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ANDREW'S
RANTS ARCHIVE #7 THE ANDREW' RANTS ARCHIVE OF PAST COLUMNS ANDREW'S RANTS ARCHIVE #1 ANDREW'S RANTS ARCHIVE #2 ANDREW'S RANTS ARCHIVE #3 ANDREW'S RANTS ARCHIVE #4 ANDREW'S RANTS ARCHIVE #5 ANDREW'S RANTS ARCHIVE #6 CURRENT ANDREW'S RANTS |
JUNE
23rd, 2008 |
SKIPPING
ROCKS A week ago I took my kid Ethan to the shooting range for a few hours to knock over pop cans and practice gun safety. When we got home I realized he was sun burned. Now keep in mind we were there for perhaps two hours and were under the same conditions. Ethan has in years past tanned as brown as a nut while I being a red head will burn at the drop of a hat. I’m the proverbial Twinkie when it comes to sunlight. We hadn’t stayed out long enough to even get me slightly red while he looked like a cooked lobster. That’s when I realized he was spending way too much time behind that fool x-box playing Halo 3. I decided to start getting him outdoors more. We tried fishing and that was a bust. I’m the world’s worst fisherman and couldn’t teach anyone else how to fish to save my life. So we tried a nature walk at the local historic park complete with a recreation log fort and a winding trail along the riverbank. I noticed all the smooth stones on the bank and thought here is something we can do. I tried to show him how to skip rocks across the water. Making a competitive game of it would help him understand a small aspect of sportsmanship along with developing hand eye coordination. At the end of an grueling hour of not loosing my temper Ethan had mastered the art of flinging the rock directly at the water and exclaiming how this was gay and he wanted to go home and play on line with his little knotty brained friends. Once again perhaps I’m getting too old but when I was 18 I was outdoors with guns and riding around the county with my best friend George in his pickup or my nova, looking for excitement in a very dull town. Sure we played our share of video games I was a Galaga champ but we also went hiking in the woods, went cruising, blew things up, and lusted after girls among many other things our mothers would have rather we not done. All healthy activities for young boys who were bored. But no, not my kid and evidentially most of the other little numb skulls out there today. If it isn’t on the computer flat screen they are not interested. Today’s youth is so wound up in technology they are loosing contact with others of their own age. For instance text messaging, for gods sake just pick up the phone and talk to someone. I really don’t understand a form of communication that is slow and cumbersome and requires learning a whole new form of language that fails to impart emotion, and tonal inflections. They communicate by e-mail, online, in blogs, chartrooms and forums but they never meet one another. If it keeps up like this we might be looking at our last generation because the little turds will never actually meet in real life and I will never have any grandchildren. I finally gave up at the riverbank and called it quits. My plan to acclimate the child to the real world rather than the virtual world failed. I guess he will become a pail computer zombie with a large set of thumbs to work the x-box controls. By the way I got 21 skips, pretty darn good don’t you think? |
JULY
28th, 2008 |
MUSH
MOUTH REVISITED Following up on the popularity of the 'Mush Mouth' article I got to thinking about other things that people do with the English language that really irritates me. One of the big issues I have is the mispronunciation of common words. I’m not talking about some obscure ingredient in a food preservative like methylchloroisothiazolinone, but more commonly used words like 'Mexican' which is pronounced here as 'Messican'. Following is a list of these words that come readily to mind, perhaps you can think of a few more. Tater = Potato Hollar = Hollor Chimbley = Chimney Ideal = Idea Incidentally my favorite pet peeve is this one. As in "Hey, I have got a great ideal on how to get rich" It makes me want to slap someone silly Yallow = Hello TB or Telebision = TV or Television Mullion = Million Mater = Tomato Ears = Years Bassily = Basically Tor = Tire Etchtible Gordon = Vegetable Garden Bobby Q = Bar-B-Q Arr Codishnin = Air Conditioning Mode = Commode Electorial = Electoral Mote = Remote Squarsh = Squash Ketch = Catch Ressirant = Restaurant MMMBI = Bye, as in good bye on the phone they build up to it with a long MMMM Bout Dat = How about that MoooBe = Movie Dribe = Drive Oh, I could go on and on, but think about it. What are some of the phrases or words that irritate you the most? Log on here and Vent in the RRS Forum Thread [CLICK HERE] |
