Deep Thoughts for 2013

Important Mail

I recently got a very important-looking envelope in the mail. In big letters it said "Notice of Intent to Deliver" with "Personal and Confidential" stamped on it, PLUS a huge product code thingie - with a 20-digit number, no less (!).

Wow! Did it ever look official! What urgent matter must it contain? Well, we'll never know - I promptly threw it out.

NOTHING important ever comes in an envelope plastered with crap like that. Simple arithmetic aside (my Social Security number is only 9 digits and credit cards are 16 - what on this earth could possibly warrant 20?), it was obvious that the "notice" was abject BS, seeing as how it WAS delivered.

They also really goofed it up by putting a return address - that of my fancy Amish fireplace (with the look of real fire) that I got last year - on it.

Man, those Amish are tenacious.

Only In Japan

I had almost become inured to the oddities that occur in Japan. They seem to always have been, and still are, really an odd people.

But a new movie about a Japanese legend starring that most Japanese of actors, Keanu Reeves (??), just came out. Called "47 Ronin," it moved me to look up what the heck a ronin was. The last time I heard the word, I associated it with a Robert De Niro movie of some sort.

A ronin is your everyday samurai who leaves or loses his master. So, OK, we got the 'ronin' part. Why 47? Because of a famous legend in Japan where 47 samurai lost their master because he honorably committed harakiri for assaulting a court officer. So what did these 47 samurai - now ronin - do? They plotted for two years, killed the court officer for causing their master to kill himself, and then promptly committed harakiri themselves.

This legend is apparently about honor and such. Of a very odd people.

Keanu should be just right for the 'odd' angle.

Poets

Like economists (see earlier rants on their uselessness), poets make stuff up to make their "profession" sound impressively full of fancy words and themselves sound knowledgeable.

As a curmudgeon, I certainly don't go out of my way to run across this stuff, but as a well read curmudgeon, I periodically encounter words whose definition I need to brush up on. And thus, I recently encountered elegiac.

It was vaguely familiar, but what the hey, the Mirriam-Webster app on my iPhone was handy. First surprise was that it is eleJEYEac, apparently, not elEEgiac, as I had always thought. Worse, the definition was of absolutely no help: "consisting of two dactylic hexameter lines the second of which lacks the arsis in the third and sixth feet."

I knew poetry was dumb, I just never appreciated HOW dumb. Who could possibly give a fig enough to even come up with one of the terms used in this definition, let alone stringing so many weird words together FOR A DEFINITION?

Poets. Instant headaches.

Tis The Season

Christmas - 'tis the season to be jolly. Yeah, THAT'S going to happen with curmudgeons. We'd be all "Bah, humbug" and "Let them eat cake" and the like, but it's been overdone.

The Christmas season is a rough one for curmudgeons. Kids are off school, so they're all over the place. All manner of nitwits are out and about shopping, so the roads and stores and gas stations and parking lots are nightmares. Yeah, you can imagine how curmudgeons really go for this time of year.

We did get Bing Crosby to popularize "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" in hopes of a good snow keeping the riffraff at home and out of sight.

Plus we consume mass quantities of "doctored" eggnog.

Tweeting

Some of us curmudgeons had a little huddle and decided that in addition to regular old in-person conversation, the phone, the US mail and email, the curmudgeon world didn't need yet some other communication thingy. Curmudgeons already drive off the road when their cell phones ring, so avoiding yet another distraction seemed prudent.

Twitter seems aptly named - a service for twits - like chatty 13-year-old girls, politicians, actors and Donald Trump. So we decided to keep the Twitterverse where it belonged - as with small children, out of sight and out of mind.

Then the Twitterverse graduated from this image to recording the Arab Spring. Crap. Suddenly the Twitter thingamabob was big news. The rest of the Curmudgeon Societé Generale members started asking me about it. "Should we be on this Twitter thing?" "How does one GET 'on' Twitter'?" "Do I have to remember to type '.com'?" "What button on my TV remote control do I hit?" "Why didn't you tell us about this back when we could have profited obscenely when it went public?"

I had to think fast. Turns out, all my TV watching came to my rescue. I used Brisco County Jr's tag line: wait for the "next big thing" - that's where the smart money is. They're thrilled. My term as Societé technical expert expires shortly - I will be long gone if the shit actually hits the fan, but I'm betting on Brisco - something else will come along.

Drive-Thrus

I've made curmudgeonly observations on this topic as far back as March of 2012: drive-thru customers at fast food restaurants are given preferential treatment over in-restaurant customers. If you haven't noticed this, you are clearly among us lazy sorts who frequent said drive-thru.

Why, even back then an alert reader wrote to say she orders in the drive-thru and then takes her food inside to eat since it goes that much faster.

Recently, I was approaching the drive-thru at a favorite fast food place that was happily unoccupied. Zipped in, ordered, and then something fascinating happened: they, very politely, asked me to drive on to the parking area and they would bring my order to me.

