This is also not a political post …

I had no plans to follow up that other post, but – dear lord, it’s only the middle of September and I’m already about to go mad. By the beginning of November these endless, mindless commercials will have me gibbering and strait-jacketed.

New Linda McMahon commercial (radio, and thus unavoidable, God help me): “Linda’s tax cuts only affect the middle class – her own taxes would not change at all.”

So what is Linda supposed to be – upper class?

In a pig’s eye. She’s rich. There is no class there.

Also, when the presidential candidates suspended their campaigns out of deference to the remembrance of September 11, McMahon, if anything, stepped up her efforts. I don’t recall hearing or seeing an ad from her opponent, but she demonstrated a marked lack of respect for the day by bulling right on with her endless spew of wasted money. I wrote to her website asking why; somehow I’m not surprised I didn’t get an answer. At least they’re not spamming my email address.

Is it election day yet?

 

This is not a political post

It really isn’t about politics. It’s more about the basic quality of life in an election cycle, and about common sense and WTFery and things like that.

Ever since the last election cycle, the two dirtiest words in my household have been “Linda McMahon”. That name is enough to make my ordinarily very mild mother’s eyes blaze. It’s not because McMahon’s a Republican – no one in my family has ever been very political, and my one venture into giving a damn did not end well on a personal level; that period was the death knell for any optimism and eagerness that was left alive in me. I don’t care anymore. We don’t care what McMahon’s politics are; I couldn’t even tell you what her campaign promises are (we mute every commercial possible, and when it’s not possible tune them out). At this point she could be running a save-the-puppies campaign and I wouldn’t vote for her if you paid me.

Here’s the thing: she’s rich as Croesus. Now, I admit it: that’s automatically a black mark against a person in my book, to remain a negative unless mitigating factors can be presented. (I admit it freely – it’s my one prejudice.) Mitigating factors can include: a hell of a lot of hard work to earn the money. An attitude showing a marked lack of rubbing anyone’s face in it. A dedication to using said money to help others.

McMahon’s commercials usually aim at factor #1: Linda worked so very hard to get where she is! Okay. And in what field did she work?

Professional wrestling.

Words cannot express the horror with which that fills me.

But – thank God – she is no longer wrestling (as far as I know), and supposedly this sordid past brought jobs to the state back in the day, so, fine. I can get over it – even the little snippet an opponent once brought out of her on all fours and barking like a dog in the ring.

What negates any positive factors that do or could ever exist for this woman is her financial aggressiveness toward getting the job of senator for this state. In the last campaign, she bragged that she was willing to spend $50 million of her own money on the election. I believe the final number was bigger than that. That right there? Goes against possible mitigating factor #2: it is rubbing her money in the face of everyone with less, and basically admitting to making a damned good attempt at buying a senate seat.

What did she get for her money?

She didn’t get the job.

Instead, what she bought was the undying loathing of every member of my family (and not a few others I’ve spoken to). Why? Because she’s bloody everywhere. Every television and radio commercial break – since APRIL – has included a McMahon commercial. Her (already unpleasant) voice has become more and more (and MORE) irritating as time has passed. She has been advertised in more different commercials than Coca Cola – more even than Viagra and its counterparts. That’s probably the biggest part of what all that money bought her, for the last election; I don’t think she’s bragged about what she’s shelling out for this one.

Some of the rest went to making hers a multi-media campaign of aggravation. I am a registered independent (because I find both parties equally repugnant and equally nothing I want to be associated with). My mother is a registered Democrat. So I would absolutely love an explanation as to why we have received not only mailings but telephone calls – plural – from the McMahon campaign.

Fifty million dollars … she’s spent more than twice that by now, is my guess. A hundred mill would buy a lot of textbooks for struggling school systems, or – oh, I don’t know, food for people who don’t have any. (See #3, above.) For it to be pissed away on such garbage as this (probably fruitless, or so I pray) campaign makes me literally physically ill.

Maybe the media consultants and those who produce the commercials have been counted into those 600 jobs she keeps boasting about.

Speaking of prompting – what’s prompted me to dash off this post is yet another irritation of those radio ads I can’t avoid: she is constantly berating those “career politicians” who haven’t miraculously fixed the world yet. And every single time I wonder: why is it so awful to be a “career politician” but not what she has become – a career politician-wannabe?

———————————————————————–

What I said over two years ago still stands, too…

 

Anne of Avonlea — and not (episode 4)

I was going to go on as usual and write a post about the remainder of the BBC Anne of Avonlea, but … there’s too much.  (I don’t even have the heart to make that a Princess Bride reference.)  My usual posts are ridiculously long, and this would have been a tome. So I’ll break it up. I’m actually a little angry about this, so this is going to be fun.

What, exactly, happens to people when they try to adapt the Anne books to the screen? Is there some buried trigger in the work, some booby-trap that is sprung when someone says “I think I’ll make a screenplay of that”, causing some drastic change to their brain chemistry? I’ve gone on at length about Kevin Sullivan, and won’t go there again – the post is here – except to say that Anne of Green Gables was beautiful. Go rent it.  Seriously, it’s wonderful.  Just stop there – really, do.  Because then Sullivan lost his mind – it’s as though he took all the words to all the books after Green Gables, put them in a big vat, and stuck an immersion blender into the thing.  It started out as a disruption to the space-time continuum of Avonlea – people disappeared, other people spoke their words, time compressed in one place and expanded in another.  But it wasn’t so bad at first.  And then someone must have killed a butterfly in one of those space-time hiccups, because it all went kaflooey.

