You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'gripes' category.
I was really pretty shocked to have read that Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor extraordinaire of long standing at the venerable institution Hahr-Vahrd, was arrested two days ago.
But I wasn’t shocked to have read the context and circumstances of his arrest. Sure, there’s the easy explanation of racism in America (you really will never convince me a white professor would have been treated the same way), but then there’s the even easier explanation that no one seems to be talking about and it is this: the arresting “officer” in the affair is yet another example of a douchebag cop with a Napoleon Complex.
Sure, I have no doubt the cop behaved in a racist manner, but that is an action coupled with a personality trait and that trait being that the he is yet another douchebag cop with a Napoleon Complex.
A professor here at school is a retired cop and relayed to me the different types of people who become police officers:
1. The Fitness Nut: the guy or gal who somehow relives their high school athletic glory days by being a cop. They are all about how they look in the uniform. Being a good or bad cop is strictly a matter of happenstance.
2. The Gun Nut: I think this speaks for itself. The Gun Nut, who is almost always male, is also closely related to the Penis Insecurity Nut.
3. The Righteous Nut: this person has an overwhelming sense of self-importance and truly thinks that the worse they behave towards the general public, the better cop they are.
4. The Drunk Cop: who is actually a pretty okay person who took the job as a way of redemption but at the same time, does not know how to handle the stress better.
Now according to Professor Cop, a police officer can actually be a combination of these varying traits but one is always more dominant than the other. Like the thing about Elvis and the Beatles: you can like both, but you always like one more than the other.
With regards to incident involving Professor Gates, my money is on Cop #3. Then again, I’m not at all familiar with the inner workings of cop-hood and the public perception I have garnered of them over the years is really just boils down to the simplicity of the douchebag cop with the Napoleon Complex scenario.
Wow, long time with no posts. I have no explanation really except to say that after a particularly brutal school term, I needed to a serious mental reboot. While I am working on school project this summer, I am also getting in my fair share of trashy novels and summer sun.
So Sailor actually has most of the summer off, but since he needs to update his Coast Guard license, he is still not in town as he needs to attend classes all over Hell’s Half Acre and take various exams as far away as Virginia.
What this means to me is that not only is Sailor gone, again, but I now have the added benefit of being car-less. As a one car family, Sailor needs it to travel so I am walking or biking my way around Erie…which fairly sucks by the way…
Mostly this is because Erie has, possibly, the worst population of drivers outside of Boston. Pedestrian signals are merely an annoyance and my mere existence in a crosswalk is apparently cause for vehicular manslaughter. A woman actually jumped the curb in her car on 38th street yesterday and nearly took me out in the process. This is because she was texting while driving. After the car came to a stop, she didn’t even bother to look to see if she had struck anyone or anything, she merely resumed texting until I started banging on the hood of her car demanding for her to step out.
There’s also a ass-hat that works at the Veterans Hospital that somehow has the idea that my bike is required to stop and let him turn into the hospital when I have the mother-effin right of way. So everyday has become a game of chicken where I am rushing ahead to avoid getting hit by this jerk-off.
My favorite people are the car load of reprobate teens who thought it amusing to lean out the window and try to push me off my bike. I guess it didn’t occur to them that such an act could quite conceivably kill me, so I didn’t feel too badly about grabbing the kid by the hair and half pulling him out the car window…little bastard…he screamed like a little boy.
But the strangest reaction I receive is from my co-workers. If I bike to work, this is somehow all right, but if I walk, then this is cause for concern. Why didn’t you just call me??
But whether I bike or walk, I encounter the same issues: hostile motorists who do not respect the law or my right of way. Barring that, when I just don’t feel like possibly getting killed and decide on traversing the sidewalk, there’s also the people who leave their kid’s toys everywhere, or who have spectacularly decrepit cement, or terrifically overgrown bushes and trees, or cars who block the sidewalk thus forcing one back into traffic.
So this interesting little experiment continues for the foreseeable future. Sailor return this week, but I am going to continue to walk and ride to work. I like the exercise, I like the time to myself, and maybe I just like the thrill of the evident danger that is cruising the streets of Erie.
Tally to date: Cars – 0, Inmate – 6.
Where the hell are you?
Don’t you know I’m sick of cold?
Where the hell are you??
Someone please explain to me how this Snuggie thing, which is essentially a bathrobe worn backwards, has become a necessary thing in people’s lives…?
Are we, in fact, that dumb?
Sadly, I think, yes.
Ye, gads, the hordes of New Years Resolutionists have yet again descended upon my happy place: the gym. It’s been a slow trickle at the Y this week but I’m expecting the Monsoon to start tonight. More like a Rain of Fashion Terror.
There’s a disconnect with people and how they dress in “public” versus how they dress from the “gym”. There’s a failure to understand that the gym is public and while I’m not suggesting you go in dressing for a business meeting, I am suggesting that clean and appropriate clothing that covers your body should be the order of the day.