There was nobody behind me - I said I could just wait there at the window. But no - if I did, their system would record my actual wait for my lunch and the manager was SCAMMING THE MEASURING SYSTEM.

That guy is probably the president by now.

Mockbusters

This is a term that I'm seeing more and more of these days. It is used to describe those incredibly awful - yet oddly compelling - movies on the Syfy channel that mimic real blockbusters (think The Da Vinci Treasure, Transmorphers, Alien vs. Hunter, Invasion of the Pod People, The Day The Earth Stopped, Almighty Thor, etc.).

These are the movies that make you wonder how the producers ever got the funding to make them other than the draw of their near-to-famous-movie titles. But it is a boring, rainy Friday night, so you'll take a risk with hackneyed scripts, stereotyped characters, unknown actors and the cheesiest of special effects (similar to those you or I could produce on our laptops).

You want to change the channel, but you can't. You long for a commercial break, but know you'll return with a new beer and popcorn for more of the mockbuster. You are ashamed of yourself, but you are entranced, beholding its awfulness.

We'll just call it the *sigh* fy channel.

Vegetarians

Vegans are, to be blunt, idiots. Yes, mankind can survive on grass and the like. Obviously we did for eons, otherwise we would not be here, would we? History is clear: back when we were plant eaters, we had to have much larger stomachs, since it took so much more volume of plant material to get enough energy to live by. As a result, the body blood was racing around the stomach trying to extract as much energy as it could. With a finite amount of blood, very little was left to operate much of a brain.

Then mankind became a meat eater - much more concentrated energy, didn't need all that digestive power, and so the stomach shrank and the brain had a chance to grow into what it is today.

Now, this happened millenia ago, but every time someone brags "I'm a vegan," my mind cannot help envisioning a return to large-stomached pea brains.

They've got the pea-brained bit nailed already.

Dallas

I've been there. I travelled a lot when I was working. Dallas was included.

You may think that that there city is way down south there, hot and filled with cowpokes. Hah! We've all seen the TV show - it's crawling with oil money. It is quite the metropolis. And if you've been watching the news recently, it is completely unequipped for snow and ice. I know - I've experienced it.

I was in some sort of high-rise hotel, and there was an ice storm. The entertainment was wonderful - people would drive into the multilevel parking area - just below me- and hit a solid sheet of ice. You could have set music to the pirouettes and bounces these cars made off each other as they skidded slowly around the parking deck. And they kept on coming.

Hit a car, bounce, hit another, twist, float around, hit a car. It was mesmerizing.

Dallas. Endlessly entertaining.

Much Ado About Nothing

In our new world of "news" 24/7, anything - (and we all know our trusty "news reporters" manufacture most of this stuff) - becomes newsworthy. This has become the modern norm...and the modern curse.

Unlike trusted newsmen of old (Walter Cronkite springs to mind), modern "newscasters" work with a very different objective in mind. For Walter, it was: "I've only got 20 minutes today, what are the most important things people need to know?" For today's crop of newsmen/entertainers it is "I've got 24 HOURS to fill, how do I make all these non-newsworthy things sound important?"

And thus, nothing becomes something.

Volunteer Work

It is my understanding, from the good efforts of my Sainted wife, that there is something called "volunteer work." I ran this concept by a bunch of the guys at a recent Curmudgeon Societé Generale meeting and was greeted with curmudgeonly enthusiasm - more commonly known as derision.

The very idea of working on a volunteer basis (you know - out of the goodness of your heart) completely escapes curmudgeons. Real work was bad enough. At least when we were engaged in it we were mollified by getting paid.

One great thing about being a curmudgeon is our know-it-all attitude and given right to complain enthusiastically about things to like-minded folks. This, of course, is a sacred responsibility and leaves little time for such altruistic endeavors as volunteer work.

Oddly, however, plenty of time for golf. Isn't tipping the caddy altruistic?

Toughs

To most of us, toughs were those idiots who threatened good-hearted souls (such as myself) in high school, amounted to nothing, got an assembly line job right out of high school and then YOU had to manage them as their boss when you got back from college.

Toughs are an entirely different thing in Russia - they run the show. Why, in space exploration alone, they were the toughest of the tough. Here in the good ole U.S. of A., we sent monkeys and things up before we risked humans. Russia? Off you go - if you live, let us know what we could do better.

Russian cosmonauts were simply crazy tough. Landing back on earth? Don't mind that hard bump into actual earth. Us? A soft water splash, thank you very much.

Russians scare me.

Microwave Ovens

I first encountered a microwave oven in college. "What!?" you cry - "they are a kitchen staple!" you cry. Not in the late sixties. Yes, last century. When even curmudgeons were young.

It was magic - it cooked my hot dog in a few seconds! What wizardry was this? Little did I (let's face it, any of us) know. We grew up with stoves, ovens, burners and such. These days, you grab a plate out of the cupboard, throw a few leftovers on it, nuke it and voila! Dinner.