The BBC version is in six parts; I talked about the first half over here, and while there were redeeming qualities, the detractions were many and hard to get over. Still, I hate leaving something unfinished… and I really do like Nicholas Lyndhurst’s Davy and Barbara Hamilton’s Marilla. And I wanted to see how they handled the rest. I want to see Patty’s Place and Phil and Gog and Magog as they move on to Anne of the Island.

Oops.

Don’t do it. Seriously. Watch the first three episodes if you’re in a forgiving mood, the first disc, but if you care at all about Anne – or Miss Lavendar - don’t do this to yourself. I think this might actually be worse than the Sullivan travesty; that left my Miss Lavendar out entirely. Maybe watch the last two episodes – but not #4, and – seriously – turn off the last episode when Anne is standing at the window. Trust me on this.

They polish off Anne of Avonlea in episode four, pretty much. Oh, look, there’s Paul’s father – and – he … looks familiar. He looks like … Oh. You know those Worlds Collide moments I talk about, especially with BBC programs? Stephen Irving is played by Anthony Ainley. Anthony Ainley, who has been in my consciousness for more years than I care to think about as the Master on Doctor Who … He was the third to play the role, though he was the first one I encountered, and like his liveslong adversary the Doctor, your first is the one who means the most to you… He killed Nyssa’s father. He was, in all seriousness, one of my early influences to help define what evil is.

And here he is playing Paul Irving’s father. Oh my stars and garters.

I’ll come back to that. Miss Lavendar is getting a post all to herself.

There are good things in the mini-series, even a few which are not of the book: Mrs. Morgan was lovely. I liked the line “They must think I’m ravin’ mad or a secret drinker!” I still love Davy, and Marilla. They have some scenes, particularly together, which are not LMM, and which still work nicely.  Some full transcriptions are on the TV Quotes Page, so as to try to keep this a little shorter, but:  Davy asks Marilla why she never married, and tells her Milty Boulter’s pa said men were crazy to have left her on the shelf. Marilla’s reply, especially in the astringent tone of voice Barbara Hamilton excels at, is beautiful: “Did he by any chance mention the nature of this mass insanity among menfolk that has resulted in me being left on the shelf?” It’s actually an impressive scene. The upshot is that Davy wants a piece of plum cake. He also really does want to know why Marilla’s not married, but he figures he can talk his way into a piece of that plum cake… The whole scene uses the passage from the book – here, and scroll down to L.M. Montgomery – up to and including the chickens, uses it to its own ends, and does a nice job.

So, good on ‘em for that; I am actually quite fond of that scene, and one or two others.  But.

The affair of the willow pattern plate was turned into something bizarre involving Charlie Sloane and, of all people, Mrs. Blewitt, who began casting aspersions on Anne’s character because she’s an orphan.  Paul Irving is brought in again to have tea with Miss Lavendar – and is made to look even worse than before.  This is a child who a) did not come from America, b) is frequently beaten up in school, and c) is in big trouble when he sees his father again.  I think I’ll have to have a Paul post as well.

The scene of Anne’s First Proposal was a jagged, ill-fitting combination of good and bad.  Of course, it’s placed entirely wrong; here it’s in the midst of the Anne of Avonlea content, when it didn’t actually happen till Chapter 8 of Anne of the Island.  And of course it wasn’t supposed to be Ruby Gillis bringing her brother Billy over to … ew.  What they were alluding to, I suppose, was in a way better and in a way worse for Anne than what they produced here; it was supposed to be Jane proposing on behalf of her brother Billy while staying the night at Green Gables.  This had its humor – Billy: “You were real loony!  Real loony!!”  Anne: “I still am.  I’m not normal at all.” – and her reaction to his trying to kiss her, but it was creepy - ”Show her the whip!  That’ll calm her!” and … well:

“When you first come here I used to spy on you … when you weren’t lookin’.  I used to hide behind your hut. [hut??] You useta lean outa the window and talk to the tree there.”

“Ew” doesn’t quite cover it.  This one little speech bothers me almost as much as the massive character violations elsewhere in the series, because I know Anne.  Being told … that … knowing that this oily, earthbound creature was sneaking about and covertly watching her – and simultaneously mocking her and, I suppose, in his own nasty way, admiring her – would retroactively taint all of the beautiful moments of her childhood, and her communions with the Snow Queen; it would have destroyed something beautiful.  It’s another reason I question the sanity of the screenwriter here.   What a terrible thing to do to Anne.

One odd thing which may have been part of the book but wasn’t as obvious was the benefits arising from deaths.  Davy and Dora’s uncle dies, and that means that Anne and Marilla can keep them, to the joy of all.  Thomas Lynde dies, and that sends Rachel to live at Green Gables and allows Anne to go to college – to the joy of all.  It’s … I used “creepy” already, didn’t I?

I need to compare the book and the film in regards to another scene, and – well, let’s see if you can spot the difference.

Book:

There was more romance in the world than that which had fallen to the share of the middle-aged lovers of the stone house. Anne stumbled suddenly on it one evening when she went over to Orchard Slope by the wood cut and came out into the Barry garden. Diana Barry and Fred Wright were standing together under the big willow. Diana was leaning against the gray trunk, her lashes cast down on very crimson cheeks. One hand was held by Fred, who stood with his face bent toward her, stammering something in low earnest tones. There were no other people in the world except their two selves at that magic moment; so neither of them saw Anne, who, after one dazed glance of comprehension, turned and sped noiselessly back through the spruce wood, never stopping till she gained her own gable room, where she sat breathlessly down by her window and tried to collect her scattered wits.

“Diana and Fred are in love with each other,” she gasped. “Oh, it does seem so … so … so hopelessly grown up.”

