Simple Tricks and Nonsense

I ducked out of my office for a few minutes this afternoon to grab a sandwich, and while I was walking the mean streets of Salt Lake City, I happened to encounter a guy who is sadly all too exemplary of people's fashion sense these days.

He had a full beard, but a shaved head, so his sideburns rose up alongside his ears and then just... stopped. He wore an Army-surplus field jacket; knee-length cut-off jeans with frayed leg openings; and black athletic shoes with what appeared to be black Lycra leggings, or possibly pantyhose. And he didn't appear to be homeless, either. He was striding along as happily and confidently as any runway model.

Now... I have an allergy to neckties, I don't even own a suit, and I've long maintained that I was lucky to be born well after that era when men couldn't leave the house without a hat. But there are days when I really wish I saw fewer people who looked like my chrome-domed-but-bearded friend and more who looked like this:

Whatever happened to elegance, people? Or dignity? Or just plain looking in the mirror before you leave the house? I think I'm going to go watch North by Northwest now and try to drive the image of those weirdly freestanding sideburns from my head...

Posted by at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Friday, one of my coworkers -- a bright guy in his mid-twenties whom I quite like, but often struggle to find common ground with -- asked if I knew when Clash of the Titans was coming out.

"Sure," I replied, "the next time I go to my video cabinet and get the DVD."

Big laughs ensued. The kid was talking, of course, about the upcoming remake of the Ray Harryhausen classic, while I was playing to my usual curmudgeonly, remake-hating persona.

Well, this humorous bonding moment led to a discussion of the original film, which my colleague had never seen, and he asked me if I'd recommend it. I told him yes, but qualified my opinion by advising that if he thought he might want to give Clash a try, he needed to keep in mind that it was a 30-year-old movie that was originally made for 12-year-olds. You see, I've been down this path before; I know how younger people usually react to the stuff I grew up liking.

Continue reading "Expectations" »

Posted by at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

My power went out this morning at 7 a.m.

I was awake at the time, more or less -- my alarm had sounded 15 minutes earlier and I was indulging in my usual routine of bashing the snooze button half a dozen times before I finally get up, wishing all the while that the idiots who design these things would give me a full five minutes in between bashings instead of only three -- and I heard the ceiling fan and the furnace fall silent.

Now, the power used to go out all the time when I was a kid. My hometown was pretty far out in the sticks back then, before the suburban sprawl creeping outward from metro Salt Lake finally caught up to us, and I guess we only had a single set of transmission lines coming into town across the far and wide desert, or some damn thing, because any time the wind blew, something would short out somewhere and we'd be in the dark for a few hours. I used to think it was fun, actually. I can't remember ever being afraid of the dark, and having to use candles struck me as a neat change from the usual routine.

To be honest, I still don't mind the occasional outage, although given how much of my work and entertainment now revolves around electronic gadgets, I tend to get bored more quickly than I did when I was a kid. Even so, I was completely unprepared for just how truly, alarmingly inconvenient it is to lack electricity during the hour when I'm getting ready for work.

Continue reading "Shaving by Candlelight" »

Posted by at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

To the worthless lump of failed humanity whose obnoxious children ruined my dinner at Sizzler the other night, the guy who sat at a table with all the adults of your extended clan, obliviously stuffing your soft, quivering jowls with all-you-can-eat shrimp while your noisy little brats went unsupervised in a nearby booth and generally behaved (and sounded) as if they were playing on a jungle gym in some open-air playground about a mile away from civilization:

You suck.

No, seriously, you do.

You see, the fact that your meager dreams evaporated years ago and your self-respect is dead and buried beneath that admittedly awe-inspiring paunch of yours does not absolve you from your parental responsibilities to actually, you know, parent. Yes, I know the only glimmer of pleasure you can strain from your gray and miserable life is the time spent discussing football stats with your equally corpulent brother-in-law over heaping plates of fried crustaceans. And I'm certain that your admirable ability to completely ignore the high-pitched squealings of your misbehaved progeny is an adaptive mechanism to protect what little intellectual capacity you may have remaining in that stupid round noggin of yours. But believe me, what you seem so adept at filtering out while you eat was unbelievably irritating to every other person in the damn restaurant. And as you're the one who spawned the offending creatures, the responsibility for them irritating me ultimately falls on your ample and well-cushioned shoulders. So allow me to offer you some suggestions on how you should have handled the situation...

Continue reading "Sartre Never Ate at Sizzler on a Saturday Night" »

Posted by at 5:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Dear PYT:

While I don't claim to be any kind of great sage, I have acquired a certain amount of wisdom in my four decades of life on this planet, and, in particular, in this valley. So believe me when I say that you would be much more comfortable during the frosty mornings of the final week of October if you were wearing a coat. I know it's crucial that everyone on the train know that you buy your t-shirts at American Eagle, and of course you want to show off how this snug-fitting shirt cradles your toned and lean body, but when you're hunched over and clutching your forearms in a vain effort to stay warm, we're really not seeing your bodaciousness anyhow. And another thing... flip-flops? Really? Do you have any idea what a bunion is? Or a fallen arch? Because these decidedly non-bodacious defects are in your future if you continue wearing those stupid things everywhere you go. That's assuming, of course, that you don't end up with frostbite for being dumb enough to shuffle around in 37-degree weather with exposed toes.

I know, I know... I sound like your father. And we all know how totally uncool that is. But really... I lecture because I care.

Seriously, I think you'd really like this coat thing. Or even a sweatshirt. I'll bet American Eagle carries sweatshirts. Go get yourself one and see if your day doesn't improve about a million-fold...

Sincerely,

A concerned old curmudgeon

Posted by at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Saturday morning, thank God, after a week that seemed like it would never end while simultaneously feeling like there just wasn't enough time for everything I needed to do. No doubt this sensation was brought on, at least in part, by an entire week of sleep disruptions: I had a couple of nights when I didn't get to bed until well after midnight, then a couple more nights when I hit the rack at the usual time but couldn't seem to stay asleep. On Wednesday, I had a particularly vivid and upsetting dream that took me several hours of daylight to shake off, and on Thursday I overslept, skipped both my shower and breakfast in an effort to get out of the house around the usual time, and I still missed my damn train. Then there was the day at the office when I was obligated to attend a two-hour, company-wide staff meeting that set me way behind on the day's agenda, and I had to stay late two other evenings to finish up the loads for those days. In short, all my usual routines went down the crapper this week. And speaking of the crapper, I had an incident involving cat shit that should probably go undescribed, since it's still breakfast-time for some of us. Well, it's breakfast-time for me, anyhow. Let's just say this feline excretory event didn't help my frame of mind any.

The whole month has been like this, really. To be honest, things have been off-kilter ever since my birthday.

No, wait. Stop. Don't go away. I promise this isn't going to be another whiny lament about me having achieved A Certain Age, as the refined ladies of another era might have termed it. It's simply an observation that life has been kinda screwy for the last several weeks.

Continue reading "Cool Quiet, and Time to Think" »

Posted by at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I just wasted an hour of a precious Friday off from work trying to buy concert tickets. Silly me, I thought ordering online would be quick and simple, not like those horrible old days when we had to actually leave the house and travel to some other physical location, whereupon we would conduct the transaction by the light of whale-oil lamps while we tried to ignore the woolly mammoths crashing around out in the parking lot.

Continue reading "So Much for Progress" »

Posted by at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Usually when I hear that some bluenose bureaucrat is getting all uptight over something the average grown-up wouldn't even notice, it's happening right here in my own backyard. So imagine my surprise to learn that it isn't Utah's state liquor board that's banned a particular brand of wine because its label features an image of a naked woman and a bicycle. No, it is in fact Alabama that has a problem with a century-old Art Nouveau illustration of a curiously nippleless nymph. The winemaker is naturally developing an ad campaign based on the ban, and I suspect that more people have seen the "offensive" label in the last 24 hours -- because of the news coverage and blogs like mine -- than would have in months or even years if the prudes had just kept their tut-tutting to themselves. The sorts who worry about this sort of thing never, ever learn the lesson that making a fuss only attracts more attention to the thing they don't want people to see.