Please note that I am not trying to make fun of the NYR’s. They took the first step towards health and that is a good thing I wish to encourage. The following list of fashion offenses is not limited to just NYR’s. I fully admit they occur in the rest population as well. So to all you NYR’s planning on invading what I like to call my State of Grace, here’s a few gym attire tips you might want to consider:
1. BOYS! For the love of all that is holy, can you please refrain from wearing the shirt thong? And don’t pretend you don’t know what I am referring to either. That ratty old t-shirt that you should have thrown out yet somehow decided that cutting massive gaping holes from collar to hip so that your underarm hair is flying full glory when you leak your sweaty man-juice all over the damn place because you were clearly raised in a barn and are incapable of wiping down equipment…oh hell, let’s just be honest about this. You wear that shirt that way because it shows off your nipples and you have this grossly mistaken notion that peekaboo nipples on a man is hot. Which they’re not. It just makes you look like a schlub who doesn’t own an proper shirt. Do us all a favor and leave the torso-loin-cloth to the privacy of your own home.
2. Flip flops? In the gym? Are you mad? The rules requiring members to wear shoes exists for a reason: one, feet stink, especially in gyms; and, two, shoes provide you with a minimal chance to save your toe when someone eventually drops a very heavy weight upon it; and three, they save you a toenail or two when you trip amongst the cardio machines because you weren’t watching where you were going. So don’t go getting all pissy with me when I rat you out to the staff. It’s a liability issue and you need to get with the program.
3. Who exactly are these goons wearing jeans and construction boots into the gym? How do they even move? Granted the boots will better protect you against dumbell drop-age, but they also tend to chew up floor mats and squeak to ear-splitting decibels on floor tiles.
4. The appropriate donning of spandex, like a speedo, is a privilege and not a right. Some people really need to give themselves a good honest look in the mirror prior to venturing into the gym. I am not suggesting that only perfect bodies sport this stuff, I’m just saying that when your fat rolls pop out between your stretchy layers is precisely when nudity becomes less revealing and more modest.
5. Ladies: VPL’s under spandex? Do I really need to elaborate? How about Backside Billboards? Do we need to go there? Let’s just leave it a simple agreement, shall we? You agree not to wear short-shorts with the waistband rolled down below your hips bones and I’ll refrain from jokes about “cracks in the pavement” when you bend over to tie your shoes.
6. Sportbras are exactly that: a bra. Like the guys with the shirt thong, ladies, please, throw a shirt over it. It’s messy when you sweat, embarrassing when I can see your nipple piercings through the fabric, HILARIOUS when you over stretch and nip-slips occur, but inappropriate in a gym with a family environment. Luckily, I don’t have kids, but I would hate to have to explain the abundance of sloppy uni-boob cleavage and tramp-stamps I’ve seen to a 6 year old.
and lastly…
7. Gentlemen, please leave the t-shirts with the foul language and offensive slogans for home where you can drag your knuckles on the ground in private. Believe me when I say this is a personal safety issue. I am the last broad you want “all up in your grill” about this, or at least that’s what the jackass I had words with last summer said when it happened to him.
Please remember that you are in close quarters with others and that gym is jot an extension of your living room. The nasty, holey, ill-fitting clothes you wear to clean house, mow the lawn, and wear in front of the TV while swilling beer and watching the game is fine when it’s just you and those who are supposed to love you regardless.
However, the other strangers and I at the gym are not yours and we will not love you regardless, so please, cover that business up.
If you haven’t heard, a Philadelphia man was shot in a movie theater on Christmas Day for refusing to keep quiet during the film.
While I don’t approve of the violence, I certainly understand the impulse that drove the shooter to his actions. Seriously, I get this. Total no brainer. People, in general, have become such complete barbarians in public, I’m more surprised that incidents like these doesn’t happen everyday.
For instance, I can not remember the last the time I saw a movie that wasn’t interupted with cell phones, people talking, or people getting up out of their seats every few minutes.
Libraries apparently have become the place to hang out with your teenage pals have a raucous good time.
Grocery shopping with your four sullen teenagers who skulk about, hogging lanes, not watching where they’re going, and have zero sense of their spatial relations, or, shopping with your screaming child in an SUV-styled grocery cart that crash into eneryone’s shins, apparently is now the accepted norm.
Noisy, crying, ill-behaved children in nice restaurants alongside the people who have no voice control or no sense of discretion sitting at the next table? Go ahead, complain, I dare you. Be forewarned that you will be viewed as the problem in that scenario,
Having to listen to other people’s loud and inconsequential phone conversations every damn place you go is now required.
Society’s utter lack of shame, or the absence of the implementation of shame as a social control, has removed any refuge from such boorish behavior. There is is simply no one place a person can go anymore and expect that rules of common courtesy be adhered to and I can easily see how the noise and constant harangue of these intrusions can cause someone to snap as it did in that movie theater.
How do you enforce the concept of common courtesy or appropriate behavioral norms? I can just see the ridiculous backlash heading this way in the form of movie theaters installing security to protect against violence as opposed to simply asking rude customers to shut the hell up. However, maybe starting with a few armed guards in movie theaters to ensure the domestic peace and quiet might not be such a bad idea.
