Hey, kids, hope you haven’t missed me too badly during my brief absence from the blogosphere. I’ve just returned from three days of visiting friends in Sin City. Report to follow, but in the meantime, I offer this visual commentary on the news I missed while I was driving across the Jundland Wastes, er, Nevada:
About two weeks ago, the Postal Service implemented its annual and much-ballyhooed rate increase, kicking the price of a 39-cent stamp to 41 cents. Anticipating that a significant number of consumers (like yours truly) would still have a bunch of 39-cent stamps in their possession, the brilliant, benevolent, and very handsome people who work for the USPS have of course taken steps to ensure that two-cent stamps are readily available for those who need them. The automated vending kiosks will be overstocked with the needed “fill-in” stamps for the next month or so as a favor to valued customers whose schedules prevent them from visiting human postal workers during regular business hours. Thus, bills continue to get mailed on time, inconvenience is minimized, customer loyalty is maintained, everyone is happy, and spontaneous renditions of “Kumbaya” can be heard echoing through post offices across the land.
Well, that’s probably how it would work on the Bizarro World. Here on Earth, my local post master, in all his or her infinite wisdom, has devoted only a single slot of the vending machine to two-cent stamps, and that slot has, of course, been sold out for two weeks.
Idiots.
One of the many, many items on the List of Things That Are Turning Me Into a Grumpy Old Man™ is the fact that an entire generation of kids has grown up not knowing what Coca-Cola is supposed to taste like. That’s because, back around 1985 or so, the evil penny-pinching, bean-counting corporate stooges in Atlanta decided — without bothering to consult the consumers who would be buying and drinking the stuff, mind you — to replace the yummy, yummy sugar in Coke with this new-fangled, better-living-through-modern-chemistry (and, not coincidentally, cheaper) dreck called high-fructose corn syrup. The value of this change was entirely one-sided: the company saved money on the production side by using the cheaper sweetener, which of course boosted the stockholders’ portfolio. Coke drinkers, on the other hand, got shafted. They lost the flavor they’d enjoyed for a hundred years and were forced to either adapt to the new, less-pleasant (and possibly downright harmful, if you believe the bad press on corn syrup) Coke formula, or find some other beverage fix.
(For the record, I don’t generally buy into conspiracy theories, but I find it entirely plausible that the marketing disaster that was New Coke really was an insidious ploy to wean consumers off sugar-based Coke so we’d be more accepting of the corn-syrup formula when Classic Coke “returned.” I’m not saying I definitely believe that, only that I find it believable.)
The really frustrating thing about the Coke situation was that the battle was lost before anyone knew it was being fought. And the same damn thing is about to happen again with another beloved luxury food: chocolate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m thinking today that maybe it was a bad idea for our species to progress beyond vacuum tubes. Hell, I’m so annoyed with my various gadgets that the Industrial Revolution itself is sounding questionable to me. I’m sure that 18th Century farmers, shopkeepers, and blacksmiths rarely felt the need to hurl their tools through the nearest window. But, man, I sure do. Here’s why:
[ADDENDUM: As if I didn’t have enough evidence for my argument that we’d all be better off if the quill pen made a comeback, my ISP seems to be having trouble keeping me online today, and Gmail is apparently too colossally cool for my antiquated dial-up connection. As the bimbo character (whose name I can’t recall at the moment) frequently remarks in Singin’ in the Rain, “I caaaaaan’t stanit.”]
In the high thirties art, technology and design are so intertwined it is sometimes hard to pry them apart. …Since 1939 art and technology have broken apart, for many reasons. Architects still design skyscrapers, but they are rarely technological showpieces. we have stopped building bridges. Locomotives nowadays are not candidates for design competitions. Airplanes never were. Artists no longer paint heroic murals. Even if they did, one suspects that technology might not be a favorite subject. (Unless it were the villain?)
The art-and-technology divorce has been a disaster for both parties, and it has profoundly alienated us from the future. “The story of the relcamation of the site and the building of the [New York World’s] Fair on it,” says the 1939 Guide [to the Fair], “is a romantic saga of modern engineering.” Yes, once upon a time, engineering was romantic. …Today we respect technology, spend heavily on it and can’t live without it. But the spiritual glow is long gone. Art has lost its grip on technology, we have lost our grip on the future; and the American religion, in which skyscrapers and steam engines were beautiful and inspiring and numinous sacred objects, is dead.
–David Gelernter, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair
I’ve been saying for years that one of the most disheartening things about the modern-day world is that, aside from a handful of rare exceptions, nothing has any style anymore. Looks like this author agrees with me.