… Diana came to Green Gables the next evening, a pensive, shy young lady, and told Anne the whole story in the dusky seclusion of the east gable. Both girls cried and kissed and laughed.

BBC:

Having been apprised of Diana’s engagement in a set of scenes presented like a bad attempt at madcap comedy, filled with interruptions, and during which she managed to mortally offend Diana by saying aloud worse than what Book Anne privately thought in her weaker moments and would have died before saying (and which was foolish in several ways – as if Anne would not have seen her ring immediately), Anne is strolling, carefree, through the woods when she comes to a scene the viewer has already been treated to: by a lake (Barry’s Pond? Never the Lake of Shining Waters) Diana and Fred are lying together among the ferns, kissing. The actual dialogue:

Diana: Oh, Fred!
Fred: Oh, Diana!
Me: Oh, my God!

I want to pull one word in particular out of each scene description, one word which makes all the difference in the world:
Book: standing together
BBC: lying together

Never, never, ever, to save their immortal souls, would any main character of LMM be found lying in the woods (or anywhere else) making out. Ever. To paraphrase Amanda in Lost in Austen: “Hear that sound, George? ‘Lurrgh’? That’s Lucy Maude Montgomery spinning in her grave like a cat in a tumble dryer.” I came within half an inch of walking out of STV because of extreme character violations. This … this would have had the same effect in a theatre. This is not only character violation, put together with the Miss Lavendar/Stephen Irving scene (which I’ll come back to) and what they did to Gilbert (ditto) it goes against just about everything the books are about.

My frequent refrain with adaptations is “I understand why changes must be made to the original material, but”.  In this case, I understand why some of the changes were made; if I dug into it I might be able to make sense of the messing about of the timeline, which after all doesn’t trouble me too much.  It doesn’t hurt the characters, and the characters are the most important aspect of L.M. Montgomery’s books.  The reason the books have remained known and loved for over a century is that there is a sweetness to them which is easily mocked, easily sullied, and hard to capture; I can’t compare with LMM in descriptive language, but here’s my attempt: there is a gentleness in the books, coupled with an intelligent, clear-sighted humor, occasionally self-deprecating but never mocking.

With the Kevin Sullivan version I was angry because he treated the first book with great respect, and then decided he could do so very much better than the rest of the series and changed everything. I think this is actually, bizarrely worse: they kept the plot details much as they are in the book (though not necessarily in the right order), but they put a spin, an inflection on everything – everything - that reminds me of Mordor’s influence on Middle-earth.

 

Aggravations: addendum IV

Driving: (1.h) Train tracks. People, they aren’t like they used to be. I remember (she said, dating herself) when I first started driving the tracks that crossed Rte. 22, for example, were completely above street level, so a car had to bump over metal ties several inches high. For quite a long time now, though, every set of train tracks I’ve been over has had the road built up around it so that it’s a nothing compared to what it used to be. I wouldn’t recommend whipping over tracks at 80 mph, but going the speed limit isn’t going to bottom out your car or kill your suspension. I generally just take my foot off the gas a minute before getting to tracks. I’ve hit potholes that were worse than train tracks. There is no reason, person I was behind this morning, to slow down to eight miles per hour to go over the tracks. None. At all. Seriously. Especially since you were in an SUV, with 4WD.

1.i) Left turns, redux. Why is it, when someone is taking a left from a parking lot or side road or whatever, and they see me coming, that THAT’s when they need to make their turn. I can’t count how many times in just the past year it’s happened that someone zips out in front of me – either to get in front of me or to cross the lane in front of me … even though there was about a half-mile of clear road behind me. Literally. I can’t count how many times in the last year – but it was three times yesterday. Wait – Perhaps my car has spontaneously developed a cloaking device, and they haven’t been seeing my LARGE WHITE CAR – cool.

9) Email: Why is it that when someone emails me they can’t manage to spell my name right? I don’t mind when it’s the first written contact – someone I’ve only ever spoken to writing an email for the first time. My work email after all is first initiallast name, so that’s fine (though it would be courteous to ask how it’s spelled, since both my first and last names have at least three common spellings). It’s when I’ve written someone and they’re replying that I don’t get it, and where it irks me. I didn’t spell my name wrong when I signed the email – why should you when you replied to it?

Like so many of my random aggros, it’s something that could be avoided by taking, literally, a second – here, to look at the signature. I’m not bothering with things like “spam” and “salesmen who won’t take no for an answer” – those are unfortunate facts of life in these United States which won’t go away unless everyone makes a concerted effort. Which everyone won’t. But everyone should.

Oh, that reminds me:

10) Grammar, spelling, and vocabulary: “Literally”. “Literally” means not figuratively, “actually true and not exaggerated”. If you say “I was literally freezing”, you’d better mean your core body temperature was somewhere around 32 Fahrenheit – because if you don’t, you must literally be an idiot (having an IQ of under 25). I don’t understand how this became an adverb used for emphasis. Well, no, I suppose I, sadly, do understand; it’s arisen through fools who think they know what a word means and use it thinking it will make them sound more smarter. The example I saw on Word was “He had literally thousands of books in his home.” If you say this and “he” has 299 books, it’s incorrect. Find another adverb.

I can’t believe this is the first English language usage aggravation I’ve listed. I could go on for days and pages on this subject alone.

