Annoy-O-Index!

I'd like the matching Fido hat with the Spot handbag please:  Fur wearers were aghast when it was revealed that Burlington Coat Factory was selling coats made from dog fur last year.  The company claims to have been duped by the manufacturer, that is based in China.  I don't have a problem with the Coat Factory, I'm annoyed with the people who are so angered by the dog coats.  First off, if you are paying less than $100 for a "mink" coat, you should be suspicious.  And secondly, and more importantly, if you have absolutely no moral qualms about wearing mink or fox or any other forest animal, but it's morally reprehensible to wear a dog.  Personally, I don't think you should wear anything that you aren't willing to eat.  I eat cows, I wear cows, life is good.

The Time to Die Tour:  Yet another Rolling Stones concert.  Mick Jagger and Keith Richards need the good sense to die.  Look at how Jim Morrison's death positively effected the Doors.  It's too late for them to be remembered as great musicians, codgers past their prime, or especially not even attractive.  (But they never were.)  But they can at least stop embarrassing themselves on-stage.  And they can stop releasing that really bad music, each song is worse than the last.  Maybe they ought to change that song What a Drag It Is Getting Old to What a Drag It Is Being Old.

That 70's Crap:  So I was listing to the radio a while back, and there was an ad for the new hip and trendy bar, a 70's nostalgia club.  I was watching TV and I saw commercial for Bogie Nights, 54, and The Last Days of Disco on video.  And let's not forget That 70's Show.  The seventies haven't died, they went into a polyester wrapped coma and staggered back to consciences, and is back to haunt us all with its bad clothes and even worse dancing.  Good thing for all of that nostalgia (or is it narcissism) on the part of the yuppies, we get to be treated to a rehash of the "me" generation.  Just wait, in a few more years we get to relive the 80's, and greed will be good again.  Oh, wait, that never went out of style.

When TV Executives Run Out of Show Ideas:  Leave it to those great minds at the Fox "Network" to find a hot new genre of entertainment (for the easily amused and lacking of mental power) and bludgeon it to death and beat the dead horse.  When Animals Attack, World's Wildest Police Videos, When Surgery Goes Wrong, When Good Times Go Bad, The World's Funniest are just some of the "reality" shows you can watch.  And let's not forget our chance to gawk at all the freaks and malforms: Guiness World Records: Primetime!  I know that it's too difficult for people in the television business to create new and interesting shows, (especially at Fox) but could we limit the number of the same kind of show appearing on one network to under five a week.  Well, on the plus side, it's not Melrose Place or Herman's Head.

"Hey, look at those old people on TV!"  Due to slumping ratings, ABC debuted the "new" old Good Morning America with aged hosts Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer.  The younger hosts who took over after Gibson and Joan Lundon got the heave-ho got their walking papers because they were too young for the audience, the most self obsessed generation ever seen on the Earth, the Baby Boomers.  So ABC gives the show a facelift (literally) to try to boost the sagging ratings.  Out with the young people, in with the old.  It's nice to see a fight against ageism on the principal that it's wrong to discriminate against people who are considered too "old" (that ancient middle aged that women get wrinkled and men get distinguished) but the problem is that that fight is being fueled be pure selfishness and the inability to empathicly connect with anyone other than themselves.  Ten years ago, there was no huge outcry against the ousting of the "aged", because the boomers weren't "aged" yet.  Oh well, I guess that I'm asking for too much.

Yuppie Nests

    So I went to my dad's place out in the wretched intellectual wasteland called the Sub-urb.  He and my step-mother live in a relatively nice area (if you like nothing to do except bake casseroles and have tupperware parties with the neighbors,  but that's the sub-urbs) and there is a lot of rolling farm land and forests to be found.  Well, not anymore.  It's being developed, good bye farm land, good bye forests, hello yuppies.  Cheap, prefabricated, look-alike yuppie nests with 1/2 acre plots and identical siding are being thrown up (quite literally) in the neighborhood, devaluing all of the unique houses in the area, because yuppies only want to live in places called "Lion Acres" or "Cherokee Estates".  These houses are worth some money now, but in a few years the yuppies will want to move away to a sub-urb further away from the city because it's no longer posh to live that close to the festering city.  But don't worry, they'll drain that area of its quaintness, like the vampires that they are; then move on to fresher pastures to use up even further away from the cities.

    And why does this bother me?  Because the yuppies feel the need to go to a new place because of its atmosphere and systematically destroy it.  The lush rolling hills are leveled, the forests and fields are paved over with mini malls and fast-food restaurants.  Then the formerly quiet areas become crowded and over-trafficed and inhospitable.  At first, the infestation seems like a boon to an area, new jobs and the property value increases; but as they wear on and start leaving, so do the jobs and the property values plummet.

    What can we do about it?  Absolutely nothing.  They have the money, they have the numbers.  The only thing we can do is to wait them out and try to undo the damage that they wrought upon society.  They can't live forever, but then again, they just might figure out how to.