bjciii: My twisted thoughts

So you are looking at your schedule for a day maybe 2 or 3 weeks from now. You see you’re pretty much tied up from waking up until around 4:30. Then you’re busy again from 6 on out until you fall asleep. You know you need a haircut, so you call up and schedule an appointment for 5pm. Those 2 or 3 weeks pass and you’re as busy as your schedule said, but now your hair is much shaggier than you thought it would be. Good thing I got that appointment to get it cut, you say as you muss up your hair in the rear-view mirror while you’re driving to work. So quitting time rolls around, and you hop in the car to head to the appointment du haircut. When you get there, you sit down and wait. And wait. And wait. 5 minutes. 10 minutes. 15 minutes pass and you’re thinking Why the fuck did I make an appointment in the first damned place?

It’s not just people getting haircuts though… it’s dinner reservations. It’s doctor’s appointments. It’s practically anything that you have to rely on someone else to make it timely. Unfortunately, just because you keep yourself on time and on schedule, it doesn’t mean that the rest of the world gives a shit! They will do what they want, when they want, for as long as they want regardless of your carefully crafted (and overly anal) schedule.

It’s quite frustrating to know that you’ve done all you can to keep things moving along and you can get everything thrown off by some asshole who just can’t read a watch. It’s truly a “butterfly effect” type of situation though. The person who throws your schedule off might be thrown off by another who was thrown off by another who was originally thrown off by some dipshit who overslept and couldn’t get to his or her job in time to turn the coffee grinder on.

Can you guess if I was forced to be late today?

Barry Bonds hit #715 today to pass Babe Ruth on the Major League Baseball all-time homerun list. He’s 40 back from tying “Hammerin’” Hank Aaron, so let’s all collectively hold our breath until he does that.

What a piece of shit Bonds is… Babe Ruth hit his 714 homers in a time where he was a fat drunk and played less games in a season. There were actually seasons where he hit more homeruns himself than several of the teams combined. Hey, I give all the respect in the world to Hank Aaron and I believe he should be righteously pissed off if Barry “Steroid Poster Boy 2006″ Bonds even gets close to him. Aaron suffered through a hell of a lot more than Bonds has and I believe his record deserves to stand.

For the record… I don’t like Bonds and never have. I’m guessing you could tell.

Over the last hour I have seen some of the worst American society has to offer. Ryan and I watched Dateline and it happened to be the time where they had “decoy” internet kids offer no resistance to the come-ons of internet predators. I will admit that I laughed at how stupid a lot of these men were, but then there were two…

One guy showed up to what he thought was a 14 year old girl’s house. What did he bring? Rope and duct tape. Now that is chilling to the bone isn’t it? Imagine what he’d have done if the Dateline host didn’t set him up. I mean, that’s an awful sobering thought.

Another guy, hoping to meet a 14 year old boy, showed up to the house… with his toddler son. Yes Virginia, there is a sick puppy. He goes for a sexual liason with a “boy” he met on the internet and he brings his son with him. Needless to say that one isn’t getting free any time soon.

So after viewing all of that on the TV, our last customer of the night walks in asking to “borrow” $1.50 for beer. Yeah. I put borrow in quotations because he planned on paying us back the same way I planned on paying back all the guys I bummed change from in high-school. Didn’t happen. Anyway, that in itself isn’t a horrible problem, but then he said “Well I have the money in change, but I was saving it so I could take the bus to the doctor’s for an appointment tomorrow. If I walk, it will take me 40 minutes.” I then, helpfully, said “Then why don’t you save that money for the bus and not get beer then?” The most depressing thing said to me all day? “Eh… I’d rather have the beer.”

This guy would rather either NOT go to the doctor’s office OR walk 40 minutes to get there simply for a Busch 6-pack of cans.

What the hell is wrong with people?! Here’s some simple rules for you to follow as I’ve seen them play out in front of me. Ready?

• If you have to borrow money to drink, you’ve got a problem.
• If you have to pay for alcohol in change (and I’m not talking about you putting a $10 bill in the change machine at a bar to play pool and then realizing you don’t have a shot at getting a table), you’ve got a problem.
• If you drag your slovenly child with you to the liquor store and elect to spend money on a half-pint instead of milk for said child… you’ve got a rather large problem.
• If you see the liquor store clerk more than once a day (and that last guy saw me twice today… and I only was there 3 hours)? Well, let’s face it, you’ve got a rather large problem as well.