Posted by at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Somewhat related to the previous entry (well, they both involve music, nostalgia, and grumpy old man-ism, at least), Lileks related a story today about his encounter at his local coffee house with one of those Damn Kids™ I'm always grumbling about. Here's his comment about the young lady's ignorance of "99 Luftballons," the infectious '80s classic about an accidental nuclear exchange (ah, the Cold War... those were the days!):

Kids today. No respect for kids of yesterday. Thing is, we were required to know every fargin’ thing about the 60s when we were coming up, being schooled in the ways of the Most Important Musical Genre Ever. You were required to nod at your elder and respect their sage ways, and thus I found myself in a few dorm rooms listening to peers explain why Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Reefer and Cocaine were incredible not just for their harmony and song-writing skills, but their ability to make music that [went] on longer than three minutes. To which you could only say: may all your girlfriends take “Love the One You’re With” to heart everytime you’re out of town.

Lileks' real point here is, of course, less about the kids of today than his own resentment toward the '60s -- he strikes me as a man who is convinced that everything went Horribly Wrong long about 1967 and it's only gotten worse since then; come to think of it, that's not entirely incorrect, depending on how you look at it -- but he touches on something I've considered myself from time to time, which is the way Boomer culture has always dominated the conversation and how people my age dealt with it, and more importantly (to me, anyhow) how that's different from the way kids these days deal with my generation's culture.

Continue reading "How Things Change" »

Posted by at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

DSC_0057, originally uploaded by jason.bennion.

Want to know how to ruin a beautiful springtime Sunday afternoon? How about having someone back into your Mustang and bugger up pretty much the entire passenger side? Yeah, that'll do it...

Continue reading "Defeated" »

Posted by at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So, I met with my tax preparer this morning, and, well, the results weren't pretty. Let's just say that if I ever try to offer you financial advice, you'd be wise to simply smile, pat me on the head, and back away slowly.

Afterward, as if I hadn't been demoralized enough by getting a thorough bitch-slapping from Uncle Sam, I headed over to Fashion Place Mall to buy a belt. I wasn't looking for anything fancy or wanting to make a statement, I just needed something to hold up my pants. Should've been a snap, in and out in ten minutes, right? One would think so. One would be quite wrong.

Continue reading "Crappity-crap Crap Crap Crap..." »

Posted by at 7:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Be warned. The Girlfriend and I spotted Halloween decorations at Costco yesterday. Let me repeat that: Halloween decorations. In August. A full week before Labor Day. And not just any old rubber-bat or paper-skeleton-style Halloween decorations, but light-up inflatable lawn displays like those obnoxious things that have been so popular at Christmas time for the last couple of years. And they have an audio component, too, stereotypically spooky sounds like screams, blowing wind, creaking doors, and, of course, John Carpenter's Halloween theme. Oy.

All Hallow's Eve is my favorite holiday, but I don't want to think about it this early, not before Labor Day, and ideally not before October 1st. I also don't want to think about Christmas in September or Valentine's Day in January. I have a theory that part of the reason why it seems like time moves so quickly these days and everybody's so stressed and feeling like they just can't catch up is because of crap like this. The retail industry seems to be increasingly out of sync with the actual seasons of the year, and thanks to their shopping "seasons," we consumers are, too. You can't buy a swimsuit in July because the back-to-school stuff is already on the shelves, and you can't get a new coat during the deep-freeze days toward the end of January because the spring lines are coming out, and we're expected to be worrying about Halloween before the pumpkins mature and Christmas while there's still leaves on the trees. Basically, the sales pitches insist that we always be looking ahead instead of enjoying the now, and the time between the advance sales and the calendar seasons seems to grow wider and wider every year. It makes me crazy...

Posted by at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I was just standing in line over at the grocery store and I noticed that they had 2GB USB flash drives on sale there at the cash register, right alongside the gum and lip balm and all the impulse-buy crap that you usually see in the grocery store checkout lane. For a moment, I was charmed by this spectacle -- how unspeakably science-fiction-y and cool is that you can now get computer memory devices at the same neighborhood store where my mom used to buy me Idaho Spud candy bars in the far-off days of childhood? (Well, technically it's not the same neighborhood store -- the grocer built himself a new and improved building about fifteen years ago -- but you get what I mean.) And that buying these things isn't any big deal? They're not down a special aisle or kept locked behind the service counter or anything, they're just hanging there with the ChapStick, as innocuous as disposable lighters and People magazine.

But then I noticed this thing was called the JetFlash Classic. Classic? I think not. The term "classic" is something usually reserved for objects that have stood the test of time and are widely seen as the apotheosis of that category of objects. Levi's 501s are classic. A '57 Chevy Bel Air is a classic. But a flash drive? How long have flash drives been around anyway? Has there ever been anything that qualifies as an iconic, perfected flash drive design? No, there have been dozens of different looks for flash drives since they became widely available just a short handful of years ago, and none of them had a look that I think anyone would call definitive. They can (and do) look like anything from suppositories to humping toy dogs. And do we even know that flash drives will still be around in another five or ten years, or will something else replace them and they're destined to end up about as classic as five-inch flop disks? How the hell can you call anything "classic" under those conditions?

You can't. It's all about marketing and branding. I get so tired of marketing and branding and the way perfectly good language gets warped to sell things that would probably sell just fine without giving them labels they haven't earned. Words matter, but people don't believe they do... and that makes me sigh and grumble under my breath like all the other grumpy old men who're pissed that the world doesn't run according to their watches...

Posted by at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sean Means, who has assumed the mantle of "culture vulture" in addition to his usual movie-critic role at the Salt Lake Tribune, made a nice observation today in response to the news that yet another venerable SL institution, Squirrel Brothers Ice Cream (which used to be Snelgrove's, before it was infected with the "cutesy name" syndrome that runs rampant in this state), is closing down:

Continue reading "Written on an Etch-a-Sketch" »

Posted by at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Okay, I'm officially tired of summer. That didn't take long, did it? Blame a crowded, sweltering train ride into town this morning.

Of course, my sour mood wasn't helped by the nicely dressed, very young man -- did I mention he was very young? -- who offered me his seat so I didn't have to stand in the aisle. He insisted upon me taking his seat, actually, despite my polite refusals. I don't quite understand his zeal considering that I am not (a) visibly disabled, (b) grotesquely overweight, or (c) all that old. I may have some gray in my beard, but give me a break, kid. Those Foundation for a Better Life PSAs are maybe a little too effective...

Posted by at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So I missed several hours of work yesterday morning while I took care of business and filed an insurance claim on my car. The insurance company naturally wanted to send me to their affiliated vendor to do the repair work, but I wanted to talk it over with my dad first -- he's a mechanic and an old-school car guy who knows lots of other car guys, and I wanted his recommendation before I made an irrevocable decision -- so the telephone drone who took my claim put things on hold until I made up my mind. I was given a callback number for "the claim office that would complete the process" (presumably a different call center from the one that opened the claim, or at least a different floor in the same building; seems rather inefficient to me, but what do I know of modern corporate labyrinths?).

I took the car to see a guy, got a quote, then, with the clock pushing noon and the certainty that my inbox at the office was buckling under the strain, headed for work. I got busy and didn't get around to calling my insurance company back, which was probably foolish procrastination on my part, but that's how it happened and I won't apologize for it.

This morning, I tried calling that claim-office number first thing, figuring I could maybe fax them my bid or something and have everything wrapped up in short order. Silly me...

Continue reading "Insurance Companies Are So Much Fun..." »

Posted by at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Warning: Grown-up language ahead. Click away now if you have a weak constitution for that sort of thing.]

This is what some asshole son-of-a-bitch did to the ragtop of my Mustang on Friday night. From the placement and size of the cuts -- near the edge of the top, and right over the door-lock post and the door handle itself -- my guess is that someone was attempting to break in, rather than merely vandalizing the car. Not that I'd know anything about how to vandalize a car, since it was drilled into my head from an early age to actually respect other people's property, but it seems to me if the goal had been merely to ruin somebody's day, the bastard would've carved a big X right down the middle or something. But as I said, I don't know what could be running through the mind of someone who'd do this to another person's car.

