I was in one of my casserole moods tonight. Recipe available upon request…
Best song heard in a drinking establishment (where I wasn’t drinking) this weekend: “I Love You” by Yello…
There are many things I was ambivalent about as a youth which I’ve learned to appreciate with age: collard greens, 1950s pop standards, etc…
There is one thing I’ve grown to hate more than anything else as I’ve gotten older: large crowds. Crowding has never been one of my favorite phenomena, but I used to put up with them occasionally if the event in question was worth the effort. No more…
It’s not that I have a phobia; I don’t get panic attacks or anything like that. I just get REALLY annoyed in crowds. I want to start shoving and elbowing when the flow of (pedestrian) traffic won’t move at a reasonable pace. And I start finding something to hate about everyone who gets in my way, or even looks like he MIGHT get in my way…
Crowds in bars are the worst, of course. Drunk idiots are statistically more likely to stumble into one’s path than sober idiots. And the M.O., at least in queer bars, seems to be “find the place where you can do the most damage to traffic flow and stand there with 12 of your closest friends for an hour or two”…
Of course, it’s no trick to get me annoyed anyway. I’m perpetually irritable and I’m quite comfortable with this fact, thanks. And my problem with crowds probably stems from the fact that I’m just not a “people person”. In other words, I tend to expect the worst out of most people I encounter, rather than the best. This tactic results in much less disappointment and even the occasional pleasant surprise…
Oddly enough, there was a time (say, 1985) when I was comparatively outgoing and even tolerated crowds pretty well. Then I spent ten years in customer service jobs and it was all over for me. I learned to see the worst in people simply because they all seemed so damned willing to show it. I haven’t waited on a customer in a retail store in over four years and I still haven’t recovered…
I may never go to a bar on a Saturday night, a sporting event, a parade, or a street fair again, and I really don’t think I’ll be missing all that much. Large crowds have a tendency to gather primarily to do things I’m not much interested in doing anyway…
Coming soon: why I hate crowds of Sodomites even more than I hate regular, all-purpose crowds…
Nice belated birthday lunch with Sarah today. It would have been even nicer if I hadn’t been having one of my “all this medication sucks and I feel like shit and who really needs a properly-functioning thyroid gland or heart anyway, dammit” days…
Speaking of which, it’s time for my evening pills…
I can honestly say that of all the places I don’t want to be this Labor day weekend, New Orleans is pretty damned close to the top of the list…
But then again, so is San Francisco…
The fog’s back. Specifically, it came back at about 4:05 this afternoon, damn near knocking me down in the process just as I got out of my car at Webster and Jackson…
You have to love a place where it’s more likely to be warm and sunny in April or October than in August, and where a ten-degree change in the daily high temperature (from 68 to 78) is considered a major weather trend. It’s great living someplace where, in summer at least, the daily high temperature is usually less than the daily low temperature in the rest of the country…
You rarely hear about the heat index or the chill factor here, unless someone’s discussing a nightclub. San Francisco stands out like a glaring anomaly on the weather map for a good part of the year. We love that…
When people who make their living as writers use words like “incentivize” in nationally-syndicated newspaper columns, I become more and more convinced that (a) there are not enough editors in our world, and (b) the English language is doomed…
I’m also of the opinion that the individuals who name paint (or paper) colors should be ostracized and ridiculed regularly. My building is being repainted, and one of the color choices is something called “Mauve Madness”. My guess is that this shade would be best complemeted by a combination of “Fierce Fuschia” and “Extreme Ecru”, but I’m not sure if anyone else agrees…
However, today’s official overused buzzword of the day, “hegemony”, is more often seen in academic writing. Like most overused buzzwords which are actual proper English words — unlike “incentivize” — it has origins as a perfectly acceptable means of expressing a certain thought. However, it moves into the realm of the cliché when used, without irony or apology, fourteen times in a single chapter or essay. It’s also indicative of a lazy writer…
But maybe I just read too much non-fiction…
I could not imagine a more pleasant site at the otherwise nondescript corner of Mission and Cesar Chavez on a Saturday morning. They scurried down the street on the back of a truck about two minutes later…
