New Year's Eve 2014

According to the calendar, another year is coming to a close. As far as curmudgeons are concerned, BFD. When lots and lots of years have come and gone, the thrill of the year end/New Year celebration is a tad reduced.

Not that curmudgeons don't enjoy a good reason to get together, drink profusely and trash other people. We ARE human. And celebrating a new year is as good a reason as any.

Resolutions? Ha! At our age, it's all about the celebration.

Wings, Beer, Sports

This is all a bar needs to advertise these days. With those three words, they'll attract sufficient quantities of mental geniuses to make for a successful business.

Curmudgeons everywhere have observed that our hot-shot society is turning into the decline of the Roman Empire and their enthusiasm for blood sport spectacles. Set up a spectacle that is fast-moving with a hint of injury today and you've got a winning formula. This is why NASCAR and hockey are so popular. And why a good football hit on the field where, say, a helmet pops off or a player is carried off gets people going, but long-term mental problems as a result get a yawn.

We are gleefully devolving. And the lowest common denominator, like "wings, beer, sports" succeeds.

Well done.

Pretention

I live in a town that is rife with Italian restaurants. For a town of less than 15,000 folks (rug-rats included), we've got over a dozen (local - not chain) Italian pizzerias and restaurants. Yikes.

So how do you differentiate yourself? You become a pretentious Italian restaurant. You put olive oil on the table for your bread instead of good ole American butter. And in so doing, piss off crotchety old curmudgeons who like their butter.

The situation is not unlike everybody being cursed with childproof medicine bottles rather than just those who want them (see 2/21/13 post on this topic) - you are forced to ask specially for what is normal.

For Italian restaurants, it is caused by pretention; for medicine, it is our delightful nanny state. Either way, curmudgeons get rankled.

Self Storage

Some people make a rather odd use of those rentable self storage units you see cropping up all over the landscape - they put stuff that doesn't fit at their residence in them on a long-term basis. Normal folks use these things for things like temporarily living in a small apartment during renovations being made to their home, or between residences because of a move, a lengthy overseas assignment, etc.

The former crowd is spending money on stuff they value so little they are not using it. Yet they "can't bear" to part with it. It is the very subject of the reality show "Auction Hunters" since at any given time, some 10,000 of these things are sitting abandoned across the U.S.

What are these people thinking? They're paying money for no return. Moreover, the storage unit place can raise their prices pretty much at will because it is highly doubtful that the unit renter will gather up and move all that crap to a cheaper place.

So I say again - what are these people thinking?

Family Trees

An enthusiastic Curmudgeon Repor field operative (who prefers to remain nameless, for reasons you will soon see) has been doing some research into his family tree. This person's ancestors - like many - came through Ellis Island where bureaucrats butchered their names for posterity. (Descendants of these bureaucrats can still be heard making the unintelligible announcements in the NYC subway today.)

Apparently other Ellis Island bureaucrats administered some sort of mental evaluation of these immigrants (deciding if they were competent enough to keep or something). This poor descendent discovered that the 'idiot' box had been checked next to his ancestor's name. At first quite discouraged, he was somewhat relieved to see that 'idiot' wasn't the worst box - 'imbecile' was.

At least that wasn't checked.