Category: Rant

Well, let the blame game begin. Me, personally, I’m blaming Joe Torre. I love the guy, reminds me of my late grandfather. He’s the reason that the Yankees got this far, limping by with one, sometimes two, competent starting pitchers all season. But Red Sox manager, Terry Francona, did what Torre just did not do.
He played games 4, 5, and 6 as if they were the last games.

Which, of course, for the Red Sox, they were. Having won the first three, the Yankees seemed willing to play on tomorrow. There was always the next day. So instead of pulling starting pitchers into relief rotation, like Francona did with Arroyo and Wakefield, Torre let the struggling Tom Gordon and the spooked Mariano Rivera blow two potential saved games. (Rivera, bless him, has been rocked by the Sox ever since the All Star game.) Instead of pulling tired, struggling batters in extra innings with fresh pinch hitters from the bench, Torre lets Tony Clark bat.

Feh. I’m a timid arm-chair coach at best, and the only team I ever watch is the Yankees, so I can’t even attempt to pretend that I know anything about the mechanics of baseball managing. But I do know this, I’ve seen less crucial games where Torre pulled out a lot more stops in order for a win. And when he made some moves in this last game 7, we were already behind 10 to 3. What took him so long to wake up?

Game 4 was ours to lose, and game 5 was well within our grasp. It never should have come to a game 7, and, when it did, the Sox were, far more than the Yanks, ready to win.

Fast Food Patron: I’d like the fish sandwich value meal, please.

Voice in Ordering Box: That’ll be $5.43. Drive up to the first window, please.

FFP: Okay.

(Fast Food Patron drives up to First Window and hands Cashier at First Window a $20 and a $1.)

Cashier at First Window: That’ll be $4.99, please.

FFP: (confused) What about tax?

CaFW: Yeah… (pauses) What?

FFP: What about sales tax? You said $4.99. There’s tax, too.

CaFW: Yeah. (studies register, then nods) Yeah. That’s $4.99.

FFP: (resignedly) Okay!

(Fast Food Patron reaches through First Window and grabs the single out of the Cashier at Front Window’s hand, to avoid further confusion.)

There was an ad for I, Robot that, mercifully, hasn’t been shown in this market for a couple of days. The voice-over said, ominously, “We designed them to be trusted with our children, our families, and our homes, but did we design them to be trusted?”

The annoying sound you hear is the venting of my eternal frustration at copywriters that are that dumb. And that entry is my vote for the second dumbest thing ever written for an advertisement.

The first, and I hope you don’t ever see this commercial, is for a company called Vital Basics, which is a stupid miracle vitamin that boosts your metabolism, keeps you alert and awake, and cures dropsy. These guys are so confident you’ll love their product that they are giving it away for free. And so says an unscripted man-on-the-street testimonial from a woman with the shrillest voice imaginable. She shrieks, “They’re giving it away FREE? It must be good.” When she cackles the word “free” it sours milk and causes grown men to weep. It breaks teevee tubes and my glasses. It keeps me up at night with cold shivers. But besides all that: What type of logic is that? Surely I could ask, “They charge thousands of dollars for that? It must be good.” Or even, “They charge $5.95 for shipping and handling? That must be how they make their money.”

I’m on a mailing list at Don’t Amend, a group dedicated to stopping the hijacking of the Constitution by the idiots against same-sex marriage. It’s a fine cause, and all I had to do was sign a petition, not the hardest thing in the world. But the poor folks at Don’t Amend found themselves the target of a malcontent, who hacked into their mail server and opened their bulk email list to anyone. I’m not sure if this caused me, and others on the list, to get more spam, because I get over to two hundred spam emails each day, so another dozen or so in my junk mailbox would go unnoticed by me. What it did noiticably do was spawn one of the most hilarious and goofy responses from several dozen of the users on the list. If I were going to make my own bulk email list of suckers and newbies, today would have made my work far, far easier.

Instead, I just deleted the emails. But not before I read through a quarter of them to get this jist of the responses to a mailing list gone amuck. The innocent response was, “Remove me from your list,” one of which started the whole mess. The first sender of the remove-me email was doing the right thing. S/he clicked a link that opened up a new blank email with the remove-me subject line, and sent it, just like s/he was supposed to do. But, like an avalanche or a mudslide, it only takes one pebble to start the whole thing rolling, and soon there were three needless angry and terse emails telling this first innocent, and everyone else on the list, that they didn’t set up the list, and don’t tell them to take you off the list that they have nothing to do with, and what the hell is a list anyway, and, by the way, go to hell!