11) Lawn care. Our lawn is, er, unkempt, for which I offer an almost sincere apology to our neighbors. I should say here that I sympathize strongly with Robert Fulghum’s lawn care philosophy: let it be as it was meant to be. So:

- – a) First of all, why are you spending thousands of dollars on … grass? The stuff you’re trying so hard to keep green out there was not, in many cases, meant to grow where you’re trying to grow it. It’s not so bad, I don’t think, here in the east; at least some of the grass is indigenous. But not all. There’s a lot of seed that is either imported from another part of the country – or world – where the grass is literally (really, literally) greener, which does not belong in this climate. Why are you torturing it like this? From what I understand, the practice of keeping a smooth green lawn originated in England – but the thing is, the English get rain about five out of every ten days. (According to the CIA WOrld Factbook, “more than one-half of the days are overcast”.) The stuff that grows in English yards is – or was – naturally occurring, and not very hard to keep green. (This is also one reason the English are famous gardeners.) (Also, those who were originally concerned with having lawns there had servants to take care of them.) Most of America is not like that. And when you start getting further west and start talking about these fools that plant lawns in the desert and then ignore water rationing to keep them up, I get a murderous light in my eye. Why would you *do* this? Why is it so very important to the American psyche to have a nice lawn, specifically of green grass, whether it’s what should be growing there or not?

- – - a.1) And if you are going to go against nature and spend tons of money and water on your stupid lawn, why would you go against common sense and the advice of experts and put your sprinkler on in the middle of the afternoon? Watering is supposed to be done early in the morning or late in the evening, when the sun is not beating down and drying away half of what you’re sprinkling out. If I know this, simply from having heard it on the news, then the morons who care about such things certainly should know about it. And, Toyota dealer on Rte 5? We were under near-drought conditions, possibly still in effect, and the state government was asking that lawns not be watered every day. So why are you?

- – b) Lawn care services. Where to begin …

- – - 1) Beginning with when they begin. This morning the idiots hired by the morons across the street started at approximately 7:02 AM. Now, I’m up anyway. I have no choice. HAD I a choice, though – if, say, I was able to write for a living and make my own hours – - and WHEN I have a choice, on Fridays and Saturdays, I’m up late. If I just went to bed at two or three, which is my choice and my right, I am not going to be happy when some idiot starts mowing his lawn at 7:03. Also, school just got out. I know my niece is expecting to be able to – and looking forward to being able to sleep in. She’s earned it for a while – she just graduated, she doesn’t have a full-time job yet: she’s in the sweet spot after high school and before college and Real Life, and it will never come again (until she retires). Let her sleep in, for God’s sake. WHY do you have to commit this nonsense under innocent people’s windows at 7:03 in the morning?

- – - 2) Trailers. Moron who wants their lawn green and pretty at whatever cost (and it’s prohibitive, at least in my book) hires service. Service shows up one or two or five mornings per week, and has implements beyond count, requiring a trailer. Said trailer is wider than the average car. Said trailer is dumped on the side of the road – which is usually a residential road, which is usually wide enough for the traffic it gets and no more. Thus, said trailer blocks nearly half the road – especially when ever-so-helpful lawn care servicer decides that cones are required around the trailer to provide extra cushion – or parks a couple of feet out from the curb. Roads, as I believe I may have pointed out in other posts, are for cars. Not to be blocked.

- – - 3) The other side of the profession: snow removal. Really, you have a truck. You have a plow attached to said truck. Someone asks you to come clear their driveway. You come, you lower the plow, you push the snow – the truck doing 99% of the work – you maybe make another pass to clear a little further. If you’re conscientious you might tidy it up a bit, or come back later to clear away what the town plows have left from clearing the street. All in all, though, it’s what? Twenty minutes or so? Half an hour if you come back? And the guy we’ve been forced to rely on (because my back won’t do shoveling) charges what is, I hear, a reasonable rate: $25 a trip. Are you kidding me? For a half hour’s “work”, you’re charging almost twice the hourly wage I’ve made most of my life in an office, four or more times what I used to make in retail? No. Sorry. I find that obscene. If it was some guy out on his own two boots with a shovel in his hands digging out that driveway – maybe. But some jerk in a truck who will probably dig up the grass along the edges and destroy part of the curb, and not even get that done before I have to leave for work? No. I cannot do it. It goes against everything I believe in. Seriously.

Especially because the Evil Office Manager I used to work with – not that one, the other one – had a husband who did lawn care in the summer and snow removal in the winter. And every time it snowed, and I would show up at work aggravated, shaken, and/or dissheveled because I was running late because I couldn’t get out of the driveway, and because I risked my life on the highway to get there (never being able to forget the time I lost control of the car and slid gracefully across three lanes, then back again the other way – or the time on the way home that the back window filled up with snow within a few minutes of having pulled out of the driveway and most of the commute home was spent peering through what there was clear of the windshield, praying, and swearing), and would be sitting there hyperventilating and knowing there was a drive home still to manage – and there she would be, having been dropped off by said husband in his truck, chortling (literally) (and I do mean literally) because “Tom always says a snowstorm is money falling from the sky!” Given what I was making on that job, and given that raises were rare as rocs’ eggs, I thought that was a little insensitive.