Atheists have an interesting gig come holiday season. Thanksgiving is okay and obviously New Years doesn’t bother me, but it is exceptionally tough to navigate Christmas.
I didn’t believe in a god from a very young age and this carried over into any secular sense of Christmas as well. If I didn’t believe in an Almighty traffic cop in the sky, you sure as hell weren’t going to get me to believe in a red-suited fat man popping down the chimney. I remember my dad having a talk with me when I was six asking me to keep my opinions to myself so as not to ruin the holiday for my older siblings.
And so it has gone. I suffer in silence every year through the holiday I hate the most.
Not that there weren’t parts of it I enjoyed. We used to sit around the Christmas tree with my dad listening to the Mormon Tabernacle choir on the stereo with the all the lights off just talking about whatever. I really could have done without the presents. Receiving them has always embarassed me. Just sitting like that, around the tree, with the TV off, drinking mother’s lethal eggnog was enough and I looked forward to that every year.
I liked walking around the neighborhood at night looking at the lighted houses. The tackier the decorations, the better I say. Bring me back the 1970’s anytime. And I love Solstice. Always have. Something about celebrating the sun standing still and the longest night of the year has always appealed to me.
But as a married adult, I am more trapped by all this holiday hooplah than ever. Sailor and I don’t put up lights, we don’t have a tree, and we don’t send out cards. But Sailor’s family is all into this nonsense and they “tolerate” my atheism (although not a single damn one of them goes to church) so long as I play nice through what I believe is hipocritcal nonsense. I’m expected to give and receive the knick-knack junk I whole heartedly detest, to put in the time on Giftmas Eve and Day and to attend holiday parties with the same people I see week after week. And I do it. Every damn year. Because I love Sailor and these tribal rituals are deemed somehow necessary in his family’s life.
But here’s the thing, I would actually play ball and cease being so pissy about all of this any of them actually believed in any of this either.
Sailor’s family do what they do only because it has been so deeply programmed into them as the socially appropriate response to the season. And that’s crap. I shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about wanting to ignore it all for simply enabling their bad habit.
I forgive it in my own parents because they do go to church. They do actually believe in all of this. Wholeheartedly. And despite our differences in philosophy, their staunch belief makes all this activity easier to deal with.
But, for better or worse, I also belong to Sailor’s tribe now and, per usual, I am making nice.
I try to focus on the one year where I got to do what I wanted. December 25th, 2004, Sailor and I, back in Maine, out on the island. We watched all 13 hours of the Lord of the Rings extended dvd’s along with a quite few appendices. We stopped only for soup, eggnog, and the brief run with the puppy dog through snow in the cemetery next door.
Best day ever. My happy place. You can be sure I’ll be focusing on that during the next holiday party.
I’m a sucker for a mystery. Not as in novels, I actually don’t care for the genre in literature. And mystery movies don’t exactly do it for me either. It’s more akin to simply enjoying a story that does not have an end. Or is missing it’s midddle. Just enough so you don’t have all the facts and are left wanting for more.
Whether it’s Amelia Earhart, raining frogs, Raoul Wallenberg, the Black Dahlia, The Mary Celeste, or Jack the Ripper, I frantically beg that people don’t find them, don’t solve them, don’t examine them, and in general just leave the story the hell alone! I like my mysteries intact.
So it is with anticipation that I hope no one comes forward to solve this interesting case of a perfectly functioning piano left in the woods off Cape Cod. It’s a little romantic, a little creepy, definitely strange, and a perfect late fall mystery for me to ponder.
So I voted this morning. The lines were non existent, the parking was ample, plenty of people were on hand, but yet it still managed to take more time than it should have.
The problems begin with the location. I voted at Trinity Lutheran Church on 38th Street, which just felt wrong. Plain wrong. But aside from issues regarding the separation of Church and State, there were no signs – anywhere – telling you that this was the place, this is where you enter, or this is the room to where you go to vote.
There was ample room for the bake sale the church decided to have, but you could not turn around in the room where the actual voting takes place. The ladies running the show (and don’t get me wrong here, I have the highest respect for poll workers) where at best unorganized and discombobulated.
No matter. I voted. Made my voice heard. And then got the hell out of there.
With regards to the after work voters though, I can see this process getting long and ugly.
If you want to explain the effed-up spectacle that is American Politics to a Viking, it is best explained via the Prose Edda, a collection of poetry about Norse Mythology.
In one particular understanding fo the world, there is the World Tree, Yggdrassil, which is inhabited by several beings: Veðrfölnir, a hawk residing at the top of the tree, and Níðhöggr, a dragon who resides at the bottom eating the roots.
The most interesting character residing there however, is Ratatosk, a red squirrel whose sole job is to ferry insults between Veðrfölnir and Níðhöggr and spread gossip.
So as we enter the final two weeks of this election season, and tempers flare hotter, and the attack ads get nastier, I think it is safe to assume that despite whomever one takes for being either the hawk or the dragon in this election, I think we can all agree who is Ratatosk.
I’ve never been more thankful to not have the TV hooked up.