Needless to say, I've had a pretty crappy weekend, alternating between surges of impotent rage and a crushing sense of violation and generalized despair. I tell you guys... between losing Rusty, various work-related issues that I'm sure no one would be interested in, some personal stuff I'd rather not share, and now this, I'm feeling completely and utterly defeated right now. I know it's a cliche for old farts to bitch about how the world has gone to hell since they were kids, but, well, it has...

Posted by at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I stayed up way too late last night watching a really bad movie called One Million Years B.C. I remember liking it a lot when I was a kid, so when I ran across the DVD on sale for five bucks, and I considered that it contained stop-motion dinosaurs animated by the legendary Ray Harryhausen and Raquel Welch in a fur bikini, I thought I couldn't go wrong. Sadly, it turned out to be one of those flicks that should've remained a fond memory. C'est la vie.

The real injury, however, happened when the receptionist here at my office asked me why I was looking so tired. I told her... and got a completely blank look. I didn't expect her to recognize the movie title, but she didn't know who Raquel Welch was either. Come on! Raquel Welch? She was only one of the biggest sex symbols of the 20th Century! And she only appeared on one of the most famous cheesecake posters ever produced! (That's it up there at the top of the entry. I remember many comic-book ads for posters-by-mail, and this one was always the largest thing on the page. It's still available, too.) But no, the kid had no idea whatsoever.

Some days I really feel like I may as well stop fighting it, apply for Social Security, and go invest in a rocking chair...

Posted by at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

Posted by at 3:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Enough. You win.

I am tired of snow and overcast skies and wind. I am tired of wearing long underwear and my fur-lined Cousin Eddie hat and still feeling cold. I am tired of driving my broken-down old rattletrap Bronco because it has four-wheel drive and I won't feel as bad if it gets wrecked as I would if it were my Mustang. I am tired of having to leap over puddles and ridges of filthy gray slush, and doing weird little dance steps and windmilling my arms because my lousy, worn-out shoes keep skidding on the slick pavement and I can't find any boots I like this late in the season.

Seriously, I know we need the snow to replenish our depleted reservoirs, and most years I really don't mind all this winter stuff. But this winter seems like it's been a very long one, and for the last couple of weeks, we've been getting storms about every three days, with blasts of arctic cold in between the fronts, and I'm really, really, REAAAALLLLY sick of it.

So, weather gnomes, just tell me your demands and I'll meet them. You want ransom money? A helicopter to the Bahamas? A first-born son? J.J. Abrams' secret notes on how Lost is going to turn out? Whatever you want, I'll get it for you. Just stop with the snow and cold already!

That is all.

Posted by at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Aw, jeez... apparently the busybody brigades, frustrated that the Blue Boutique managed to reopen in its new location without brimstone raining from the heavens, have found someone else to pester with their crusade against healthy adult interests.

Continue reading "More Torches and Pitchforks..." »

Posted by at 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

You know, I realized this year that New Year's Day is actually kind of a sucky holiday.

Continue reading "New Year's Day" »

Posted by at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My corporate overlords have shuttered the offices this week to give all us serfs a much-needed rest, so the last thing I want to be think about during my time (as Mr. Hand in Fast Times at Ridgemont High would call it) is anything that remotely resembles proofreading (which, if you're new around here, is what I do for a living)... but man, sometimes I just can't help it. Like when I see a caption on my local news broadcast that's listing various things you can do to maintain healthy skin and among the bullet-pointed suggestions is something called "Excersize."

Excersize? Could they possibly have meant exercise? Come on, people, this is not a difficult word! And even if it is beyond the mental capabilities of the interns who are writing the news and the blond-and-blue-eyed announcer-bots who are reading it, doesn't the text that appears on-screen ever pass through a spell checker?

I don't expect much from local TV news -- too much of the average 20-minute broadcast is devoted to sports, weather, and pointless "cute" banter for any actual news to make it through -- but this sort of thing is really just intolerable. Excersize? Good lord...

Posted by at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

My darling Girlfriend loves Christmas carols. She also loves a cappella singers performing Christmas carols. Myself, not so much.

I try to restrain my inner grinch for her sake -- I really don't like making her feel bad -- but it's so very, very hard when confronted by a bunch of fresh-faced young men who have perfect harmony and really cheesy joke-writers. The genre just naturally tends to lead to cutesy-ism, and that's something I cannot abide. The one time I gave in and went along with her and her mom to the annual holiday performance by local sensation Voicemale, it was all I could do to keep my nervous twitching from throwing me right out of my seat. (Sorry, dear, I really am... but then, you knew all this already and for some reason you still like me...)

It might not be so bad if all the a cappella groups out there would take a hint from these guys:

That's the way you do it: cover all the favorites in a single arrangement, throw in a little Toto for good measure, then thank everyone for coming and to all a good night! Yeah...

My thanks to Greenberg for finding this.

Note: If for some reason you want to read more of my grouchy, anti-Christmas-music babble, revisit this classic entry from a couple of years ago...

Posted by at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You know, I love Utah, I really do. I grew up here, my family roots stretch back to the very first wave of Mormon pioneers in 1847, and, for my money, you're never going to see anything as jaw-droppingly beautiful as the Wasatch Mountains on the first clear day after a snow storm. This is my home, and while I can imagine living in other places, I highly doubt I ever will.

But as comfortable as I generally am here, it drives me absolutely batshit insane when the busybody prudes of this state decide it's time to dust off their torches and pitchforks and launch yet another crusade against their latest perceived threat to the moral well-being of the community.

Case in point: the kerfuffle over the Blue Boutique.

Continue reading "Feeling Blue in Sugar House" »

Posted by at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In response to a thought-provoking WaPo article about the future of museums in our ever-more digitized and entertainment-driven world, this guy asks:

If we can access a white-laser virtual model of the Mona Lisa at a resolution of 10 microns from our personal computer, why bother getting shoved around and consumed by the crush of tourists at the Louvre only to get no closer than 3 feet? ...What's the point of going to a museum today?

Um, to see the actual painting rather than a picture of it? Isn't that astoundingly obvious?

Continue reading "I'm All About the Real, Man" »

Posted by at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How do I know that the season is changing?

Well, for one thing, the temperature when I left the house this morning was delightfully cool, somewhere in the upper 60s, the first time it's been that low in several months and a welcome change for this curmudgeonly blogger, who has found this year's record-setting string of 100-plus days to be just about unbearable.

But the real tip-off was the legion of cute young co-eds commuting up to the U of U this morning for their first day of classes... which, of course, goes hand-in-hand with the Utah Transit Authority's asinine annual ritual of shortening their light-rail trains just when a reasonable person would expect that they'd need more capacity. All summer long, the trains have been running with four cars and were mostly empty. Now, this morning, with all these new faces waiting on the platform, there were just two cars, and we ended up wedged in like cattle.

Morons.

Posted by at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Scalzi is feeling testy today, as you can see in this book meme he's cooked up:

1. Open the book you're currently reading to page 133.

2. Read the fourth line on the page.

3. Put the book back where it had been resting.

4. Tell no one of what it was you just did.

5. Think of five friends to tag with this meme.

6. Do not actually tag them. They are busy and have lives.

7. Go about your life as if nothing has happened.

8. Carry the secret of this meme to your grave.

So did I perform this particular meme? No one will ever know...

Posted by at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Any further comment would be redundant...

Posted by at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hey, kids, hope you haven't missed me too badly during my brief absence from the blogosphere. I've just returned from three days of visiting friends in Sin City. Report to follow, but in the meantime, I offer this visual commentary on the news I missed while I was driving across the Jundland Wastes, er, Nevada:

Continue reading "Justice Stumbles, But Recovers" »

Posted by at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Since I seem to be time-travelling today anyhow (I've already been to 1999 and 1976), let's take a moment to consider the future...