I don’t get it. I guess I was brought up correctly by some really great people and that is why I just don’t understand why people do the stupid shit they do. I just felt the need to vent before I hunkered down and watchedthe Lost season finale. Hope I didn’t depress you too much.

So there’s this piece of shit hick congregation from Kansas who has taken it upon themselves to protest military funerals because they believe that God hates homosexuals and is punishing our country by allowing servicemen and servicewomen to be killed in the war. So what do they do? They show up with placards that read “Vengence Is Mine Sayeth the Lord” and “God Hates Fags.” Now I remember a huge hulabaloo when Sebastian Bach (formerly of the New Jersey metal band Skid Row) wore a shirt that was a parody of the old “RAID kills bugs dead” that read “AIDS kills fags dead.” He was lambasted in the press for a long time and forced to apologize. These people hide their hate-speech behind a thin veil of religion and are allowed to do and say whatever they want with no retribution.

Before I continue… understand that I respect and believe in our Constitution and the First Amendment that I seem to be toeing the line on here. I firmly believe that everyone has a right to their opinion and everyone has a right to voice that opinion. However, I also firmly believe that our “guaranteed rights” as American citizens are based upon the principle that I have the right to do and say what I want providing it doesn’t infringe upon the rights of another.

This Seaford, DE family was burying their 20 year old son who fought and died for our country and they deserve the right to NOT hear hate-speech spewed towards them while just trying to say goodbye to their boy.

This is where I believe The First Amendment needs to be tucked away for about 20 minutes and baseball bats are brought out. I go on record right here, right now stating that if a relative of mine (God forbid) ever was killed in the line of duty and these assholes showed up at the funeral? Let’s just say that I really hope you will all donate money to my defense fund becaue I will kill someone. NO ONE deserves that at a funeral. It’s quite possibly the toughest thing they will ever have to do (even more so when you’re burying a child) and to have a bunch of redneck radicals spouting off like that is unnecessary and unwarranted.

I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done, if you are alive, then you have a mother and a father somewhere. My parents always tell me that there’s nothing I can do that will stop them from loving me and I believe it. I see my friends with their children and I believe it there too. So what right is “guaranteed” to a bunch of hate-mongers that forces grieving loved ones to listen to such shit while their heart is breaking? I tell ya folks… humanity is supposed to be the greatest achievement God made. It’s stories like this that makes me very sad at that fact.

Yesterday was “Employee Recognition Day” and I thought it was going to be some big joke with no redeeming value. I was, fortunately, completely wrong.

Basically all of the full-time employees got together and received awards for distinguished service and achievement accolades punctuated by a few speeches. Yes, there were people speaking and not every word held everyone’s attention, but once I realized what I was actually there for, my cynicism left almost completely. Here we were, corralled together by the bosses to be thanked for our daily jobs. People received pins (or something) for 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, & 35 years of service and it struck me: People WANT to stay here. People want to stay here because, even though everyone wishes they didn’t have to work, here was a place that fostered loyalty by showing their employees that they mattered.

That inspires me.

I’m not going into details because you long-time readers all know about my past experiences, but this was a new one for me. Every day I’m here I feel rewarded somehow and I’m happy to get to work in the morning. Then they bus us all to a completely different place to reward us, feed us, and entertain us to show us how much we really mean to them.

So utterly foreign, yet so completely right. This is the place I want to be. It’s funny how some places never really understand that. It’s not always about money or prizes… it’s just about the right person coming up to you and saying “Thanks. You’re doing a great job.” Moreover, it’s not just the words, but the sincerity behind it that really matters. I guess I really am blessed.

I’m just evil sometimes.

I had this 2 hour discussion on Mother’s Day with my parents on why I BLOG and I made a point that sometimes I write about controversial issues because I really enjoy seeing how people react. Certain subjects I will go the exact opposite way from how I feel only because I want to see who will reply and how they will do it. It’s just fun to stir up those emotions sometimes.