 

Aggravations: addendum III

8. Schoolbuses

At risk of sounding like Bill Cosby (uphill, both ways, five miles in the snow with no shoes), why exactly is it that schoolbuses have to stop at Every. Single. House? Truly, I understand that kids are stupid – er, ignorant, and don’t look both ways and are in all ways in need of supervision, but when I was a kid we had one bus stop at the corner for all the kids in the immediate neighborhood. I was lucky in that it was right across the street from my house, but all the kids in a block’s radius gathered there. They walked a tenth of a mile to the bus stop every morning. If it was raining, they left it to the last minute and brought an umbrella. The bus did not stop at #26 then #30 then #34 then around the corner to #80 and #86. Because the bus stop was across from our house, Mom watched out the window, or came out; other parents as they were available did the same to make sure everybody was where they were supposed to be. Am I to believe that the kids today are less capable of walking a tenth of a mile (well, with obesity rates what they are, that may be so) and navigating to a spot within sight of their own homes? Shouldn’t they be *taught* to look both ways and not to talk to any strangers en route? After there was an accident in which a kindergarten classmate of mine was killed, they installed bus monitors on all buses; the girl had run back into the street to pick up a piece of paper she had dropped and was hit by a car; the monitor was there to ensure that didn’t happen. Makes sense – again, adult supervision needed. While I hate it, I can’t argue with the policy of a bus’s flashing lights and the stop sign that pops out at every stop and no one is allowed to pass the thing while it’s stopped; it makes sense. And I’m not saying kids should have to walk more than a couple of minutes, or ever go out of sight of their house – it would be too easy for a passing car to scoop up some child who walked the same way unsupervised every day. What I am saying is that it’s pure idiocy for a schoolbus to stop at two houses in a row, then skip one and stop again, then skip three and stop again. Pick the one in the middle and make all the kids gather there. Am I also to believe that parents are so unwilling to take turns shepherding them? That doesn’t seem to be the case; at most of the stops at which I’ve had the misfortune to witness pickups, there was an adult waiting with the child(ren).

And yes, I’m writing this because I left two minutes late this morning and got caught behind the &^#! bus. It’s intensely frustrating. Especially when all of the kids meander from their house at the last second, clamber aboard, and make their way to the very back – anything to make the whole transaction take longer. May every one of them be daily stuck behind schoolbuses when they learn to drive.

 

Aggravations, addendum II

As I think of them, clearly – in other words, as people do them.

1.f) Bikes. I know, I know, they’re wonderful – they’re exercise, and they’re green, and we should all share the road, kumbaya. But oh how I hate bikers. I won’t even touch the outfits (neon spandex and foolish looking helmets – really? You’re going to need that aerodynamic edge on your journey up Route 5?) (OK, so I touched). Most roads weren’t built for sharing. Look, Lance, I’m doing my best here to stay away from you and get past you, but if you insist on doing stupid things – like riding five feet away from the curb and swerving and suddenly deciding that because you’re supposed to obey the same laws as a car you also have the security of a car – there often isn’t anywhere for me to go to avoid you. And if it comes to a conflict between you on a bike and me in my car, you’re going to lose, and if you force me to kill you because you couldn’t find a more appropriate place to ride I’m going to be really upset. Yesterday I passed one fool who was wobbling about a good bit (and *no* helmet – isn’t there a helmet law? Not that it matters?) – and then a minute later passed another one, riding toward me on the same side of the road. On the wrong side of the road. Meaning that in a few minutes they were going to meet, and someone would have to give way – - into traffic. Always fun. I really don’t want to talk about kids on bikes – they scare the hell out of me.

1.g) I can’t believe I forgot this one: GET OFF MY BUMPER. Unless I’m crawling or being stupid, there is no reason in the world for you to be so close to me I can’t see your *&#! headlights. Don’t tempt me to stand on the brakes. I have an old car and my insurance is paid up.

I don’t know if there are enough letters in the alphabet for the driving list.

 

Aggravation addendum I

7) Rudeness of a very specific variety, which has something in common with everything else I claimed about: thoughtlessness. People just don’t think – or don’t care. I just had to walk out to the mailbox, which is partway across the parking lot from the office. We’re in an industrial park with a number of other businesses. There were two men standing having a conversation outside one of them about as far from the mailbox in the opposite direction as this office – that is to say, one was talking, animatedly, while the other nodded. The one talking sounded kind of annoyed – not angry, not outraged, just maybe annoyed; I couldn’t hear exactly what he was talking about, nor did I care to – except that I couldn’t avoid hearing “fucking” used at least eight times adverbially.

If I get cut off or nearly run off the road, I readily admit that I make good use of the word, generally as an adjective. But that’s alone in my car, and in a temper. It’s not a word to be used in public. And yet I was exposed to that conversation for what, two minutes? Eight times. I’ve been a little shocked before at how little people think about what they’re saying in public -outside where anyone can hear like these guys (there’s a kids’ gymnastics school right across the way – if I could hear him, so could anyone coming in or out), or in a restaurant, or the grocery store, or in an office, and in “outside voices”; I’ve mentioned how Evil Ex-boss’ favorite exclamation was “Horseshit!” He also was known to drop the f-bomb pretty frequently – well, consider the source). But I’ve had people sitting ten feet from me in an office either let it slip in conversation in front of me (on the phone, usually) – or in conversation with me, and I’m always foolishly surprised. Are there no barriers at all anymore about what is and isn’t appropriate?

It’s one of the reasons that historical fiction is both so quaint and so refreshing – at any time fifty years ago or greater, any man considering himself any level of gentleman would have chewed off his hand before being caught using a four-letter Anglo-Saxonism where a woman could hear. Now very, very few men seem to consider themselves gentlemen – I think most would laugh if the concept was mentioned to them.

It’s not so much that I want special consideration because I’m female – that’s stupid. I want special consideration because, in some of the instances I’ve mentioned, I’m a stranger and don’t want to hear it, and in other cases I’m a coworker or casual acquaintance, and a little more formality – simple politeness – is called for. Or used to be.