Continue reading "The Future That Never Happened" »

Posted by at 8:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

About two weeks ago, the Postal Service implemented its annual and much-ballyhooed rate increase, kicking the price of a 39-cent stamp to 41 cents. Anticipating that a significant number of consumers (like yours truly) would still have a bunch of 39-cent stamps in their possession, the brilliant, benevolent, and very handsome people who work for the USPS have of course taken steps to ensure that two-cent stamps are readily available for those who need them. The automated vending kiosks will be overstocked with the needed "fill-in" stamps for the next month or so as a favor to valued customers whose schedules prevent them from visiting human postal workers during regular business hours. Thus, bills continue to get mailed on time, inconvenience is minimized, customer loyalty is maintained, everyone is happy, and spontaneous renditions of "Kumbaya" can be heard echoing through post offices across the land.

Well, that's probably how it would work on the Bizarro World. Here on Earth, my local post master, in all his or her infinite wisdom, has devoted only a single slot of the vending machine to two-cent stamps, and that slot has, of course, been sold out for two weeks.

Idiots.

Posted by at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here's a cool little item that I was planning to include in my recent round-up of space news, but somehow missed; it's a promotional trailer (ostensibly put out by NASA) hyping the planned return of human beings to the Moon:

Continue reading "NASA Trailer" »

Posted by at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As long as I'm in a complaining mood today anyway, I may as well mention that one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of so-called "literary fiction" is the way authors of this stuff so often play with the standard rules and techniques of fiction writing. Presumably they're trying for some kind of effect, and also presumably fans of LitFic appreciate and enjoy this; me, I just think it comes across as pretentious and gimmicky.

Case in point: I'm currently reading a novel called This is the Place by Peter Rock, which, in general, I am enjoying. (Rock has created some wonderful evocations of Wendover, Nevada, and the Bonneville Salt Flats, two places I just visited last month.) However, the guy is apparently unaware of the existence of the quotation mark. None of the book's dialogue uses it. Instead, you're just supposed to pick up from context that someone is speaking, as in this passage:

How you doing, Jamie? The bartender knew what she wanted before she said a word. He brought two cocktails and she drank the first one fast.

I'm doing, she said. Hard at work here.

It's not a huge thing, but it's driving me crazy. It's sometimes confusing, but the biggest issue is that I just don't see any reason, artistic or otherwise, for doing it, and it's coming off as more of a distraction, an affectation, than anything that adds value to the work...

Posted by at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

This is something that's bothered me off and on for several years, but this morning I finally reached my breaking point: what the hell is the matter with the audio mix on The Today Show?

Anytime they use background music for a segment -- which is pretty much all the time these days on this increasingly fluffy and pointless "news" program -- the music is so loud that it drowns out the voiceover. It happened this morning while Matt Lauer was reminiscing about his best experiences while doing his "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" segments, which I still enjoy despite my general disdain for Today. The insidiously catchy and terminally annoying Outkast tune "Hey Ya" was playing over the story, cranked up to the point where I could hardly hear Matt at all, so what I ended up with essentially a music video with visuals of Lauer on an aircraft carrier, walking around Red Square, etc.

I've wondered for some time if the problem was with the TV in my bedroom (I usually half-listen to the various morning shows while I dress for work, so I can catch a weather forecast), but today, because I was actually interested in the story in question, I tried the HDTV in my living room; same thing there. Are the show's producers even aware of this issue? Is it deliberate on their part? Do they think for some reason that viewers find it pleasant or exciting to have music drowning out the host personalities that we're supposedly tuning in to listen to? Or are we just supposed to look at them? Why have the hosts at all? Why not just play music? Oh, wait, that's what the radio is for, isn't it? Idiots...

Oh, and as long as I'm bitching, I'd love to see all the national morning shows drop their outside "plaza" segments, too; listening to the screaming crowds of people who all seem to think that their Aunt Mildred in Peoria will somehow pick out their single voice from the cacophony is even more annoying than the nine-millionth play of "Hey Ya." Not that the goofball weather-guessers who mingle with the crowd ever have anything all that important or amusing to say, I just don't like all the noise. Arg...

Posted by at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the many, many items on the List of Things That Are Turning Me Into a Grumpy Old Man™ is the fact that an entire generation of kids has grown up not knowing what Coca-Cola is supposed to taste like. That's because, back around 1985 or so, the evil penny-pinching, bean-counting corporate stooges in Atlanta decided -- without bothering to consult the consumers who would be buying and drinking the stuff, mind you -- to replace the yummy, yummy sugar in Coke with this new-fangled, better-living-through-modern-chemistry (and, not coincidentally, cheaper) dreck called high-fructose corn syrup. The value of this change was entirely one-sided: the company saved money on the production side by using the cheaper sweetener, which of course boosted the stockholders' portfolio. Coke drinkers, on the other hand, got shafted. They lost the flavor they'd enjoyed for a hundred years and were forced to either adapt to the new, less-pleasant (and possibly downright harmful, if you believe the bad press on corn syrup) Coke formula, or find some other beverage fix.

(For the record, I don't generally buy into conspiracy theories, but I find it entirely plausible that the marketing disaster that was New Coke really was an insidious ploy to wean consumers off sugar-based Coke so we'd be more accepting of the corn-syrup formula when Classic Coke "returned." I'm not saying I definitely believe that, only that I find it believable.)

The really frustrating thing about the Coke situation was that the battle was lost before anyone knew it was being fought. And the same damn thing is about to happen again with another beloved luxury food: chocolate.

Continue reading "Don't Mess With My Chocolate!" »

Posted by at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, I get on my train this morning at my usual station, the end-of-the-line terminus at the south end of the valley. The train sits at this stop for 15 minutes or so in between runs, to give people time to actually walk across the immense park 'n' ride lot and get on board, which means that on mornings when I'm one of the first people on -- as I was today -- I get to sit in a mostly empty train car and observe what human beings do when they think no one's around. And today I saw a corker:

There was this corpulent, sour-faced old man in cheap velcro-fastened shoes who apparently doesn't know or doesn't care that you're not supposed to eat on the train. I watched as he pulled a leftover KFC drumstick out of a plastic grocery bag and commenced to chowing down, dropping bits of Extra Crispy coating all over himself and the bench seat on which he'd parked his immense rear. This was mildly annoying, but I see people eating or drinking coffee fairly often in the mornings, so I could let it slide. No, the thing that really got me was that when he finished his breakfast, he carefully placed the bone under the seat in front of him, then got up and moved to another seat.

I debated for some time over whether to go tap him on the shoulder and ask him if he really thought no one had seen him commit his tiny act of ignorant, inconsiderate crappiness, but he looked like the sort who would escalate the situation into something truly ugly. In the end, I wussed out and chose to avoid confrontation. And it's been bothering me ever since... I really should have just faced the argument and let the stupid old son of a bitch have it with both barrels.

Posted by at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It rained a few nights ago, and in the morning, after the storm had blown away, the sky looked as if it had been scoured and burnished. As I walked across the platform toward the light-rail train that was waiting to take me to work, I stopped and looked to the west. The slumped and rounded contours of the Oquirrh Mountains stood out clearly in the sparkling air, as if they were only yards away instead of miles, and all the houses and trees that blanket the valley floor were crisply defined as well. In the northwest corner of the valley, out over the Great Salt Lake, I could see a mass of leftover clouds piled up in a tall, gray heap that was shockingly dark compared to everything around it, and beautiful for the contrast it provided. The world looked clean and refreshed, and it suddenly struck me, as it occasionally does, that I really, really love living in this place where the mountains are so near and the sky so far above.

Unfortunately, the downsides of living in Utah often make an equally strong impression.

Continue reading "Yin and Yang" »

Posted by at 1:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Boing Boing, evidence that we have become a hopelessly decadent society:

...a restaurant in Atlantic City has come up with a $1,000 brownie... Brûlee’s "Brownie Extradordinaire with Saint Louis" is a chocolate brownie made with Italian hazelnuts, dusted with edible gold powder and served with a very rare port. After each bite, the dessert captain squirts a mist of the vintage port on your tongue with a $750 atomizer, which incidentally is yours to keep.

