Premte Peeves

Thursday, September 30, 2010 by Dick.

“Lindsay Lohan is undergoing treatment at the Betty Ford.” “Mo’Nique wants us all to stop picking on poor Lindsay Lohan.” “Troubled star Lindsay Lohan is fighting back at a company that filed a lawsuit against her for allegedly stealing spray tan secrets.”

Spray tan secrets?

Lilo coverage. It’s all LiLo, all the time. Faux News, Los Angeles Times, NYTimes.

This is news? Hey mainstream media! Isn’t it time to let intrepid boy reporter Jerry Springer cover this important story?

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Wordless Wednesday

Wednesday, September 29, 2010 by Dick.

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Parking Poaching

Monday, September 27, 2010 by Dick.

I am pugnaciously pissed by parking pad pulverizers. They don’t have their pinkies on the pulse of passengers pressured and pushed to be pedestrians. In fact, their pundits want to punish by puncturing our pickups and sending them to perdition.

I think they’re just punks.

The Burlington Free Press reports that cars claim about 24 acres in Burlington, Vermont’s, municipal lots and spaces based on the area of a typical 10-foot by 20-foot parking space.

Burlington celebrated global “PARK(ing) Day” last week. The five-year-old secular holiday aims steal back automobile parking spaces and reallocate them as something else.

My mom always said, “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Science has shown that idiom to be factually wrong, at least for fruit flies; the tiny fruit fly likes sweet balsamic and apple cider vinegars better than honey, perhaps because the vinegar is easier to sip. Or because they like, well, fruit.

Anyway, Mom’s human relations rule proffers that we should not provoke the very people we want to persuade.

The PARK(ing) holiday began in 2005 when San Francisco art and design studio Rebar Group converted one nearby parking space into a mini park. They added a roll-in tree, a park bench, and laid sod atop the asphalt. Rebar maintained the “park” for just two hours. This year Burlington, Hangzhou, China, and Tehran held their first events.

It appears PARK(ing) organizers don’t care what we do with the “reclaimed” parking spaces as long as we don’t let cars use them.

One Burlington bright spot has occupied a “car-sized space” on Cherry Street for about a year. Outdoor Gear Exchange reduced the space for its truck loading zone, added a car parking space there, and installed a grand multi-bicycle “parking station” in front of their own store. It’s a bright spot because no one drives any farther to park and we have made room for additional green uses.

Want to persuade parkers? Pilfer a bit of pedestrian pathway next to the parking plot you want to point out and create your public park there. People will get the point. Particularly when they park right next to you.

Parkers have a sweet tooth (after all, there are never any empty spaces in front of Maple City Candies in St Albans), so my mom wasn’t wrong. Making me drive around burning gas to park somewhere else is more of a stick than a carrot cake and is unlikely to make me plug or praise your paradoxical-parking project.

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Premte Peeves

Thursday, September 23, 2010 by Dick.

I have an appointment with my doctor for my usual six-month mirror fogging on Friday. He was a very young doc when I stated going to him more than 30 years ago. Now it turns out he’s my age.

A woman in the office called today, as someone in the doctor’s office always does anymore, to confirm the appointment.

“Don’t forget your new insurance cards and be sure to bring your photo ID,” she said.

Photo ID? Jeezum, you’d think that, after staring at my navel for more than 30 years, the doc would recognize me by now. Or at least my navel.

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Wordless Wednesday

Wednesday, September 22, 2010 by Dick.

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Anger Management

Monday, September 20, 2010 by Dick.

There, I said it.

Come to think of it, I am downright vexed. See, everywhere I look, people are trying to exasperate me and that just pisses me off.

BP, the company so many Americans have come to hate. They screwed up. The government screwed up. And the public got screwed. Meanwhile, 153 days of media coverage exacerbated the anger and fanned the flames. BP blamed the government which aggravated everybody. People on the ground blamed BP which antagonized BP but pleased pretty much everyone else. The media blitzed the scientists by offering conflicting reports, then blaming the experts for not knowing the answers. They took science down another notch which irks me. Lot of anger in that paragraph.

Anybody been to court lately? When our Visigoth neighbors decided some of our land was their land, they dragged us before the local zoning board, then sued us in both Vermont’s Superior and Environmental courts. They lied which inflamed me. I resisted which affronted them. Lot of anger in that paragraph.

“The only litigation more contentious than a divorce is a boundary line dispute,” our lawyer said. He, at least, was happy.

It goads people (”goad,” not “goat,” although it probably gets some goats, too) when I say this but Islam galls us. Some Muslims enrage us. One of the reasons they do, aside from claiming “religion of peace” status whilst trying to kill us, is simple: raving Muslim terrorists stir up embittered Muslim illiterates to blast unsuspecting Americans while ruffled rank-and-file Muslims stand idly by. Lot of anger in that paragraph.

Jealousy. There’s a biggie. In another arena gekko said “jealousy became more important than the relationships I craved.” Proverbs reminds us that Anger is cruel and destructive, but it is nothing compared to jealousy. Still, when Anthony Lozano threatened, bound, and tortured his girlfriend who eventually escaped the home they shared, all allegedly because he found a post on her Facebook page from another man, he certainly acted out his exasperation, irritation, and temper.

Take politics (sounds like a Henny Youngman joke). Here in Vermont, Demorat Peter Shumlin is riling his supporters (and the opposition) to a full boil over the Repuglican Brian Dubie’s hateful stand to renew the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant license. Mr. Dubie has maddened his supporters (and the opposition) by calling Mr. Shumlin a liar and a liberal. Lot of anger in that paragraph.

I’m a political junkie. I have chaired political committees, sat in political booths at field dayses, and walked the streets registering voters. I have run for office. I am now a “Librarian” but I started out as a Republican. I stuck it out until the party started to rant and rankle. I generally like the ideas individual Tea Party peeps discuss, but the Tea Party as a whole scares me because they monger anger. Their invective leverages agitation, outrage, and seething, steaming umbrage to whip voters into the mob frenzy independent of the thought process.

All extremists favor those tactics. The media who know that if you bleed, it leads. The lawyers who charge by the infuriating hour. The religious freaks who bristle over a Bris. The control freaks who flip over Facebook. And the politicians, whether they be home grown “officials,” terrorist fanatics, miffed militia men, or radical revolutionaries.

Provocation pays.

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Here’s my plan for the 43 days until November 2 (and all the days in the future):

• If you are in the media and you pump out lies designed to get on my nerves, you will succeed and I will not buy from your sponsors.
• If you belong to an extremist religion and continue to support the people who want to kill me, it will offend me and I will ask that you lose your tax exempt status.
• If you are a politician seeking my vote, stop. If you name your opponent it will anger me and I will write my own name in on the ballot.

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Breaking News:
I am just sooooooooo tired of these airheads: The NYTimes reports that, “Democrats are deploying the fruits of a yearlong investigation into the business and personal histories of Republican candidates in an effort to plant doubts about them.” !@#$%^ing !@#$%^ers.

Posted in Society, Politics & News, Media, Random Access | 6 Comments »