If I wasn’t at work with a pile of things to do waiting I could relate this to manner of dress. I touched on it incidentally on Walk in the Dust in my post about Leave Her to Heaven: Cornel Wilde spends a slightly ridiculous amount of time in a suit and tie. But the ridiculousness of it is as seen from 2010. In 1945, it was probably just about right. If the movie were remade today, he’d probably be wearing ripped jeans and a graphic t-shirt. Hat? Baseball, maybe. There is, really, sometimes something to be said for ridiculous conventionality…

 

Random aggravations

Herein I vent on a variety of subjects, because I’m cranky and I want to. These are the things that make my eyes widen, and cause me to wonder – sometimes aloud, and profanely – what, if anything, people were thinking.

1) Driving: there’s a lot to vent about here, but I’ll try to keep it short. (I know – me, keeping it short?? Wonder of wonders.)

…a) If you’re in a lane that’s going to endin a few hundred yards, and I’m in the one that isn’t – in other words, I’m not being stupid – don’t try to fly past me and get in front of me. My response to your idiocy will be to catch up to the car in front of me and ignore you. Because you’re an idiot and should have merged over several minutes ago – or if you’ve driven this road more than twice before you should have known the lane was going away and not been in it in the first place.

…b) Turn. Your. Damn. Lights. On. If it’s raining, or it’s getting near dusk, or even if there are just a lot of trees along the road, turn them on. You may be the center of your own stupid universe, but, especially if your stupid vehicle is dark, it’s hard to see in some situations. Just do it.

…c) Use your signals. If you are stupid enough to violate a., but you signal – thereby *asking* to cut in front of me – I might let you. (Robin Hood quote: “Ask me nicely.”) And if you’re turning, there shouldn’t be any question – especially if you’re in front of me and decide you need to go left. If you come to a stop in the middle of the road for no apparent reason, I am going to blow my horn, because you’re an idiot. Also, signal if you’re planning to turn left at a light, particularly if there are two lanes, and most particularly if there isn’t a left turn arrow – so that I will not be stuck behind your stupid non-signalling … back end. Again, you may be the center of your own moronic universe, but I – thanks be to God – can’t read your excuse for a mind. Signal. It might save your worthless life someday.

…d) Conversely, if you signal a turn and then change your mind and don’t turn after all (or it’s a shallow turn), make sure the signal goes off, ‘kay? I remember a comedian (though not who it was) doing a riff on this years ago, mentioning that that clicking noise you hear isn’t just the rattling of your pea brain in your otherwise empty skull – it’s connected to that little blinking arrow on your dashboard. This isn’t as egregious an error as the others, because at least it offers some amusement on an otherwise grim drive – it is slightly funny to see some fool turn right after having signalled a left turn for the last mile – but it can also be truly irritating: WHEN are you going to turn?? Or are you? Ever?

A subsection of d) (d.1) is the moron who doesn’t know quite where he’s going, but knows it’s on the left here somewhere, so he crawls along at fifteen miles per hour, ideally with that signal blinking away. If you don’t know what you’re doing, pull the hell over – especially if I’m not the only one behind you. Get out of the way, let the rest of us get on with our lives, and *then* figure out where you’re supposed to be.

…e) Two words: Cell phones. I hate them anyway, but folks, in one of a long line of legislations that try to enforce common sense, it’s illegal to use a cell phone in a moving vehicle in Connecticut. If I see you using your phone, I hate you.

… …e.1) One word: texting. Text, and die. Just don’t take me, or any other innocent, with you.
Those are the big ones in this category for the moment. I’m sure others will come to me. Probably after I get on and off the road again.

1.a) Parking. Do it right. Take up one space, and at least try to get in the middle of it, not all the way over to one side or the other. I’m not the best parker in the world, but I *try*. Rather more often than I’d like to admit I’m crooked, but I always make sure the people next to me can get in and out. So many cars look like the driver was swatting at a hornet that was flying in his face when he put it in park. Particularly if it’s a busy day wherever you’re dumping your vehicle: one car, one space. And then there are the fancy-schmancy expensive things that someone was so afraid would be touched by some other human or human-powered agency that they park it purposely across a couple of spaces. If you’re that afraid, do what the other people with more money than brains, but at least small brains, do: leave it at the far end of the lot. Or, better yet, if you’re that afraid of scratches or dings, then buy the expensive car, and put it in a large climate-controlled display case in your yard – and get a clunker to actually drive around in. And, finally on the subject, not so much an annoyance – it’s no skin off my nose (and where does *that* phrase come from?) if someone wants to make more effort for himself – but a mystery: why is it that when there are two spaces together, end to end, at least half the drivers I’ve seen don’t pull through? You pull into a parking space. The one in front of you is empty. Why not drive another eight or ten feet, and set yourself up so that all you have to do when you leave is … drive? But no – a great many people treat the yellow lines around the spaces like walls, and pull into the one space, and stop – and then as often as not they *back out* when they’re leaving. I don’t get it.

2) Work related aggro: freight companies. In my last job, I had no choice but to learn the ins and outs of scheduling freight pickups. Sadly, the current job is the same, only moreso. They’re one of the banes of my existence, and the fact that scheduling pickups is such a huge part of this job is further proof that the harder I try to take a new path the more firmly I’m set on the same tedious soul-killing road. I compared it once to being like a lab rat being taught a maze: try to take a branching path, and get zapped. >zzt< Bad lab rat. Don’t deviate.

Anyway.