The online menu for this place can be found here, if you want to see how the better one percent lives.

I can't begin to describe how offensively vulgar I find this. I am utterly disgusted by the thought of rich, spoiled bastards with more money than sense ($1K is equal to four payments on my Mustang!) eating a precious-metal-encrusted brownie while a lackey (no doubt dressed in velvets with a powdered wig, just like they did in the good old days before the guillotine spoiled the party) silently stands by to squirt wine into their lazy mouths because they can't be troubled to soil their fingers by lifting a frakking glass. I wonder if the restaurant also offers to complete the whole experience by sending a perfumed peasant home with the diner to wipe their tushy with a napkin of fine Egyptian linen? I imagine the gold powder does improve the aesthetics of the inevitable conclusion, at least.

Posted by at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

About four hours ago, a man walked into Trolley Square, a quaint, relatively tiny Salt Lake City mall, and opened fire with a shotgun. The details are still sketchy, but, as of this writing, six people are confirmed dead, including the gunman, and an unknown number of injured people are in nearby hospitals. The victims have not yet been identified, and authorities have not even specified their genders or ages.

Continue reading "You Never Think It'll Happen in Your Neighborhood" »

Posted by at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've just been reading about a massive new development project that's planned for Lehi, Utah, a town just south of where I grew up, in the next valley over. Up until a few years ago, Lehi was a bucolic farming community where the largest structure of any kind was the old roller mill where Kevin Bacon and his friends staged their high-school dance in the movie Footloose. I used to love driving down that way in my big Ford Galaxie, past the sweet-smelling fields along narrow two-lane (and in some cases, one-lane) roads that were so infrequently travelled that no one had bothered to maintain the lane stripes.

As with so many of the places I knew as a teenager and young adult, however, that Lehi is gone forever. Nowadays Lehi is another anonymous suburban wasteland with some of the most congested traffic conditions along the Wasatch Front (the result of a whole bunch of new residents trying to get to work along those narrow old roads), and it's about to get worse. The planned development is described as an "85-acre 'high-adventure' residential and retail development" that will include the tallest building in Utah, a 450-foot, five-star hotel and convention center. I have no idea what a "high-adventure" residential and retail development is supposed to be, and I can't imagine a less likely place to plant a skyscraper than the wind-swept bluff that divides the Salt Lake Valley from Utah Valley, but here's the really agonizing part: this entire project is being designed by none other than Frank Gehry.

Continue reading "Right in My Own Backyard" »

Posted by at 6:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

So, I'm mentioned yesterday that things haven't been going so well lately. Here's the reason:

On Sunday night, my car got burglarized as it sat in the parking lot at The Girlfriend's apartment complex.

Continue reading "People Suck" »

Posted by at 4:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Man, I must be getting old, because I was genuinely shocked -- shocked, I say! -- during tonight's episode of ER to hear one of our hunky, idealistic young doctors called somebody an asshole. I remember when Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H called someone a bastard -- which is, to my mind, a far less vulgar and offensive term -- and it made headlines. I find myself wondering which expletives still remain on the verboten list for broadcast TV, and how long will it be before that list ceases to exist altogether? And is this a good thing?

I used to think it was cool that TV standards were loosening and that characters were starting to speak more like real people. But now I think this new-found realism comes with a price. You see, these words used to have real power when I was younger, and part of their power was that you only heard them in the movies. You only heard grown-ups use them, and often only under very specific circumstances. Today... well, today profanity just doesn't accomplish much. For example, a certain four-letter word that starts with "f" has become as common in casual conversation as "you know" and "um," and it's just as meaningless. And that bothers me. Not because I'm a prude, but because the word has been drained of its effectiveness. It used to be the ne plus ultra of cussing, the atom bomb of expletives, the one you reserved for extra-special occasions when nothing else was strong enough to make your point. What are we supposed to say now when we've just dropped a sledge hammer on our foot?

I'm telling you, the world has gone to hell. And those kids today... I swear.

Posted by at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I'm thinking today that maybe it was a bad idea for our species to progress beyond vacuum tubes. Hell, I'm so annoyed with my various gadgets that the Industrial Revolution itself is sounding questionable to me. I'm sure that 18th Century farmers, shopkeepers, and blacksmiths rarely felt the need to hurl their tools through the nearest window. But, man, I sure do. Here's why:

1. The keypad on my cell phone has quite suddenly stopped working. I try to scroll through my list of contacts and the buttons either stick or are doing some kind of triple-action or something, because they won't go sequentially from one name to the next. They're leaping across six or seven names at a time.
2. My crappy DVD player seems to think that a request to go to the "episode selection" menu on one of my new Star Trek: The Animated Series DVD is an instruction to go to sleep. I end up with a blue screen that says "Welcome." This is not happening on any of my other DVDs, and the disc that's causing the problem worked fine at The Girlfriend's house last night.
3. I've been having problems accessing Bloglines so I can catch up on what's going on in the world.
4. And, if all that isn't enough, the CD I'm listening to is stuck in the middle of Prince's "Purple Rain" and making an incredibly annoying "wha-wha-wha-wha-wha" sound. Yes, I'm still a pre-iPod Luddite who listens to music in the form of shiny silver discs instead of streams of data. Given the luck I seem to be having with high-tech stuff today, I may just go shopping for a hand-cranked Victrola...

[ADDENDUM: As if I didn't have enough evidence for my argument that we'd all be better off if the quill pen made a comeback, my ISP seems to be having trouble keeping me online today, and Gmail is apparently too colossally cool for my antiquated dial-up connection. As the bimbo character (whose name I can't recall at the moment) frequently remarks in Singin' in the Rain, "I caaaaaan't stanit."]

Posted by at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I have to be honest, I'm not a big fan of Christmas music. Actually, I'm one of those grinchy-scroogey curmudgeons that develops an uncontrollable shoulder-cringe and a twitchy eyelid every year right around November 1st -- which is, not coincidentally, the same day that FM100, our local "lite hits" station, begins its two-month-long all-Christmas, all-the-time format. Now, you may wonder why this affects me in the least since I don't actually listen to FM100. It's the principle of the thing; just knowing that there's a radio station here in the valley that's pumping out not just one but two whole months of every imaginable recording of "Jingle Bells"... well, it just gets to me. Especially if I have to call The Girlfriend at work and spend any time at all on hold, because her employer's hold music is, you guessed it, provided by FM100. Gack.

I think it's the constant, unrelenting tidal-wave effect that really does it. If the Christmas music was spread out, just a song here and there with regular music in between, maybe I could handle it. But as it is, if you find yourself exposed to it, whether on some company's hold-music feed or trapped in a department store somewhere, it just goes on and on and on until you want to strangle the nearest elf with a popcorn-string and then pour curdled eggnog into his open, staring eyes. I find almost the entire genre completely and utterly annoying. Almost. There is a small handful of Christmas songs that I do kinda, sorta like. Because, hey, even I am not immune from sentiment and warm childhood memories and all that crap. So, for your ongoing edification on that most important of all subjects -- my personal tastes -- here are Bennion's Favorite Christmas Songs, complete with a little video treat at the end...

Continue reading "Bennion's Favorite Christmas Songs" »

Posted by at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I took the day off work yesterday so I could hold The Girlfriend's hand while she underwent a minor surgical procedure. Okay, I wasn't allowed to actually hold her hand during the procedure, but I was out in the waiting room the whole time. Well, except for when her mom and I ran over to Village Inn for a quick plate of eggs and bacon with a side of pancakes. But we were there when the doctor came looking for us to tell us we could go see her in the recovery room, and that's what counts, right? In any event, she's doing fine, thanks for wondering.

Later, finding myself with a free afternoon and nothing better to do, I decided to drop into Beans and Brews for a Starbucks-style coffee-and-milk beverage and an hour or so of recreational reading. The particular Beans and Brews I visited is just down the street from a high school, and, as school had just let out for the day, the place was crowded with gangly, gawky young men dressed in their unofficial uniforms of baggy jeans and dark-colored hoodies, all eager to get their daily caffiene buzz on. I slipped through their gauntlet, bought a mochaccino, and found a sofa to settle into with my book.