For a brief example: I have a friend who posted something on her BLOG about someone she has dealings with. I don’t know ANYONE in her circle of friends, yet I posted a rather inflammatory comment in an attempt to ward off any flamers from lambasting her. Of course I did it knowing that I’d be able to redirect any problems they might have with what she wrote towards me because, well, again I don’t know anyone she runs with and I don’t really care what they think about me. He saw my comment and replied to it in a very pseudo-intellectual way. God it was funny. I sat and laughed about it because here I was, pushing the buttons of someone I couldn’t pick out of a lineup with a gun to my head, and he was unnerved by me. Tee-hee.

In any case, I love causing trouble

It took the entire ride home debating the movie with Chris to discover that Mission: Impossible III would have been bad regardless of who starred in it. Yes, I hate Tom Cruise and I really hoped that THAT would be my excuse for why I didn’t like the movie, but it wasn’t. This movie was just plain bad.

I blame it on Jack Bauer.

When Mission: Impossible II came out all those years ago, there was no FOX television show called 24 that captivated audiences. Our version of a spy or a secret-agent was all about Hollywood and the big-budget movie. Now we’ve got Jack Bauer every Monday night and, next to him, all others pale in comparison. Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt was just plain boring. There was no sequence like Mission: Impossible when they raided Langley. There was no coherent plot to hold us. It was basically “this is what happens when Ethan isn’t globetrotting around trying to save the day and this is what happens when the two worlds collide.” There was one saving grace however:

Philip Seymour Hoffman

If he wasn’t in the movie, I swear to you, I would have walked out of the theatre. Anyone who knows me knows that I have seen MORE than my fair share of movies in the theatre. I’ve seen stinkers and I’ve seen champs. Since I was able to make my own decisions about movies, I have only walked out on one (1) movie. That movie was not the horrible Blankman or the equally bad series of movies that Wade and I suffered through that starred Jet Li. No, that movie was the 1986 movie Gung Ho staring Michael Keaton. Brian Silverio and I were 10 years old at the (now closed) Christiana Mall theatre and were so incredibly bored, we simply got up and went to the old arcade (also now closed). So, knowing that history… the fact that I have only walked out in 1 movie over the past 20 years, you know how bad this was when I was willing to actually do it.

I won’t recap the plot because, let’s face it, there wasn’t one. I won’t list the characters because the only 2 that actually matter are Philip Seymour Hoffman’s incredible villan and Keri Russel’s IMF agent. Even my man Ving Rhames fell flat in this one. I really tried to ask myself If it were anyone BUT Tom Cruise, would I have liked it? I had to honestly answer myself “No. No I would not.”

Don’t waste your $9.50 to see it. Wait until it hits the premium cable rounds and you can’t get off the couch because you’re too tired to move. That’s about the only way you’ll be able to tolerate it.

You are walking out of a grocery store and you see two people breaking into a car (not yours). You manage to get a pretty good look at them, so you relate that to the police after the thieves get away. Here is the description:

Male wearing a baggy white shirt, blue jeans, brown shoes. Dark hair. Standing about 6’0″

Male wearing a baggy hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans, white sneakers. Blonde hair. Standing about 5’9″

How quickly do you think they’re gonna get caught based on that description?

My home state’s newspaper decided that it was “racist” to list the ethnicities of any person suspected of a crime. Now, reading the above statements, the vast majority of you will come to believe the second suspect was a white male simply because of the blonde hair. Keeping that in mind, what can you fill in about the first suspect?

Not much.

Our societal biases will lead us to believe a race depending on what we’ve personally experienced, but that is dangerous when trying to collect tips to solve a crime. “Dark hair” is a feature of every single ethnicity on the planet. By using that two-word description, the newspaper is not only not narrowing down the suspects, but they are increasing suspect pool! Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, or Indian… which one do you think could have done it?

Now imagine the paper actually grows a set of balls, thinks logically, and posts the following descriptions instead:

White Male wearing a baggy white shirt, blue jeans, brown shoes. Dark hair. Standing about 6’0″

Black Male wearing a baggy hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans, white sneakers. Blonde hair. Standing about 5’9″

I don’t know about you, but a black guy with blonde hair would kind of stick out wouldn’t he? Knowing that the “dark haired” suspect is white also eliminates a ton of suspects… so why isn’t it done? It just really disgusts me that the Politically Correct Nazis are so glued into society now that it’s almost impossible to get anything done without worrying about hurting someone’s feelings. I say: Fuck ‘em all. If some guy’s feelings get hurt and a killer gets caught, are you going to lose any sleep?