Why so tense? These could have been chalked up to before-the-first-caffine-intake email, since they took place so early in the morning, but these same nasty, clueless emails kept coming in. The first one started at 8 a.m. EDT and the last trickled down at noon, when Don’t Amend finally fixed the hole. A few people took it upon themselves to send the nasty, curt response several times throughout the day, along with requests to take themselves off the list. That’s good thinking.

Still, I understand the impulse to try to control things that are out of one’s hands. But spitting against the wind? Not my style. Apparently, though, there are a large portion of the Don’t Amend mailing list that believe themselves to be of a higher authority, because these people “helped” by telling everyone else to stop sending emails to the list, over and over again. I do believe they failed to realize that the greater majority of us on the Don’t Amend mailing list were not, in fact, sending emails to the list, so more than half of the email pollution was coming from these know-it-alls who were telling us to stop replying to all, as they, themselves, were replying to all.

In order to make their point as annoying as possible, they spread as much ALL CAPS and weird typefaces in their emails. This is something that only friends should do to each other in emails, but never, ever to strangers.

A couple of my favorite responses were the one that basically said, “I don’t get that many emails, so this was a lot of fun to read through. Relax and enjoy it people,” which I did, and the other, verbatim, “I have been receiving mass emails from member of Dont Amend with weird “remove me” dialogue….please dont remove me.” Sweetly insecure.

And, yes, YES, all I wanted to do was respond to each of these people and tell them that they were being so stupid. And I wouldn’t have sent the email to the list, either, because I know how to use email, unlike the woman who insisted she has used email a long time and knew how to reply to an individual, as she emailed everyone on the goddammed list! I would have wasted a large amount of time to teach these people a valuable lesson by copying and pasting my rant into several dozen emails. But, but, I thought, that would be pointless. No one learns lessons via email. And, besides, I have a blog! I’ll post it there! Yeah, that’ll learn ’em.

As both readers of my blog know (Hi Mom! Hi Uncle Frank!), I try to stay away from current events, because by the time I write about it and post the article, the event has all but faded from the public view. But when breasts are involved, I try to keep timely. Of course, I refer to the shocking and civilization-collapsing baring of Janet Jackson’s right breast on national television.

I didn’t see the actual live performance, for the same reason that I do not gawk at traffic accidents—I find no pleasure in watching other people’s pain. That sums up halftime shows, beauty pageants, and other reality-based television. I just don’t care. So I missed what is being billed as the most-replayed event on television. I have the Internet, however, home of twelve-billion boobies, and Janet’s shame was on display before the Monday morning news-cycle. I laughed and laughed and laughed, when I first read the news on CNN shortly after midnight after the Super Bowl. CBS, MTV, the NFL, Justin Timberlake, and thousands of others were denying any responsibility. The breast was not meant to be exposed! There was red-lace under there that was meant to stay on. Oh, the humanity!

I thought, that night, naively, that this was a non-story, because she quite obviously had a pastie on her breast, a silvery, star-shaped pastie. (Initially, I thought that the photo was being censored, because the pastie is so big and doofy-looking!) I thought that the pastie kind of proved that the stunt was carried out as planned. Why wear a pastie at all, if not to hide the real indecent part of the breast, the scary and evil nipple? And that’s where I was so wrong. See, the floppy flesh around the nipple is just as bad. I didn’t realize this. Apparently, the bad part of the breast is the outside, the part that faces the arms of a woman. Because the inside, where Wonderbras and silicon have pushed them up to the chins of the women in television and magazines all accessible to minors, the cleavage, that’s just fine. The outside part? Only a suckling child should be able to get that view.

Sensibly, no one is offended by the young White male molesting and ripping the clothes off an older, shorter Black woman. Sensibly, no one is upset that women are used as commodities by the recording industry and Hollywood. Sensibly, no one cares that the talented Janet Jackson has to sex herself up in order to move CDs, because her talent has nothing to do with her marketability. Thank God, we’re all so fucking uptight that we can’t deal with a perfectly fine boob because it was shown to tens of million children who were watching a pro-football game, where advertisers spent hundreds of million dollars on telling American men that they have erectile disfunction and are not pleasing their American women. Hey kids! Buy beer! Don’t smoke pot! Drink beer! Trade stocks with this company! Get a stiffy! And drink more beer! And then back to the game where men are men, son.