I'd been reading for a few minutes when I suddenly heard Steve Perry belting out "Don't Stop Believin'." This was a bit puzzling because the coffee-house's PA system had been -- still was, in fact -- playing some anonymously mopey rock song that I couldn't name if you held a gun to my head. I looked around to see who'd brought in a competing music-player... and was surprised to see one of the hooded teenage boys pulling a cellphone from his pocket. The kid was using a song that had charted before he was even conceived as his ringtone. I grinned, thinking to myself that there might be some hope for the future after all.

Then the in-store music switched to an artist I recognized -- Warren Zevon -- and I overheard the young barista telling his friends to listen to the amazingly cool song that was just starting. "I just love this one," he said, "It's called 'Werewolves of Thunder'."

Doh.

I turned my attention back to my book and tried not to feel smugly old...

Posted by at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I get a kick out of UTA (that's the Utah Transit Authority for you out-of-towners). After observing their actions on a more-or-less daily basis for just over a year -- I've been riding Salt Lake's light-rail system to work throughout that time -- I can only conclude that some evil genius has used his psychotronic disassociation ray to reverse the polarity of the organization's institutional brain, so that every decision it makes is exactly the opposite of what it ought to be. Case in point: all summer long, the trains have been running with four cars during the morning rush hour, and they've been far below capacity. Plenty of seating for all the downtown cubicle-monkeys like myself. Now, today, classes are back in session at the University of Utah and a whole bunch of new riders are using this nifty light-rail system to get to campus... and for some reason the trains have dropped one car. Which means all the unwashed masses were cozier than flakes of dolphin-free tuna in light oil this morning.

So, let's review: summertime, fewer riders, lots of cars; schooltime, more riders, fewer cars. Can anyone explain the logic process here? Anyone? Anyone at all? Yeah, that's what I thought...

Posted by at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've believed for some time now that we Americans are turning ourselves into a nation of infantilized wussies. Seriously. We worry constantly about achieving "closure" for every little childhood trauma, we dress ourselves in soft 'n' cuddly fleece outfits that resemble nothing so much as overgrown jammies (all they need are the sewn-in feet), and we're downright obsessed with safety. Cops pulling you over for not wearing your seatbelt, those obnoxious seals that have to be removed from all of our food and medicine containers, warnings on the sides of our coffee cups that the contents may be hot (duh!)... it's enough to make me want to run out and do something positively reckless, like run with the bulls in Pamplona or wave freshly baked cupcakes at the women coming out of Gold's Gym.

Continue reading "Remember, We Survived" »

Posted by at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Okay, the following is a bit of a departure from this week's Talkin' Books theme, but it's so in line with my general philosophy that I thought it bore immediate repeating here. From a blog called Hooptyrides comes the Idiots Rule:

Everything you love, everything meaningful with depth and history, all passionate authentic experiences will be appropriated, mishandled, watered down, cheapened, repackaged, marketed and sold to the people you hate.

--Mr. Jalopy

Yep, that about says it all...

[Ed. note: Actually, on re-reading the source of this quote I see that the original entry was actually "Idiots Rule," not "The Idiots Rule." That puts a slightly different spin on things, doesn't it? Oh well, I still agree with the sentiment...]

Posted by at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

For the record, I did not write the following. Somebody sent it to me via e-mail, along with the usual daily batch of unfunny joke-type spams. However, this certainly seems in the spirit of something I would write, and it amused Anne when I showed it to her, so I'm going to post it up here. I've done some minor editing to correct eccentric capitalization and such, so apologies to whoever originally wrote it:

Continue reading "Five Minutes in 1980" »

Posted by at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Sometimes it's not easy, living in Utah.

My home state is scenically beautiful, it has an interesting history and a pleasantly varied climate, and for a relatively small city, Salt Lake actually boasts a disproportionately (and surprisingly) large number of cultural amenities. But the rest of the world never seems to talk about these things. No, when you hear about Utah in the national press or popular culture, it's always something to do with polygamy or green Jello or the eccentricities of the predominant local faith. Or it's something ugly and embarassing like the current flap over Larry H. Miller yanking the acclaimed film Brokeback Mountain from the schedule of his Megaplex theaters because it was too gay for his tastes.

Continue reading "Miller's Folly" »

Posted by at 1:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

[Ed. note: if you're squeamish about harsh language, be wary. F-bombs and other nastiness follows.]

Last night, right around the time I was posting the previous entry, I was startled by a sudden noise at my bedroom window. It was sort of like that sickening whump you hear when a bird ends its life against a pane of glass, but it also had a tinkling quality to it. The sound of something breaking.

For a brief, confused moment, I thought something had fallen inside the house, that a delicate knick-knack had somehow slipped off a shelf or something. But then I realized that my first impression was correct; something had hit the window. And I had a pretty good idea of what it must've been, too... you don't usually get birds flying around at 11.30 at night, and I haven't seen a bat around my neighborhood in years.

Continue reading "Incoming!" »

Posted by at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

At the conclusion of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Dr. McCoy remarks that the bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe. It's taken me years to completely figure out what he meant, but I think I finally get it. What old Bones is saying is that the world is filled with small-minded, mid-level-management types whose only purpose in life is to squash the unorthodox and ensure that everyone does everything "by the book." These gray-skinned, unimaginative little beings live and die by their rules, their time clocks, and their almighty god, Procedure. Their thought processes are inflexible and binary in nature; they think in terms of black and white, on or off, one way or the other. They abhor the idea of a third possibility or an exception to the rules because it overloads their limited minds and interferes with their hardwired purpose, which is to use what little power they've been granted by the greater beings above them to enforce their mindless and impersonal regulations.

So, you're wondering, what's got ol' Bennion riled up today? Nothing, except being awakened by the raspy buzz of a chainsaw, which was busily mutilating this wonder of nature:

Continue reading "The Bureaucratic Mentality Vs. My Mother's Trumpet Vine" »

Posted by at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

I'm hardly an advocate for national chains and big-box stores, but I have to admit that I'm pretty bummed about the impending demise of Media Play. I learned that the book, music, and video stores are going out of business when I dropped into the West Valley City location yesterday to do a little Christmas shopping and saw big red clearance-sale posters everywhere. (FYI: if you live near a Media Play, everything in the store is currently 20-40% off, and those prices will no doubt drop even lower as the final day approaches.) I've spent a lot of money at these stores over the last ten or fifteen years; a sizable chunk of my extensive VHS and DVD collections came from there, and not a few of my toys and collectibles, too. In recent years, I've increasingly done my movie-and-music shopping online, which makes me as culpable for the chain's failure as any other factor. However, on the occasions when I do visit a brick-and-mortar retailer, I prefer Media Play to any of the other options here in the Salt Lake Valley. Media Play's biggest local competitor, Best Buy, may have lower prices, but their DVD selection is consistently inferior; they usually stock hundreds of copies of the hot new releases, but it's tough to find even a single example of the older films and offbeat stuff I'm often looking for.

In addition, I don't care for the atmosphere inside Best Buy stores. The tall alleyways in the movie section are claustrophobic, and some idiot is always volume-testing the stereos with the most annoying music he can find. These stores are very much designed for the hip, young, and attention-deficit-disordered among us, with lots of flashy, shiny things that I imagine are designed to overstimulate the senses to the point where you don't notice your wallet flying open. Or something. I guess I'm showing my age, because I'm far more comfortable with Media Play's lower-key approach, their bright, clean lighting, and their chest-high display bins that let you gaze out over a sea of merchandise to the other side of the store, if you wish. It's an atmosphere that encourages browsing, and The Girlfriend and I have often enjoyed a pleasant hour of wandering in between dinner and the beginning of our movies. The clamor-and-din of Best Buy, on the other hand, makes me want to run in, grab some specific item, then get the hell out. I guess this is just one more thing for me to gripe about when I start boring the kids about all the ways that life used to be better when I was their age.