I used to, on my Comcast site, have a “Desert Island Top 5″ webpage. You know what I’m talking about… Someone asks you: If you were stranded on a desert island, what 5 [fill in the blank] would you want to have with you?

On my page, I had top 5 books, albums, movies, and television shows. Of course that page didn’t make “the cut” on this new site, so I just mothballed the whole idea. Well today I was listening to WAAF (out of Boston, MA) and they played “Once” from Pearl Jam’s Ten. It struck me just how amazing that album really was and how that made my list once upon a time. So here is my list for the Top 5 Music Albums.

5. Guns ‘n’ Roses – Appetitie for Destruction. Truly a watershed album for hard rock, AfD introduced the world to the psychotic W. Axl Rose and the band of miscreants (originally featuring Steven Adler, Duff McKagan, Izzy Stradlin, and Saul “Slash” Hudson). An amazingly produced album featuring a microcosm of the day’s music. Amazing stuff.

4. Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker – Live at Carnegie Hall. This is the only jazz album I’ve ever owned and it was a complete “impulse buy.” I listened to it the first time and was just blown away at the sheer musicality of the main players. Diz & The Bird were at the top of their game in my opinion and really turned me on to jazz.

3. Nirvana – Nevermind. While not the first “grunge” band to make it to the mainstream, this album was definitely the most popular and talked about. Oddly enough, it’s not even the best one, but it was just so “real” at that time that it caused many people to open their eyes and face them towards Seattle. I actually don’t remember a major Nirvana release being bad, but this was the best of the bunch.

2. Pearl Jam – Ten. Nirvana had the cool kids popularity and Soundgarden had the hard-edge for the scary kids, but Pearl Jam held everyone. This album has yet to be matched by any of their other releases and it probably won’t be ever matched by them. I equate it to a break-out rookie of the year season, but the rest of the career is a good, solid career unmarked by any huge spikes of brilliance. Ten, however, was an amazing album where every single song was unbelievable on its own (until MTV overplayed “Jeremy” of course… but that wasn’t their fault).

1. U2 – The Joshua Tree. For my money, this album was, by far and away, the greatest musical achievement in recorded history. Okay, how about in the last hundred years or so? My point is that you will be extremely hard-pressed to find a better written, played, or produced album in the world today. From beginning to end, this album can be listened to over and over until the media gives way before you ever begin to tire of it. Unlike Pearl Jam’s Ten, The Joshua Tree featured songs that actually got better the more they were played by MTV! While “Jeremy” got tedious after the hundreth time, “Where the Streets Have No Name” still captures the heart and gives the audience goosebumps. Unreal how that happens…

Anyway, bring on the criticism folks… I’m a big boy. I can take it.

I spent most of my day proof-reading a 60 page Master’s paper on female juvenile delinquency. My head was pounding! I also managed to fit in a few television shows after I finished up work tonight (actually last night as we’re now past the ol’ Midnight hour) and I got angry with ABC.

More and more television stations are stretching their shows past the allotted cut time which screws up the TiVos and DVRs of the world. They are programmed to stop at a set time, but if ABC or FX or NBC or whatever decides to start 30 seconds early or end 1 minute later, you miss it. Computers are logic and it will only do what is asked of it. The bastards at the networks are doing everything they can to kill off “delayed viewing” because they know that those of us who record television and do things outside of the house only to watch that stuff later, well… we most always skip (or fast-forward) through the commercials. Commercials pay their bills, we don’t watch ‘em… do the math. Also, it’s a ploy to up the ratings of a particular show so it can command a higher advertising revenue for the show’s commercial slots.

It’s quite saavy actually, but it doesn’t go on and actually help me now that I missed the tail end of Lost last night!

When the Neilson ratings start combining Live Viewing patterns with Recording patterns, then you will begin to see what people are truly doing with their viewing habits! The way that everything is counter-programmed against everything else? I can’t even begin to tell you who doesn’t TiVo something (beyond my parents I mean).

My boy Dave called it a few years back:

Bill, you’ll never watch television the same way after you get DVR.

How right he was…

Oh, last thing… The Wilmington Flower Market starts tomorrow. You know what THAT means don’t you? Yup… it’s supposed to rain the next 4 days. Never fails…