Irrelevance Glorified

Okay, Mr. Papa Johns pizza assembly guy, I get the picture. I open up my pizza box and I see this:

I've added the dime. The dime is not the astonishing part.

This is worse than nothing. I’ve opened up the box before and seen no pepperoncini. I can deal with that. It’s like, “Oh, they just forgot to put it in there, that’s unfortunate but its totally understandable that this happens from time to time.” This, however, is blatant passive-aggressive behavior. A man (and yes, all the people who work at this place are men) actually took the time to pick out this minuscule pepperoncini specimen and place it in the box. I can imagine him cackling with glee (with underlighting) imagining the look on my face as I opened the box and saw this sorry excuse for vegetation staring back at me.

You better watch yourself, Mr. Pizza Preparer — you’re on notice. If you’re not careful, you might wake up with some habenero heads in your bed.

So, if you know me, you know that I don’t like Tom Brady. In fact, even if you don’t really know me, you might suspect that I hate Tom Brady, considering that I’ve made two posts consisting solely of the fact that I hate Tom Brady, on occasions where he has suffered devastating losses.

So why do I hate Tom Brady? Well, it doesn’t help that he played football at Michigan. My loathing of Michigan football is even deeper than that for Tom Brady. But it’s more than that. You see, I dislike all “good-looking” quarterbacks. Tom Brady is already a quarterback. He plays the most important position for the most popular sport in America. He makes millions of dollars because he’s actually really good at it. He has probably spent his entire life, since high school, as the center of adulation and attention. He should not get to knock up famous actresses and then marry supermodels. It’s just not right. If you’re going to be a successful quarterback, you should be homely. Otherwise, this is all just unbalanced. Booo, Tom Brady. Yeah, Kyle Orton!

Basically, though, my argument is seeded in jealousy and an inapplicable standard of justice. That’s just petty and irrational. Luckily, science has stepped in an gave me a plausible, legitimate reason for my prejudices! Continue Reading »

So, I have a Netflix account, and my queue is currently populated with over 200 items (a little bit overcounting, though, since multi-disc television shows list as one item per disc). I often put movies in the queue that probably wouldn’t be considered all that great, some that get poor reviews, just because I haven’t seen them, and I want to take a flyer on them. For instance, Demolition Man is currently in the mail, approaching my apartment. I expect this movie to be horrible, but hopefully it will be entertaining.

Virtuosity is horrible. And it is not entertaining Continue Reading »

I, in general, possess a lot of empathy. I can look at situations, or issues, and see how other people think and why they support the positions they do. Unlike some of the unwashed masses, I can see why olympic events such as synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics do showcase talent and are worthy of our adulation.

Not so much with synchronized diving.

I’ve been watching the Olympics the last few nights, and really, synchronized diving seems pretty worthless. It seems that you perform exactly the same dives as you would in individual diving….but you just copy someone else as well. There’s really nothing special about it, and frankly I’m just stunned that it’s a medal worthy sport when, say, cricket isn’t.

The only nice thing about synchronized diving that I can think of is that it’s fairly steroid and cheater proof, unless someone out there uses Siamese Twins or something.

So I’ve been here for about a month, and there are a few things that have started to get under my skin. I can imagine other installments happening in the future, but here’s my top four as of yet.

Traffic
Yeah, yeah, this is an obvious one, but you don’t understand. Or perhaps, I didn’t understand. It’s a combination of having enough people here that there are cars on the road all the time, every day, plus the endless, endless, traffic lights. If you don’t make that left turn light, you might as well turn off your car and take a nap, because it’ll be about 15 minutes before you get your turn again. The stoplight system here is most certainly not a system designed to move traffic quickly and efficiently. It’s designed to piss every single driver off equally so as to maintain a sort of evil fairness. Additionally, California does not believe its drivers can handle a middle turn lane, so there is usually a median dividing lanes and U-turns are often needed to access something on the left side of the road.