For the record, all 61 Media Play stores will be closed by late January, displacing some 2000 employees in 18 states. Happy New Year, people.

Posted by at 5:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I used to think, back in the dark old days of the Reagan era, that human civilization would most likely end in an instant of nuclear fire, one brief flash of horrible beauty and destruction followed by eternal silence and ashes. After this morning's commute, however, I've decided the end is going to come more slowly and far less spectacularly, in a prolonged struggle without end that fools us all into thinking we're making progress and moving ahead, when in reality we're just creeping our lives away inch by inch as we all slowly go mad.

I've decided, in other words, that humanity's end will come in one colossal traffic jam.

I can see it all now... future archeologists from an alien civilization pondering the bizarre death rituals that would require each individual to be wrapped in a sarcaphogus of steel and plastic and placed on a long ribbon of concrete running between our cities. Would they assume we wanted to keep our dead near us, above ground and in plain sight? Would they assume we shared some mythological vision of the dead travelling onward to our final destination? Perhaps the other seats within these sarcaphogi were intended for symbolic passengers, or beings that we thought we'd pick up along the way. The scraps and crumbs littering the floor and control surfaces of the sarcophagi would surely be interpreted as symbolic meals to feed the travelers on their journey into the afterlife, while the various electronic devices plugged into the mummified ears of the deceased were perhaps intended to provide a way for the living to speak to the dead. I suspect these future scientists from another world will shake their heads at the sad superstitions that left we foolish humans so isolated, so wedded to the idea of perpetual motion despite the ironic fact that we really weren't getting anywhere at all.

Yes, I can see it all... and I think I'm going to take the train to work the rest of this week.

Posted by at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Responding to a sudden whim this afternoon, I walked over to Night Flight Comics on my lunch hour. It's been a while since I've hung out at a comic shop, longer, perhaps, than I'd realized. Browsing the new issues, knowing that I'd be coming into the middle of all those stories with no idea of what was happening, seeing new titles I didn't recognize at all -- not to mention how damn young the store's employees seemed relative to myself -- it all made me feel something like a college student who has returned to his old high school for one last, sentimental look around. It hasn't been that long ago that this place was home, but it's been just long enough. Things are different now.

I ultimately selected a book I've had my eye on for a couple of years, a nifty trade paperback collection of the '70s-vintage Star Wars comics that I loved as a child. When I laid it on the counter along with my debit card, the shaggy-haired clerk in the Green Lantern shirt noticed the familiar logo and asked a sadly predictable question: "What did you think of Episode III?"

I had to hold my breath to keep from sighing. I wasn't in the mood to have this debate, not today, not again.

Continue reading "Weary of the Fight" »

Posted by at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday, John Scalzi wrote in his AOL Journal about the difficulty of being expected to produce what he calls a "variety show" -- meaning lots of entries about many different and mostly lightweight subjects -- while Something Big is going down in the world:

...it's causing me some real cognitive dissonance to have an entry [about] the complete horror of what's developing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and an entry about cats in a sink, right next to each other. I'm feeling mildly guilty about talking about cats in a sink at all.

I'm experiencing much the same kind of angst myself, actually. I've been looking at my last couple of published entries and thinking about the topics I'm planning to write about in upcoming ones, and suddenly I feel like I've got some really screwed-up priorities, like I'm a modern-day Marie Antoinette or something. Huge numbers of people are dying pathetic deaths right here in our own country and I'm writing about fake zombies and space movies, for god's sake. It's frivolous, isn't it? A sign of a superficial personality? Do I have a responsibility to use my abilities and my little public forum here to acknowledge what's happening? Am I being disrespectful to the victims of Katrina if I don't?

Continue reading "Overwhelmed, and Craving the Peace of 1985" »

Posted by at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Writer Peter David tells a heartbreaking story today about a little boy who loves Spider-Man. He wears Spidey-branded shoes, plays the Spidey video game, owns the Spider-Man movies on DVD and regularly watches the animated series on the Cartoon Network. But he's never read a Spider-Man comic. Even worse, he has no interest in reading one. Zero. Zip. The very source of the character and stories that he's made the center of his young life holds as much appeal for seven-year-old Steven as sitting through a grad-school lecture on macroeconomics. (Not that a lecture on macroeconomics holds much appeal for anybody except the tiniest handful, but you get my point.)

It is stories like this that are propelling me down the road to premature Grumpy Old Man-hood.

Continue reading "Kids Today..." »

Posted by at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been planning to write something about the recent death of TV news anchorman Peter Jennings, but I obviously haven't gotten around to it yet. My plan was to follow my usual obituary schtick and be simultaneously nostalgic and curmudgeonly as I discussed how Jennings' passing marks the end of an era, which was, of course, a better time than our current Dark Age of debased superficiality. But it looks like someone has already beaten me to that angle:

...it seems certain that, at least stylistically, Jennings will have no heir. News managers today aren't looking to hire Cary Grant, the man of distinction; they're looking for Matt LeBlanc, the dude next door. In fact, if young reporters in 2005 were to emulate the air of aristocracy that rocketed Peter Jennings to stardom two decades ago, they'd likely be shown the door. Q-score focus groups interpret urbanity as snobbery these days, which may be why Jennings himself lost ratings supremacy to Tom Brokaw when the glamorous 1980s gave way to the naturalistic '90s. Once the millennium arrived, forget it: His brand of romantic persona had been supplanted by Britney Spears making pig noses and reality-TV contestants eating and vomiting up live worms. ...Male news anchors no longer exude savoir-faire... because Hollywood actors no longer exude it. Yesteryear's debonair hero has passed the torch to today's cute goofball mensch: Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Ashton Kutcher.

That's from a piece on Salon called "Peter Jennings and the Death of Panache", by Richard Speer. It's worth a read, if you don't mind sitting through a commercial to get to it. (Sorry, Salon's difficult that way.)

Continue reading "What the Hell Happened to Sophistication?" »

Posted by at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The previous entry on home theaters started me thinking about consumer video technology, specifically the preferred video format of the moment, the DVD.

I've been collecting DVDs for about five years now. I wasn't what you'd call an early adopter of the technology, but I did get in on it before it became hugely popular and started suffering the problems that inevitably come with ramped-up manufacturing and "lowest-common denominator" thinking. (Yes, I am a bit of a snob when it comes to these things, and I do think it's fair to say that DVD content and overall presentation was much smarter when the format was still a niche market. But that's a rant for another time.) At this point, I own roughly 230 unique DVD titles, comprising both movies and television programming, and I think my collection includes a pretty good sampling of product from all the major DVD producers, except maybe Disney. (I don't have kids and I'm not a big animation fan, so very few Disney offerings appeal to me.)

What's interesting about all of this -- aside from the value of idle boasting, of course -- is that the size and diversity of my collection has allowed me to recognize distinct differences in the product coming from each of the major labels. Just like each studio was known for making a particular kind of film back in Hollywood's Golden Age, so too are their modern descendents easy to equate with specific DVD characteristics.

Continue reading "Of Poor Quality and Big Stupid Cylon Heads" »

Posted by at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't have time to go into detail right now, and my senses of propriety and self-preservation would prevent me from naming names anyhow. But I want to vent briefly about something:

It absolutely infuriates me when someone else's mistakes wind up inconveniencing me, especially when those mistakes are due to stupidity and/or disorganization that could have and should have been avoided.

No, I can't elaborate further. Suffice it to say that I've had a long, shitty day and I'm tired of having long, shitty days and being told "that's just how it is" when I complain about them. That may be how it is, but it isn't how it should be, and one of these days I'm going to figure out how to make things more like the latter than the former.

That is all. You may now resume your regularly scheduled Web surfing. Sorry to be a tease...

Posted by at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As I promised at the end of the previous entry, I'd like to say a few things about Dirk Benedict's essay on the new Battlestar Galactica series. Be warned that things go off into some distinctly ranty territory toward the end. I didn't intend to rant when I first started writing this, but I got on a roll and managed to say a few things I've been trying to think of how to say, so take it or leave it at your discretion.

