idea… ?

I’ve just been reading about the guerilla marketing campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force that went horribly wrong yesterday, and I honestly can’t decide who is more foolish: the marketers who didn’t stop to consider the ultra-paranoid times in which we live before they started planting mysterious devices all over urban settings, or the ultra-paranoid public who apparently believe that al-Qaeda has started decorating its bombs with blinking LED cartoon characters.

I really hate the 21st Century sometimes…

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Jan172007

It’s Really Damn Cold, Too

As if getting ripped off the other night wasn’t reason enough to be in a bad mood this week, the temperatures around here have plunged right through the floor into the god-forsaken darkness below. It’s cold. I mean, really cold. Bone-chilling, record-breaking, taun-taun-killing, frakking cold. It’s Minnesota cold. And that just ain’t right.

Believe it or not, Salt Lake is usually quite comfortable in the wintertime. Nighttime temps for this time of year are supposed to be in the low 30s, sometimes in the upper 20s. Chilly, but tolerable, so long as you have a decent coat. For the last couple of weeks, however, the highs have been in the teens and low 20s, and once the sun goes down, the mercury drops into the single digits. This is the kind of weather in which people die if they get stuck outside overnight. I spent a few minutes in the driveway last night talking to my dad, and my exposed face ended up feeling sunburned.

I’m not usually one to complain about the weather, but this is just miserable. I find myself watching the evening re-runs of Magnum, PI and Hawaii Five-0 a bit more wistfully these days…

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Jan172007

People Suck

So, I’m mentioned yesterday that things haven’t been going so well lately. Here’s the reason:

On Sunday night, my car got burglarized as it sat in the parking lot at The Girlfriend’s apartment complex.

It was my own damn fault, because I carelessly left my doors unlocked. Some opportunistic bastard just happened by, saw a victim ready for the exploiting, and took whatever they could find. I’m willing to bet they were in an out of the car in less than 30 seconds.

On the positive side, the car was completely undamaged — at least the thief didn’t break out a window or slash my convertible top to get in — and the total value of the items taken wasn’t much, probably less than $100. But it’s an awful feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you realize that something’s not right as you’re settling into the driver’s seat. When you start thinking, Hey, I didn’t leave my center console box open like that, did I?, and then the knowledge comes in a cold, stilleto-thin flash that, no, you did not leave the console open. It is a cliche to talk about feeling violated in these circumstances, but damn if that isn’t the first word that leaps to mind. Knowing that there was some… stranger… sitting in my Mustang, sitting in my driver’s seat, rumaging through my stuff… it’s frightening and infuriating and ultimately quite emasculating because there’s not a damn thing you can do about it after the fact. And, in my particular case, it’s also humiliating, because, as I mentioned already, I’ve got no one to blame but myself.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Obviously the scumbag who took my stuff had a choice about whether or not to open the door, open the console and glove compartment, and grab someone else’s things. Some of the blame surely belongs with him. (I’m assuming it was a him, and probably a young him at that — I imagine someone in baggy pants, puffy white athletic shoes, and an oversized sweatshirt with the hood up, possibly also wearing a cap with the bill turned sideways — although these days you really can’t tell. It could’ve been a her, or a middle-aged yuppie in conservative clothes. Who knows? But the stereotypes are alive and well around The Girlfriend’s apartment, and apparently in my own mind as well.) Even so, it wouldn’t have happened if I’d been more conscientious about clicking the little remote-control fob on my keychain.

For the record, the items taken comprised two CDs (actually two CD cases, only one of which contained an actual compact disc; take that, you little bastard!), a Mini MagLite flashlight I was rather attached to (it went to Germany and back with me a few years ago), and a zippered portfolio containing the car’s registration and owner’s manual (I suspect the thief grabbed the portfolio because it resembles a CD case). I’ve already bought a new MagLite, ordered a replacement owner’s manual, and obtained a duplicate of the registration, as well as having the car alarm’s sensitivity tweaked by the installer (not that it will do any good if it’s not armed, of course). I still need to pay the my local library for those CDs, which were both loaners, but basically I guess the whole thing is over and done with. However, running all those errands cost me the Martin Luther King holiday on Monday (which I’d planned to spend on creative, non-blog-oriented writing), and I’ve been feeling like an utter bonehead for several days now. Not to mention finding myself considerably more sour towards my fellow man. At the risk of sounding like my father, you used to be able to trust people in these parts.

Just file this one under World, subheading Bucket, Going to Hell in a.

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Jan112007

The End of Standards and Practices?

Man, I must be getting old, because I was genuinely shocked — shocked, I say! — during tonight’s episode of ER to hear one of our hunky, idealistic young doctors called somebody an asshole. I remember when Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H called someone a bastard — which is, to my mind, a far less vulgar and offensive term — and it made headlines. I find myself wondering which expletives still remain on the verboten list for broadcast TV, and how long will it be before that list ceases to exist altogether? And is this a good thing?

I used to think it was cool that TV standards were loosening and that characters were starting to speak more like real people. But now I think this new-found realism comes with a price. You see, these words used to have real power when I was younger, and part of their power was that you only heard them in the movies. You only heard grown-ups use them, and often only under very specific circumstances. Today… well, today profanity just doesn’t accomplish much. For example, a certain four-letter word that starts with “f” has become as common in casual conversation as “you know” and “um,” and it’s just as meaningless. And that bothers me. Not because I’m a prude, but because the word has been drained of its effectiveness. It used to be the ne plus ultra of cussing, the atom bomb of expletives, the one you reserved for extra-special occasions when nothing else was strong enough to make your point. What are we supposed to say now when we’ve just dropped a sledge hammer on our foot?

I’m telling you, the world has gone to hell. And those kids today… I swear.

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