Still, it was a stupid stunt, and I have no sympathy for the puppets that were strung along and will be hung out when the Inquisition is over. It is just a shame that real destroyers of our culture and community, MTV and the morally outraged, will both win, and the poor, maligned boob will lose.

Offered as Peoples’ Exhibit A, your Honor. Upon visiting China for the 2003 Miss World Contest, Miss United States, 20-year old, Kim Harlan, had this to say, “I thought everyone would be wearing, you know, little Asian outfits, but they’re perfectly normal, you know, just the way we dress up.”

Emphasis added. Quote from Marketplace on NPR.

What is this world coming to? Even hoodlums don’t know the rules anymore. It used to be, in my day, when you needed to steal a license plate, you only stole the front plate. This way, the person whom you stole the plate from wouldn’t notice for weeks that a plate was missing, and therefore wouldn’t report it, and you could go on your merry way with the stolen plate on the back of your unregistered vehicle.
That’s the way we did it when we were young, dammit!

But just two weeks ago, what happens? My girlfriend’s plates are stolen from her new car — both plates! We see the car in the parking lot, and an eagle-eyed friend notices the plates are gone, so we call the police who file a report. So what did the thief get away with? Nothing! It wasn’t vandalism, since the car was not marked up in any other way. It was just stupid, because now the plates are worthless.

And just in case you see New York plates with the number ALL 7111, feel free to beat the perp… I mean, driver, about the head with the dumb stick, ’cause he’s probably used to it by now.

As a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk liberal, most people would expect me, I think, to take the side of the poor Muslim woman who lost her driver’s license because she would not remove her veil, in the name of Islam and modesty. The signs point to underdog, and I’m all about boosting the underdog. The ACLU, an organization I support and admire, has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Sultaana Freeman. There is currently an email missive, which incorrectly states that Florida gave in and is allowing Freeman to wear the veil on her license photo, that goes on and on about immigrants not playing by the rules, and this is God’s country, and love it or leave it, and all that crap. In other words, I should be decrying the heavy-hand of the government, and freedom of religion, and all that crap. But I’m not.

It turns out that that the stupid email missive mentioned above, which claims falsely to be an editorial in a Tampa-area newspaper, is wrong on many counts. One of the main ones is the immigration status of Sultaana Freeman. She’s an American, who once went by the name of Sandra Kellar. A short while after she converted to Islam, she was arrested in Illinois on battery charges after beating a 3 year-old child in her care. In that case, she also tried to refuse the lifting of the veil on the child in the name of modesty and Islam. Underneath the veil of the child, police found bruises on her face. Her arm was also broken. The mug-shot of Sultaana was taken without the veil.

Suddenly, I see no reason to side with this woman.

Moreover, the sticking point in the Florida driver’s license issue is that Freeman already had her photo taken with the veil, and only, she and the ACLU claim, after 9–11 did the state have interest in persecuting Muslims. But there are two problems with this argument.

The first is that the state has always said that driving is a privilege, and its rules are now that the whole face must be shown in the license. If Freeman doesn’t want to take off the veil, she is welcome not to. And she will not be granted a license. Simple. It is not religious persecution.

The second point: It is not religious persecution. In Islamic countries where women can travel or drive, they do not wear their veils in their passport or driver’s license. Their whole face must be visible. There is no Islamic law that makes it immoral, or immodest, to remove the veil when identification is needed.

I wanted, in my liberal, knee-jerk reaction, to think that Florida was needlessly troubling this woman. But now, my spider-sense is tingling with the possibility that Sultaana Freeman, nee Sandra Kellar, former Pentecostal preacher and child-abuser, may just be hiding something besides her modesty behind that veil.

I’m going to create a window sticker that says, “Hey! Self-Centered Asshole! Learn how to park!” See if I don’t!

I don’t care how nice your car is, or how much of a hurry you’re in. When you’ve got to quickly run into a Dunkin Donuts to get your Mocha Coolata, get yourself a parking space, like everyone else in the damned shopping center. If you don’t, and I see you, I’m a-gonna slap one of these imaginary stickers on your car. Just you wait. Jerk.

What the hell is wrong with CNN (and by extension, all our American media outlets)? This little propaganda gem was found on their web site today. The linked article goes on to talk about how cable news might be playing some role in helping the Bush administration link Saddam and al Qaeda without any real evidence to support it. Well, duh.