It’s amazing how important expressways, interstates, and highways are to getting anywhere timely. It seems like there are no local roads that get you anywhere faster. It’s always faster to take the highway, even if you have to drive 5 miles to get to it. What’s really frustrating is that because of all the stoplights, on many stretches of the road a bike is just as fast. That’s one of the reasons I’m going to start biking to work — when the same bicyclist is matching me stoplight for stoplight over 2 miles of road, I’ve lost one excuse for taking the car, and it mostly just comes down to laziness. And sure, I’m lazy, but I don’t like to admit it.

Streetlights

I’ll toss this in with the traffic. A lot of the streetlights in Santa Clara county have a yellow tinge that is exactly the same color as a yellow traffic light. So if you’re driving at night down a street with stoplights, it’s yellow lights all around. It’s just…disorienting.

Warning Labels

(picture taken without permission from ComplianceSigns.com.)
California has stricter toxicity laws than most states, so levels of chemicals that would be acceptable in most states are illegal in California. However, those laws only apply to new products and buildings. Buildings already constructed get warning stickers. So everywhere I go, I see stickers on entrances, “This building contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer.” There’s an entire section on ComplianceSigns devoted to signs about California Proposition 65. Really, the part I find most annoying is the “State of California” part, like California is privy to knowledge that the rest of the states just cannot comprehend.

Accordion Thingies on Gas Pumps

I have to admit, when I first expressed my exasperation over this, I was actually wrong about it’s purpose. The first time I encountered this, I assumed it was a nanny-state restriction designed to make sure that you don’t leave the gas nozzle dispensing gas in your tank and walk away. That is, it made you stand there and hold the nozzle in, preventing the chance of a malfunctioning nozzle causing an overflow and a potentially dangerous situation. I figured that at some point in time, some person left the nozzle in their gas tank, gallons of gas spilled out, and some endangered rodent accidentally died. But then I was advised that despite the pushback of the corrugated plastic, you can in fact leave the nozzle in your tank while it pumps, no added support needed. And then I looked up some information and, you know, actually looked at the freaking thing, and saw that it’s intended purpose is to capture any evaporated gasoline that might escape from your tank while you are filling up. Yeah, they are preventing that small portion of gasoline from evaporating and contributing to air pollution. I would think this would be an amazingly small contribution to poor air quality, but perhaps when you multiply by the number of cars in California and consider that it’s so much hotter there than Illinois, raising the vapor pressure of gasoline, it actually matters. Given that I’m a newcomer to the state, I guess I can give it the benefit of the doubt. Still, it was probably introduced so that evaporated gasoline didn’t disrupt the mating rituals of a particular coastal moth or something.

So yeah, I got myself a new apartment. It’s not too bad, just moderately overpriced instead of ridiculously overpriced. But it’s the little things that I never bother to check. For instance, here is the cell phone coverage map for my area.

That “X” there? That’s my apartment. Seriously, what the hell. I kinda need to stand near the window to ensure good coverage. Well, as we all know, my blog is carefully read by corporations, so maybe T-Mobile will get off their ass and put in some new towers. Or increase the power. Either works for me.

(Note : I realize that most of what I say here is more indicative of the area I’ve been living in the past 11 years rather than this particular urban area, but it doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.)

For the past 5 years or so (plus-or-minus 6 years) I’ve had the good fortune to live in Urbana-Champaign, an area with a very low cost of living. It’s a very livable town, even on a graduate student’s salary. One of the most successful scams in Central Illinois is the wool that local landlords have pulled over student’s eyes, making them think it’s a sellers market instead of a buyer’s market. Many people sign leases in November for an August move-in, and they’re in their new home for about two months before they’re being asked if they want to renew. But for the past three years, I’ve paid about $230 for my share of the rent. Not too bad.
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Before I continue on this rant, I want to warn that it contains spoilers for the current show “Heroes” as well as, sadly, some fantasy novels.
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First of all, I’m no business man. I’ve got no MBA degree, I’m just a humble engineer. I don’t know how to, say, take risky mortgages and package them all together into an amorphous mass that, while easier to disguise and thus sell, ends up severing the relationship between homeowner and bank. And I probably wouldn’t think of slicing parts of my company out into thousands of pieces, giving those pieces assets, getting banks to give those “special purpose entities” low interest loans based on those assets, and then getting the S.P.E.’s to lend that money to my main corporation to raise money without appearing to be in debt. I’m just not that smart.
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