JUNE
9th, 2008 |
TODAY'S
MUSIC Every time I turn around my kid has his stupid I-Pod strapped to his fool head. I took a look at his music and listened to some of it. What was I listening to? Sure every generation has music that the previous generation hates. It’s a form of rebellion and I can understand and appreciate that. There was a time when listening Bo Diddley and Jerry lee Lewis was thought to send kids to hell. Heck if you go back far enough that crazy Mozart was the equivalent of Oozier in his day. But as I listened to my kid’s music I realize I couldn’t understand any of the words and the music was a disjointed sound like a train wreck. I skipped around to several different artist and songs and it was an airplane crash with mutilated geese or a concrete truck impacting an orphanage. At least our music and that of preceding generations had a tune you could follow and words you could understand unless you were listening to Bob Dylan who no one could understand no matter how hard they tried. I tried to be open minded and asked Ethan what are they saying in this song. He honestly couldn’t tell me. We had a long discussion on why he liked it and it turns out its because its what is out there on the air and its what all his friends listen to, it didn’t matter if he liked it or not. I had him listen to some ZZ Top from the Eliminator album and he informed me that this was old and sad music. I played several different things for him from Frank Sinatra to Buffett to Black Sabbath, and he sneered at all of it preferring to listen to the unintelligible linguistics of his own generation’s music. Perhaps I’m getting old but at least growing up our generation appeared to be open minded enough to listen to the music from other eras and evaluate it with an open mind. I remember the first time I heard Samuel Barbers Adagio for Strings in C minor and thought it was the saddest and one of the most beautiful pieces I had ever heard. How about Mel Torme singing Fly Me To The Moon, Jimmy Buffet with One Particular Harbor, or Led Zeppelin with the classic Stairway to Heaven. I could ramble on and on like this, but needless to say we never came to an accord. I guess good music is only to be found on the oldies channel on the radio dial. The other stuff just plain scares me. |
MAY
26th, 2008 |
MUSH
MOUTH I grew up in Hazard Kentucky as did most of you reading this rant and I have never had much trouble understanding the speech and various dialects of different regions in this country until I moved to upper east Tennessee. I have lived in Arkansas, Louisiana, Arizona, Kentucky, and briefly in California. But never have I had such a communication problem as I now have in Johnson City, TN. I am serious I have visited nearly every state in the union and have been to 11 different countries, I even lived in Indonesia for a while but the inability of the natives of this area to speak intelligibly is amazing. What I'm referring to is what I call the 'Mush Mouth'. And now my kid has it. Half the time I have no idea what the hell he is saying. For instance I will say Ethan are you hungry and the response is “ imdunnofo iwannambrgr “. What the hell does that mean? When I answer the phone at work I say “Thank you for calling the Sleepzone this is Thomas can I help you” Short to the point and it tells the caller where they have reached, who they are talking to and that I am there to assist them in clear concise English enunciated as best as that old bat Mrs. Bassie could train into me in the 7th and 8th grade. But if I call Lowes for instance I get some slack ass that is so tired of answering the phone for the millionth time that they just slur the words out in an unintelligible garble. “ thnkfrclnglwscnihlpu” What the crap is this, a disease of the brain, and mouth. Have they no gumption to care if they sound like a Neanderthal or not. I ride my kid about it constantly and won’t even respond to him unless I can understand him. My wife says that I need to relax and try to realize that people here are a little more lax in their diction. I think if they got anymore lax they would regress to a primordial state and use pseudo feet to ambulate rather than walk. Speak up America so I can understand you, don’t fall victim to the mush mouth. Remember people judge you on how you sound no matter if its fair or not. If you sound like a moron then they will treat you like a moron. |
MAY
5th, 2008 |
NATIONAL