There’s really only one issue I have with freight companies, but it’s huge, and it should be so simple. If I call in for a pickup between 1:00 and 4:00, it’s because – shockingly – I want you to come and pick up between 1:00 and 4:00. Well, no, really it’s because I want you to come between 1:00 and 5:00; experience taught me pretty quickly that lying through your teeth is the only way to get a pickup at a reasonable time. Tell them the truth – that, for my old job, shipping closes at 4:30, will just result in drivers showing up sometime around 5:00, causing the guy in the shipping department to stay an extra half hour (plus the time needed to load the truck), which is – horrors – overtime. Not only does it annoy the guy in shipping, but God forbid there should be an extra $5 spent in the course of the day to cover that overtime. Before I learned the art of lying to the freight companies, I was thoroughly reamed about this – so I started saying we closed at 4. Then, when that still wasn’t enough margin and trucks still started showing up at 4:45 and 5, I started saying 3:30. Now it’s the same – we close at 5, I tell ‘em 4, and they STILL show up at 5:15 … Last night it was “Could you call New Penn and find out if they’re coming?” *sigh* “Hi – I scheduled the pickup this morning, close time as 4, it’s 4:45, what the hell?” “He’ll be there in half an hour – he’s a new driver.” Right. The last two times this happened, with two other companies in the past two weeks, it was mechanical failure. Riiiight. The funny thing is that if and when the driver actually does show up, he often has another story entirely. When New Penn got here – at about 5:10 – “he said he was here early to pickup around lunch time and that we were closed”. So now I’m supposed to add to every pickup request the note that we are closed for lunch between 12 and 1. This is ridiculous in so many ways … First, what are you doing coming before the scheduled time of 1:00? Am I in fact wasting my time when I type in those numbers which are apparently meaningless? If you’re not late, you’re early – or, in the case of last night, both. Second, it says on the bleeding sign I had made up for the bleeding dock door that we are closed for lunch – if you get here and see this, then sit in your stinking cab for twenty minutes till the doors get opened again. It’s *lunchtime* – what the hell do you expect? Third, if you attempt a pickup and can’t do it – because of your own stupidity or some other cause – and you find you can’t get back to that stop – whether because you don’t feel like it or because you were stupid enough to go on with your schedule and now you’re in Coventry – then you need to call me. Or call your dispatcher if you’re a coward and have him call me. If you call me and tell me that you or I or your mother upon your conception made a mistake or the truck broke down or you’re new and stupid and slow or there’s a tornado on I-91 and that you won’t be able to get here, I will be a great deal less pissed off than I will if you don’t call.

3) Local news-gathering organizations. Not just WTNH, about whom I think my opinion is pretty clear – all of them.

…a) Traffic reports. Why do they bother? This isn’t quite as relevant to me any more, praise be, because I don’t need to get on the highway any more. But for much of my working life I did, and I listened to the morons on tv and the radio talking about the traffic problems of the day – and I don’t think there was ever a time when problems I encountered, major or minor, were mentioned on those in-depth reports. They generally concentrate on the commute to and from the northern half of the state, despite the fact that the station we watch is the only one in the south. One memorable occurrence was when I worked in Madison, over half an hour from home. My route included taking I-91 South to I-95 North. That particular morning I saw that 91 was even more congested than usual, but had no idea why – there had been no mention of any problem whatsoever on the morning news inanity or on the radio. This was before I had a cell phone (I held off as long as I could – I think I mentioned I hate cell phones), so there was nothing I could do but inch along until finally I got within a quarter of a mile of the entrance to 95N. And it was closed. In all the years I had to drive 91 and 95, that was the only time that happened – it was pretty major – and it had to have happened early enough for the traffic bozos to be able to report it in time for me to take back roads – and yet there was no mention whatsoever by anyone whose job it was apparently supposed to be to make people’s commutes easier. I think I got to work about two and a half hours late that day, and furious.

…b) If they know they’re doing a story about someone’s arrest, and they’ve sent some fool cameraman off to get in everyone’s way to get footage of the arrest-ee being taken off in cuffs, why is it that they rarely have enough footage to cover the story? As the anchorperson natters on about, for example, the crime and the arrest and what led to the arrest, on the screen they show the store that was robbed for a couple of seconds, and then two seconds of the store owner looking mournful, then three seconds of the glass from the broken window scattered on the sidewalk, then five seconds showing the bad guy being taken out of the police car at the station with his jacket pulled over his head because he’s an idiot … which totals 12 seconds of images, and meanwhile the *scripted* story is going on for thirty seconds, so they start over again and show the store, the store owner, the glass, the bad guy – and start over again. And again. I never will understand why someone can’t get a better estimate of how long the *scripted* story will be – I know movie folk do it all the time: so many lines of script mean so many minutes – and therefore how much footage they need to run behind it. But I see them run the same brief loop of meaningless film three and four times, on a regular basis. Why?

… …b.1) Do we really need the footage? Do we really need you standing out in front of a building where something happened six hours ago, leaving no mark on the premises? Do we really need some poor schmoo standing out in the hurricane to prove to us it’s a hurricane, or standing thigh-deep in water to prove it’s a flood?

…c) The misspellings I’m covering when they come up, as I see ‘em; I was driven to start my posts to vent about them because it’s been a regular, ongoing problem with WTNH for many years. It’s embarrassing. *They* should be embarrassed. (It’s not as bad as the misspelling I caught on CSI one night – some computer readout had some stupid mistake I can’t remember – but it’s much more frequent.) What is, in a way, even worse is something my brother commented on last night – “Wait – Jimmy’s a child molester??” Referring to those times – those alarmingly frequent times – when the anchor will be reading one story while they show a photo or footage relating to another story entirely. Sometimes it’s just silly – but other times it can be damaging, such as when they’re talking about an arrest or conviction and showing a person unrelated to that crime. If the viewer is paying as little attention to what’s going on as the production staff, and just happens to look up at that point, they could come away with a drastically wrong impression. I have no concept of the process of putting together a newscast – most of the information I have is from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. But I would think that the things I’m talking about, all the many and varied stupid mistakes, would be something they would try very hard to avoid. Granted, it’s a fairly large undertaking that has to fill an hour and a half of airtime every evening, plus mornings and noon-time. There are a lot of pieces to assemble for the puzzle. But the mistakes are so very common that I can’t think too highly of the puzzle-builders’ abilities.

