People who should be shot, Vol. LXVIII:
The guy who came up with the ability to embed sound files in web pages and emails.
Thanks to DJ Pepe in the next cubicle, I've been treated to just about every MIDI file known to man over the last two hours, and at a rather high volume to boot. I suppose I should just be glad he uses a Macintosh...otherwise our entire office would have been infested with the Sobig virus about eight billion times over.
Apparently, a couple of weeks ago, New Hampshire governor Craig Benson got stuck in a little traffic jam, trying to go through the Hampton tolls on his way south on Route 95. If you've ever gone between Maine and Massachusetts, you know what I'm talking about - miles and miles of backups to pay a buck for the privilege of driving through 17 miles of New Hampshire. It seems this little waiting in line thing put him in such a tizzy that he's pushed a change through state legislature that will eliminate the southbound toll...and double the northbound toll. His quote, verbatim, from the Nashua Telegraph article:
Benson said tourists come to New Hampshire to get away from traffic snarls. "Yet, here's a welcome mat to New Hampshire - a traffic backup as significant as any metropolitan area," said Benson.
Now, let's think about this for a second...considering there is one (1) state of the contiguous 48 to the north and east of New Hampshire, and forty-six (46) of the contiguous 48 to the south and west of New Hampshire, where do you think most of these people are coming from? So why on this great verdant spheroid upon we live would you want to facilitate southbound passage, when everyone will be coming FROM THE SOUTH? Wouldn't you want to make it easy to get in and remove the northbound toll? Does this not make sense to anyone else?
Strange things happen to your psyche when you watch and/or listen to 160+ Red Sox games over the course of a season. Yes, that's right, I'm talking about the mental anguish inflicted upon the general watching/listening public by those brain-strangling advertising jingles. These need to go away, and fast. Or maybe I can just infect your brains with them and then I won't have them stuck in mine anymore.
- The Foxwoods jingle. Take a chance, make it happen, break a guitar over your cranium...
- The Ford end-of-the-year clearance. Any way you want it, that's the way you need it...I want it and need it off my TV, goddammit.
- Giant Glass. Who do you call when your radio's busted from smashing it against the wall?
The one good thing about Giant Glass, though, is their sign behind home plate at Fenway Park. When there's a left-handed hitter in the batter's box, and he's standing just so, his rear end blocks out two letters in particular, and you see "GIANT --ASS". Cracks me up every time.
On August 20th, 1999, I got the news from a friend of the band that Blues Traveler's Bobby Sheehan was found dead in his apartment. It's hard to believe it's been four years since then. A lot has changed in my life since then, but BT hasn't - I've been to six shows this summer and it still feels great. I have a feeling that a lot of that is due to Bobby's influence on the band, in making them into such a strong and close group that they decided almost instantly to keep going after his passing. Next month will actually mark my tenth year of being a fan; I first discovered them in the CD collection of my roommate, freshman year of college, in September of 1993. Here's to ten more...at least.
I've been chatting with someone recently who sees fit to type this after every mildly amusing thing I say, and it's gotten to the point of such annoyance that I'm going out of my way not to be funny just so I won't see these three damn letters. Does that make me a bad person? I mean, it's one thing to actually get this much laughter in person, but if my chat counterpart is really laughing this much at what I'm writing, she'd be dead by now from lack of oxygen. Or at least in great gastrointestinal distress.
I am both sad and happy to report that one of the previous subjects of my blog no longer exists. No, as much as I'd like to say that it's Willard Scott, that's unfortunately not the case. I actually speak of the artist formerly known as the huge pile of crap on my desk. In a fit of inspired house-cleaning, we finally came to the conclusion that some stuff just needed to be organized, and I cleared off my desk as well as the immediate area. All of my DATs and cassettes are now neatly put away, a bunch of extra CDs are on their way out in the mail as freebies, and I can actually acccess writing implements without knocking over the entire canister in a flurry of ink and graphite.
Then, unbenknownst to me, Viv schemed to lure me into a Home Depot EXPO Center to investigate shelving units. And now I'm seriously hooked on this idea. The concept of putting together a bunch of nice wooden drawers that can each hold 200+ DATs as opposed to a six-drawer high $30 plastic thing from Staples that holds 50 per drawer...well, it's nice. I might even be able to fit my cassettes in there too...though at 75 to a drawer, that's like ten drawers of cassettes and two or three of DATs. But still, it's better than having all my crap spread over a folding table, two file cabinets and a tapestry laid out on the floor.
And now, ever since I bought a drill a couple of weeks ago, I'm in high demand... fixing kitchen chairs, hanging some hooks for my mother in law, banging a table back together... she may even have me installing some blinds. How did this happen? It's like I'm Bob Vila now. Maybe some track lighting would help...
Emailing with my friend Aaron today and I realized that a few things about the Today Show have crept into my brain and have secretly been annoying me for years, but they've never surged into print until just today.
1) You know how every other live show says "We'll be right back after this brief commercial break" or "after a word from our sponsors"? Have you ever realized that they NEVER say this? Instead, their code for "We're going to show a commercial now" is "But first, this is Today on NBC". Um, what? But first...you're going to show an ad is what you're going to do. And no shit this is Today on NBC.
2) "Today's weather was brought to you by Country Time Lemonade." No, I'm sorry, today's weather was brought to you by a complex series of climatological conditions that came together to change the air pressure, shift some moisture around, and cause what we like to call precipitation.
2.5) (not quite the same, not quite different) "Al Roker was brought to you by the Sony VAIO." Actually, Al Roker was brought to you by Mr. and Mrs. Roker, his parents, as well as the hiring manager who decided to bring him on board at NBC and the program manager who decided to put him on the Today Show. Personally, I wish they hadn't brought him to me, but that's another rant for another time. I will ask, though - who was it that decided weathermen have to be wacky? I mean, I'm sure it was groundbreaking and hilarious when David Letterman was doing the weather in Muncie, Indiana, talking about hailstones the size of canned hams, but these days it seems like EVERY weatherman is a canned ham. And yes, Willard Scott, I'm looking in your direction. No man should find 100-plus-year-olds quite as attractive as you make them out to be.
3) Ann Curry's job has apparently been reduced to saying the word "morning" as much as possible when she's on-camera. A typical greeting from Ms. Curry: "Good morning, Matt, and good morning to all viewers this morning. In the news this morning, a sad story this morning. Only this morning has the mourning period begun for Marty Mornhinweg's two mourning doves..." Seriously, though, it should be a drinking game - down a mimosa every time she says the word "morning" and you'll be smashed out of your gourd by 7:30. In the morning.
My site-mate Craig asked me last night, "So how do you feel?" My immediate response was "I have birthed" - without even realizing that I'd been working on this project for exactly nine months. I've been working with my friend Joe Catanese on a new look for my other web site (yes, this isn't the only one). It has finally come to term and after a very short labor (about 15 minutes of switching URLs around) it has now been released upon the world. Have a browse around if you're so inclined. I'm rather proud of it. And my wife is happy to see it launched because it means I spend less of my spare time working on it...theoretically.