Hah! Not so fast. Not in a household where some china is so old that it isn't "microwaveable." If you microwave it, the glaze will craze.

Who would have such things in their cupboard in this day and age when Corelle and other fine products are at hand? Sainted wives, of course. What guy alive would know such nuances? None, of course.

Into the doghouse I go.

Yikes, More Catalogs

This is the time of year when some one or two hundred million catalogs come zinging through the mail slot in our front door. It is pretty much the only time of year I pity postal workers. As a retired sort, I am often here at home for the endless noise of catalogs plopping to the floor.

And, as a curmudgeon, these things are gold - you will not catch ME actually venturing out amongst the Christmas shopping rabble to wrestle for that last who-gives-a-#@%$ in stock. No, I shop by catalog.

And phone. Sure, you can idiotically type your credit card number into every catalog web site and such, but most places code off of your catalog when you call - "what are the numbers on the back cover in the blue box?" followed by "Is this indeed the curmudgeon?" It is a relaxing, pleasant holiday shopping ritual.

Except for this year. Now the catalog dweebs don't let you start with a human - nooo - you call the number and get an automated answering system rather than some nice person for starts.

Just connect me to a human, dammit.

Parts Unintended

As a curmudgeon, it is my duty to read our town's local rag for the "police blotter." This is where we retired sorts get all our salacious news for gossip.

I recently ran across an arrest report on some poor soul who, in addition to being arrested for like 6 things (fictitious plates, uninsured, improper registration, being an unlicensed driver, driving while his license was suspended AND no name on a commercial vehicle), he was also charged with...wait for it..."riding on parts unintended."

Now, I get the rest of them (this is New Jersey and we love to pile on as many offenses as we can), but the "parts unintended" was a new one on me. There had to be more to the story, and it turned out to be two words left out of the article: "for passengers."

Leave it to NJ to create a violation for people riding on parts unintended for passengers (e.g. pickup truck bed or van area without a seat) just so we can really stick it to someone when we're in a foul mood. Which is often - this IS New Jersey.

Poetry

Let's be honest here - who the hell really needs poetry? We all know its history - it was something our high school english teacher dreamed up just to torture us. Although sometimes poems can be cute (childhood rhymes we still remember) or meaningful (There once was a man from Nantucket...), mostly poems are like babies: they're beautiful to their creator, but to other people they are just irritating.

Back in the days after the Revolution, our nation was busily forming its identity as the complete opposite of evil Britain (driving on the right side of the street, using eating utensils differently, preferring coffee and dumping their precious tea in the drink, etc.). Despite all this revolutionary zeal, we then proceeded to borrow a tradition of theirs and created the stunningly useless office of "Poet Laureate."

What a load of unmitigated crap.

More From NJ drivers

I have commented in the past that driving here in New Jersey is not for the faint of heart. (According to my fantastic record-keeping, I've made pithy observations on this as recently as this past June and as far back as April 2012). Anyway, we're a very densely populated state and many of our roads were laid out with care IN THE 1700s, so it takes special talents to negotiate them today.

Insulting other drivers is commonplace. Frankly, for years even I promptly gave other drivers the finger when they didn't use their directional signal properly. Out of 100s of these "correctional suggestions," less than a handful of drivers actually took umbrage. We've got thick skins here in NJ. So the sign shown here should come as no surprise to any NJ driver - all part of the rich experience of driving here.

A curmudgeon wouldn't have it any other way.

Speedos

In an off-handed remark, I recently mentioned to some fellow Curmudgeon Societé members that I had read an article on this apparently extant fashion issue in a recent Vanity Fair. They looked at me like I had just revealed I came from Mars.

Not because I had mentioned "fashion" or "swim attire," but because I had read a Vanity Fair. After all, Vanity Fair is one of those magazines that devotes the first 100 or so pages to fashion ads - not exactly curmudgeon turf. Nonetheless, it actually has some good articles, even when they touch on things we never knew existed, like men's bathing fashions.

According to the research in this article, no rational American male would be caught dead in a Speedo. Any curmudgeon could have told them this, seeing as how we are a pleasantly overweight lot.

If a curmudgeon were ever to appear in a Speedo, I doubt there is enough Valium on the planet to numb the memory of anyone beholding it.

Nor'easters

As a kid summering in Maine (about as Nor'east as you can get), these were indeed nasty storms. We knew what to do - make sure the boats were tied up securely, hunker down, and wait it out putting a jigsaw puzzle together. No sweat.

But with blithering sorts giving all manner of weather "reports," to our ever panicky public, the message becomes translated as "the sky is falling! the sky is falling!" and all go into hoarding overdrive, as we did on Thanksgiving this year.

Now, I recognize Hurricane Sandy was a hard hit, but Nor'easters have been wary foes for generations. Today, panic ensues (a ratings bonanza for weather people), videos of panic show up on TV and YouTube, and lines form immediately at gas stations. "Hunkering down" is apparently unacceptable - there is shopping to be done.

Curmudgeons? Kings of the hunkering.