…d) The mangling of the future tense. Instead of “is going to”, it’s always – no matter who, no matter at what time – ALWAYS “gonna be”. “So, Geoff, the weather gonna be warm tomorrow.” “Jets gonna be playing in Milwaukee tonight.” It’s the most amazing thing. If it was one person, I could chalk it up to poor education or socialization and roll my eyes at it. It’s not. They all do it. On particularly cranky evenings, when my nerves have already been rubbed raw by, most likely, moron freight companies and anencephalous drivers, if the windows are open I can be heard yelling at the tv “IS!! IS going to be, you jackass! For the love of William Safire say it! IS!!”

4) Since I mentioned them – cell phones, of all sorts.

…a) Bluetooth. I was at the grocery store the other day, going to get a cart, and this woman walked in talking. To herself. Carrying on an animated conversation with an invisible friend. The thingamabob, the earpiece, must have been on the other side of her head – or she really was as schizophrenic as she appeared. My old evil boss would occasionally stop in mid sentence, reach up to his ear, and then start talking. I always resisted the urge to call him Lieutenant Uhura, and I’m now glad I did, because I never would want to insult Nyota that way. I suppose it’s just my own hang-up, but I don’t think I would ever want Bluetooth for just that reason: I wouldn’t want to look bat-#$@! crazy in public.

…b) In cars. I may have gently alluded to this earlier.

…c) In grocery stores and such. Why? Mom tells a story about one day when she went with me to the store and didn’t feel like going in; she saw a young woman pull into a parking space across the way, on her phone; she stayed on the phone as she climbed out and wandered into the store, and was still or again on the phone when she came out a while later, got back in the car, and pulled away. (Did I mention that’s illegal? And stupid? I might have.) Why? I feel like Miracle Max when I ask, what is so important? I can’t usually even count the number of people I pass in the grocery store aisles who are maundering away on their phones. The fun part is that a lot of them can’t drive a cart while on the phone any better than they can drive a car in like position; I’ve been run into a few times and almost run into many times because some fool couldn’t tear the phone away from their head in order to steer properly. If you need to call and find out if we needed lettuce, fine, whatever – I’ve done that, of course. But why would you even want to carry on a lengthy conversation wandering around in public?

…d) In movie theaters. One word: don’t. One more word: OFF. Three more words, quoting a dead terrorist puppet: “I keel you.” There should be damping devices installed in all auditoriums: your phone simply will not work while your butt is in a movie theater chair. If you’re that paranoid about the call you might miss – from your baby-sitter, or your patients, or your significant other – don’t go. Or make sure your baby-sitter, or your answering service, or whatever, has the telephone number for the theater, so that you can be tracked down if you’re needed. Movies are expensive. Don’t screw it up for everyone else. (There should also be damping devices in cars. A cell phone should not operate if the car is in motion. Period.)

…e) While you should doing something else not mentioned above – like paying attention in a meeting. Or school. Or a conversation. There are plenty of rants out there on the etiquette of talking on the cell phone … All I have left to say is to reiterate: I really do hate the things.

5) Minor annoyance: non-Googlers. A few minutes ago I referred to Nyota, and had a vision of someone posting a comment asking who or what Nyota was. (Not that hardly anyone leaves comments, but still.) It’s something I’ve never understood, something that used to spark a bit of snarkiness on the Boards Which Shall Remain Nameless. Some twit – well, a lot of twits – would post something along the lines of “Who was originally cast to play Aragorn?” To which at least one person would reply “Google is your friend.” It happens a lot, on various topics – someone is either sitting on a webpage with a comment button or a message board, and doesn’t understand something, and … asks. Or, better, someone purposely goes to a website like the BWSRN, and asks. Um. You’re on the internet. The internet has a lot of information available at the click of a button. Why would you not try to fend for yourself? WWW.Google.com. Or, better, www.goodsearch.com. You can even just type in your question as if you were talking to the Enterprise computer. For fun I just copied and pasted “Who was originally cast to play Aragorn?” (without the quotes). Result: 4012 entries, and the preview of the very first one says “Aragorn is a noble man who has fought with his own concern as to whether he will … Originally, Stuart Townsend was cast to play Aragorn, but appeared too young for the role …” Gosh, that wasn’t hard. Look it up. It doesn’t take any special skill, and you might learn something. (A related nuisance is the children of all ages (but only one level of thought capacity) who frequently go to the BWSRN and I’m sure others like it and look for help with their homework. Some of them come right out and say they have a paper due; others just ask questions that make it obvious. Like “Why are riddles so fundamental to a common culture?” I sincerely doubt that the person who formulated that question was the same one who wrote the post that follows it – it’s pretty juvenile, where the question is not.

6) Work email: if you say you’re going to email me, email me. (Or fax – but it’s usually email.) If you don’t plan on it, don’t say you’re going to. If you planned to and find you don’t need to, shoot me a line that says “Never mind!” Don’t make me call you back to find out what’s going on.

OK. I think I’m done. For now. I feel slightly better. I can’t bitch about what I really want to bitch about, as there are personalities involved, but this will do to vent the steam. Is it Friday yet?