Continue reading "Thoughts on Starbuck's Thoughts" »

Posted by at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Before I proceed with my long-promised review of the new Battlestar Galactica remake series, there's something I want to get off my chest: I am really sick and tired of the way every article I read about the new show starts out by trashing the original series. What is it about American culture that we can't complement one thing without denigrating something else? It's almost like one of Newton's laws -- for every positive word spoken there must be an equal and opposite insult.

TV Guide is especially guilty of this kind of needless hostility. For example, in next week's issue, critic Matt Roush begins his comments about the new show's season ender by saying, "If anyone had predicted a year ago that I'd be hooked on a new version of Battlestar Galactica -- that cheesily juvenile and insipid 'Star Wars' wannabe from the late '70s -- I'd have laughed."

That sort of remark is all too common in the press on Neo-G, and it really pisses me off.

Continue reading "Neo-Galactica, Part 2: The Rant" »

Posted by at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

When I was pondering the other day what purposes this blog serves for me, I forgot one very important function: it gives me a place to publicly voice my frustration at the knuckleheaded, market-driven, focus-grouped, pre-packaged mediocrity that festers in the heart of our culture, draining the passion from anything new, leeching the originality out of anything cool, and digesting everything into a soft, flavorless gruel of miserable disappointment.

What, you may be asking, has Bennion's knickers tied into such a painful little knot this afternoon? Why, it's nothing more than a glimpse I caught yesterday of a poster for an upcoming movie, a little summertime trifle called Sahara.

Continue reading "Coming Soon to a Theater Near You..." »

Posted by at 6:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The frequent visitor to Simple Tricks has probably noticed that I am prone to frequent and often uncontrollable attacks of nostalgia. What can I say? I'm well on my way to becoming one of those boring old farts who is convinced that the modern world is going to hell in a bucket and that everything was much better back in the day. As near as I can tell, this process of codgerification began right around the time kids started to talk about something called "grunge" and could no longer identify Night Ranger as the band who recorded "Sister Christian." The rate of decay accelerated to light-speed when I realized that most of them couldn't even identify "Sister Christian."

In that vein of grimly humorous pop-cultural disenfranchisement, allow me to present the lyrics for my new theme song, a little ditty called "1985" by the band Bowling for Soup. It may help you better understand where I'm coming from. At the very least, it will give you something to read while I continue banging away at a very long political post...

Continue reading "My New Theme Song" »

Posted by at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

It's one of those days when there's so much stupidity floating around that I don't know what I should be outraged at first.

Continue reading "Wednesday Afternoon Rant" »

Posted by at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Just in case you were wondering, Anne and her folks got back from their big Church history tour last night. I was waiting at the airport to collect them, marvelling at the colossal lack of style shown by most of the people around me. I'm not exactly George Clooney in the sartorial department, but most people these days seem to travel in their gym clothes -- sweatpants, sweatshirts, hoodies, t-shirts, wifebeaters, and ball caps. Everything loose-fitting, untucked, often several sizes too big. The look was so common last night that the occasional pair of jeans was remarkable, and the lone gentlemen in a sport coat and tie was downright startling. (He was an older man, of course, old enough to remember when t-shirts were considered to be undergarments only.) Most of the athletic outfits were nondescript and without obvious logos, but then there was the family of gang-banger wannabes that was dressed head-to-toe in Oakland Raiders-wear. An entire family -- late-twentysomething mom and dad, a tall boy about ten or twelve and a younger boy, maybe seven or eight years old -- garbed in officially-licensed, Raider-branded black-and-gray. Dad wore an expensive-looking leather team jacket; mom had a slightly-less pricey fleece version. And all of them wore those ubiquitous nylon workout pants with the snaps down the sides of the legs. They must've spent a small fortune at Fanzz to acquire all that stuff.

Continue reading "Return of the Girlfriend" »

Posted by at 1:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Labor Day, the traditional end of summer, is almost a week behind us. Soon our noses will tingle with the scent of burning leaves and our ears will be filled with the papery rustle of dry corn stalks. It's time to trade the seersucker for flannels and put away those white shoes for another year...

Continue reading "Lament for a Summer Ended" »

Posted by at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My friend Cheno has relayed to me an interesting bit of gossip: it seems that employees of George Lucas' special-effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, were recently asked to sign non-disclosure agreements that forbid them from speaking publicly about Star Wars episodes seven, eight and nine. What does that mean? Well, it could mean that The Great Flanneled One is planning to make more Star Wars movies following next spring's Revenge of the Sith.

No doubt this possibility has a lot of Internet fanboy-types wetting their pants with glee, but I myself am having a far more subdued reaction. My first thought is that I'll believe in the legendary "final trilogy" about the time I start seeing trailers for a fourth Indiana Jones film, another long-rumored fanboy wet dream. My second thought is that I hope these films never get made.

Continue reading "Episodes VII, VIII and IX? No, Thanks..." »

Posted by at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"This is an important day," the teacher said. "Do you know why, Virginia?"

"Today is important, Virginia, because thirty-five years ago on this date, human beings did something that previous generations had not thought possible: they walked on the Moon."

Continue reading "One Small Step" »

Posted by at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This irritates me something fierce. Four years ago, a theater student at the University of Utah, Christina Axson-Flynn, raised a stink because she thought it was unreasonable for her professors to expect her to swear when the script she was performing from required it. When Axson-Flynn (who is Mormon) couldn't convince her professors to see her point-of-view, she did what every American is apparently required to do at least once in their lives and filed a lawsuit, alleging that the U. is biased against Mormons.

Continue reading "Know What You're Getting Into" »

Posted by at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

James Lileks had some interesting thoughts this morning about film, specifically about the subjective nature of comedy, and how well (or how poorly) a film plays to an audience a couple of generations removed from the intended one.

He's discussing one of the later Marx Brothers movies when he says:

Continue reading "Ephermal Film" »

Posted by at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

When I was a kid in the 1970s and early '80s, much of the landscape I called "home" was rural. Open space was always nearby, even if you lived in downtown Salt Lake City, and out on the edges of the valley where my family was located, there were far more hay fields than housing developments. It was a comfortable, worn-in landscape that soothed the eye and fit the body like a really old pair of jeans.

Everything started to change in the mid '80s, when a few subdivisions sprang up in the pastures of retiring farmers whose children didn't want to continue working the land. These were followed by a shopping center or two, and then a couple of new stop lights to handle the increased car traffic. No big deal, it seemed... there were still plenty of fields, and the sweet smell of alfalfa in the air, and the same old dirt roads and open irrigation ditches and sluggish canals there had always been. But change was coming. These small building projects were, in fact, the beginning of a massive and uncontrollable chain reaction, like the first couple of flying neutrons that lead to a full-scale nuclear blast.

Continue reading "Score One for Preservation" »

Posted by at 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Remember how only a few days ago I was grumbling that TV networks no longer give new series a chance? Well, here's proof of my point: CBS has cancelled the promising new science fiction/legal drama Century City after a mere four episodes.

Continue reading "Stupid TV Executives" »

Posted by at 1:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've been reading all over the 'net that today is the tenth anniversary of the suicide of Kurt Cobain, the troubled, heroin-addled lead singer of the seminal grunge band Nirvana. Two of my favorite bloggers, John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton, have commented on this event in heartfelt, if somewhat ambivalent, entries. Personally, I feel no ambivalence on this subject.

I don't care.

I didn't care about Cobain when he was alive, I didn't care when I first heard he was dead, and I certainly don't care that it's been a decade since his death.

Continue reading "The Fuss Over Cobain" »

Posted by at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There's a column in today's Salt Lake Trib in which television columnist Vince Horiuchi comments upon the decline of the traditional TV "season." If you'll cast your mind back to the Good Ol' Days™, you may recall that new programming used to run in one big consecutive block that lasted, roughly, from fall through spring, with re-runs airing during the summer. That's no longer the case, which Horiuchi thinks is a good thing. I'm not so sure myself.

Continue reading "The Demise of the Traditional TV Season" »

Posted by at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)