My dad said it. He said the Jesse Helms mantra, even though he was half joking. I knew I’d hear it at least once this week, even without access to North Carolina TV coverage…
I may leave town tomorrow. If not, I’ll tell you the unlikely story of how I may soon be a member of the United Auto Workers…
Also, please be advised that my increasingly shitty internet connection is my current excuse for not answering email nor actually visiting exciting websites this week. My backup excuse is tons of work, so (in theory), I’m actually CREATING exciting websites. Wish I could upload them…
So who’s gonna miss this hateful, ignorant son of a bitch and his perpetually constipated visage when he leaves the Senate? Not me. Maybe in a few years I’ll at least get over that twinge of dread and embarrassment I feel when I tell people that I’m from North Carolina…
All my life, I heard the mantra repeated over and over again: “you may not agree with Jesse Helms, but you always know where he stands”. Well, yeah. Big deal. There was never much question where Hitler stood either. And it’s amazing how often he and Jesse could be found standing in just about the same exact place. I like to think that when they die, they’ll continue to be in pretty close proximity too…
Sitting around feeling a little restless on a Saturday night (but not quite restless enough to go out and do anything), I was laying on the living room couch, listening to music from the 1940s and 1950s on KABL, and looking around the room, noting that most of the technology in my living room was available 20 years ago (and was widespread 15 years ago).
It started me pondering some rather odd technologies from my lifetime, all of which might have become “the next big thing” had not their timing been a little off or their operation just a little too convoluted.
- Remember those adapters which used to let you play cassette tapes on your car’s 8-track player? Those were just plain bizarre, not to mention a good way to destroy both your cassettes and your 8-track player. Nothing ever sounded quite right either.
- Cable FM radio was a strange service I had in Charlotte back in the 1980s. Not that I paid for anything so stupid, but it was pretty easy to rig by splitting the signal which ent to your TV. It was a little pointless in an urban area where all the radio reception was fine anyway. An unintended advantage for me was that it provided a high-fi audio signal for TBS (which was on cable TV channel 6, a frequency just adjacent to the lower end of the FM radio dial). I think they also (on purpose) delivered the audio sgnal for MTV (and maybe HBO) this way.
- How about TVs which still had mechanical tuners, but disguised them as push-buttons and allowed you to put whatever channel wherever you wanted it. I still have one of those, actually, but I don’t have the sheet of replaceable channel numbers anymore.
- A funny-looking thing which may or may not have had an actual purpose: those linear-tracking turntables which hung vertically so that the record spun facing you.
- Even funnier: record-changer turntables which played one record, and then dropped the next one on top of it and played that one. At the end of an hour or so, you had four moderately-scratched records spinning at about 15% below their normal speed.
- Before microwaves were common, we had boiling bags, those individual servings of a meat patty in gravy in a plastic bag which you boiled for ten minutes or so. Of course, this required food which was thin and didn’t have a shape which needed maintaining.
- The best strange food technology, though, was the McDLT from McDonald’s. Of course, the whole McSystem at that time involved pre-cooking sandwiches which sat in a heated holding bin until served. Thus, lettuce and tomato together on a sandwich was unworkable; it left a soggy, wilted mess. That is, until the McDLT, which came in a two-chambered styrofoam package, with the meat and cheese on one side and the lettuce and tomato on the other. It could sit in the bin for the standard “ten minutes” and it was a very odd thing indeed when served.
- Until about 1985, tone dialing (which is now standard) was an option, it cost more, and it wasn’t available everywhere. For about five years or so, there were these hybrid tone-pulse phones. They had pushbuttons but interfaced with the phone company in the old-fashioned pulse system (and took forever doing so). You could also switch modes during the call so you could dial in and use long-distance services which needed tone-dialing.
Anyone have any other strange technologies from the recent past? I don’t mean dead technolgies (like Beta, which was actually superior to VHS), but ones which died quickly just because they were so fucking weird or Rube Goldberg-esque? Mention them here. Do it now, before I start talking about the Kinko’s Oversize Fax Network…