FINANCES We got problems folks and everyone screams its George Bush's fault. Now lets get serious do you really believe that one man and his policies no matter how inept and misguided could be responsible for the situation we find ourselves in nationally? I mean really it’s a lot of peoples faults including ours. We all charge up credit cards, have our houses mortgaged and our cars are no sooner paid for than we go finance another. The oil companies are sticking it to the American public while saying they are not price gouging and yet this past year reported all time heights in their profit structures. It’s the old pirate philosophy of “Take what you can and give nothing back” Now we see that the federal government is giving huge banks and financial firms billions of dollars to stay solvent. Just giving it to them. If I screw up and don’t have enough money to pay my bills will the government or those same banks give me enough to cover my debts? I don’t think its that cold in Hell yet do you? I actually read in an article if all the money given to the financial sector in this past month alone was given to the public instead it would average out to about 30,000 per person. Now which do you think would stimulate the economy more. Giving the public that money which would be spent paying bills and stimulating growth or giving it to the failing banks to cover their bad lending choices. If I had 30K I could pay about half of what I owe on my house. That in turn would help those very same financial institutions. But this way we don’t get that money the bank does and we still owe them for the full mortgage. Its like they are getting paid twice. And all we get is a 600.00 per person check to sort of whet our appetite. Also the value of the dollar keeps falling and you know why? Its cause it now looks like monopoly money. I just saw the new 5-dollar bills in the Barney purple and florid colors. It used to be money was green on one side and black and white on the other. It had a dignity and looked refined with pictures of old dead white guys on the front. Now no one takes the stuff seriously cause it looks like it was printed at Parker Brothers or Hasbro. Bad financial choices as a nation and funny looking money that’s just plain to stupid looking to spend in any other country. We are headed towards a huge recession mark my words. Stock up on peanut butter and jam. |
FEBRUARY
18th, 2008 |
CURRENT
DATA COMPUTED Well it’s been a while since my last post and there is a reason why. I was challenged by a reader to objectively look at global warming and seriously study both sides of the argument. I started looking into it and the more I studied the more controversy there was. After nearly a year and a half I have accumulated nearly 300 gigabytes of data including reports for and against global warming. The myriad theories of every possible nature and from well respected scientist to idiot Hollywood actors and stupid politicians. Just because you play a doctor on TV doesn’t mean you are one. Anyway I was going to write a long dissertation on my findings but as I wrote it citing sources and studies it became bigger and bigger. As it passed 30 pages I realized this was going to be bigger than my dissertation in Graduate school and this forum was not the place for such a lengthy article. So I will condense my findings down to a single paragraph and anyone who wishes to discuss it with me in a rational manner may call and do so at length. I don’t want knee-jerk reactionary groundless arguments I want to hear some actual facts to support your point of view. OK so here it is. Yes the earth is warming. It is not caused by man. Its nature. The sun contributes more than anything else to this cause. Global warming and cooling cycles are normal. For example the three ice ages one of which we are still on the tail end of. Man does have an impact on the environment in a localized nature but not enough to affect a global scale. We just don’t make that big of a difference. So yes were warming, deal with it, there’s nothing we can do. If its any consolation in about 17,000 years it will all be under ice again and I am sure people at that time will guilt themselves into believing that their teleporters and Bertol Ray devices are causing the current changes. Just remember people that this fantastic planet we live on is not a static environment. It changes daily whether we are here are not. Its had massive temperature changes and as few as a single continent on more than one occasion in addition to ice ages and massive volcanic obliterations and total global eradications of all life on 3 documented occasions of which the dinosaurs were not one or even close. We even had polar shifts where the North Pole used to be at the equator on 2 separate instances. Provable by magnetic north in the rock strata. It’s the weather guys and there’s not a thing you can do about it. |
