Author: Jon

Are you ready to complain?

I hope you are.  When I first started this site, everyone immediately asked, “How can I complain?”  And now, you can.  The alpha release of the complaint submission form is available!  This is very rough, and needs a lot of work, but if you submit a complaint, it will be displayed.

So, I’m looking for feedback.  It needs some styling, I know.  I’m not really good at building a pretty page.  And eventually you’ll be able to add your own tags instead of picking from a limited number of categories (Something like del.icio.us or Flickr or whatever).

Don’t worry – your email address is not visible to anyone but me, and I’ll never contact you (Unless you’re already a friend, as most of you submitters will be) and I will NEVER sell your email address.

For those who are curious, the submission form is written in Ruby on Rails, which is a pretty cool new-ish web programming language.  So far, it’s a joy to program in.  And I barely know what I’m doing, so it should be even better when I know a bit more.

That sound you hear is Walt spinning in his grave

‘Apocalypto’ wins weekend box office – CNN.com

But “Apocalypto” overcame the baggage of Gibson’s personal troubles as well as its difficult subject matter, which features a no-name cast in a hyper-violent tale that includes beheadings and images of hearts ripped from people’s chests.

This is a DISNEY movie.  What is wrong with the world where once-respected actor who has lost all touch with reality can make a “hyper-violent” movie in a language almost no one speaks, get a deal with the company that makes almost nothing but children’s entertainment, and then lead the weekend in ticket sales?  There is absolutely nothing right with this picture.

Where are the people screaming for an NC-17 rating?  Once again, horrific violence is just fine, as long as there’s no sex.  Or maybe there is sex, I don’t know. Our country is so messed up.

In any event, I don’t watch Mel Gibson movies anymore.  Old ones are okay, before he lost it.  But nothing new.

Metro doesnt understand economics

Metro Considers Increasing Rail Fares – washingtonpost.com

“Because of declining real estate values, we have holes to fill of our own, and now we’re being presented with holes in Metro,” said Kauffman, a member of Fairfax County’s Board of Supervisors. “It’s not like we have a stockpile of green putty to fill the gaps.”

Wonderful. I was just talking to my friend and host in NYC yesterday about how much nicer the subway is in New York than Metro is in DC, and how Metro is expensive here.

I love how they want to combat a slower-than-expected increase in Metro riders by a fare increase. It’s like the pay phones, facing greatly increased competition from cell phones, doubling the cost of a call in a few years. And what happened there? The pay phone has become nearly obsolete. Not that they had much chance of competing, so maybe it’s not a good analogy.

But it’s Econ 101 – the way to fix slow growth is not to raise the price. In fact, they might want to consider lowering rates. And the article mentions discounts for SmartTrip riders (SmartTrip is the permanent card that replaces the paper cards, if you ride Metro more than once every six months it’s worth the SmartTrip). I had no idea there were discounts for SmartTrips. Maybe they should try publicizing this. You can discount all you want, but if people don’t realize it’s cheaper, it doesn’t do you much good.

Worst tunnel ever

Yesterday, we finished our flag football season, finally.  I had the pleasure of taking not one but two members of the team to the GW emergency room.  In the first game, on the last play, they had 4th and goal, eight seconds to go.  The play before, my wife had been bumped in the head, and she was a little ticked off.  They snap the ball as she’s leaning over the line, ready to rip someone’s head off.  She pressures the quarterback, he throws it up, we knock it down, and we have our second win of the season, 12-7, over the 4th seed in the playoffs.  Our only other win was against a team playing short a player because they only had two girls, and you need three on the field at all times.

So, in our celebration, we didn’t notice at first that my wife was on the ground.  Did any of you see Carson Palmer in the playoffs last year, when he got hit on the side of his leg and tore up his knee?  Well, that’s what happened here.  It doesn’t look like it will be that bad.  She’s on the couch icing it right now, and we’ll go to an orthopedist later this week if it doesn’t get better.

She was sitting on the sideline, elevating her knee, as we played our second game (Rescheduled due to rainout), and it didn’t go so well.  They went up 7-0 pretty quickly.  On the ensuing kickoff, “Picnic” got run over by this gigantic meathead.  You know the type of guy who comes to a game when it’s 27 degrees out in shorts, with the sleeves ripped off his shirt, with “MAXIMUS” or something written on his arms?  Wearing a leather rugby helmet?  Yeah, that kind of guy.  The one who is way too intense for co-ed flag football.  Anyway, he ran into Picnic on the kickoff, and Picnic came off the field.  He had his hat pulled down to his brow, but there was a little blood on his forehead.  I mentioned this to him, and he took his hat off, revealing an inch long cut about an inch above his eye.

So, I took Picnic and the wife to GW, where he got ten stitches, and they determined that my wife hadn’t broken her leg or torn anything major.

Then we went to NYC to visit some friends.  We’d been planning this for months, and didn’t want to let a little injury get in the way.  But we left hours later than we meant to, and hit the Holland Tunnel just as everyone going out in Manhattan on a Saturday night got there.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  The four lanes in the middle are EasyPass only at the toll, while the two on the right and two on the left are cash.  I was in the second from the right, and the EasyPass lanes are moving much better than the cash lanes, obviously.  So everyone wants to drive down the EasyPass lanes and then cut in in front of me.  I played chicken with a big black Nissan Titan for about 50 yards before he finally backed off.  It was extremely satisfying.  I was less than six inches from him most of the time as he tried to nose his way into my lane and I wouldn’t let him.  I hate people who do that.  Traffic sucks, we all have to sit in it, and you’re making things worse.  But I didn’t let anyone in.  Ordinarily, if people are being polite, I’m happy to do it.  But not when they’re sprinting to the end of the line and then trying to cut in at the front.

Anyway, it was an adventure.  The weekend was fun.  I got to see some of the holiday decorations in Times Square and all that.  I love NYC.  I didn’t think I would until I visited earlier this year.  I’ve been three times now, and I’ll definitely go back, especially since we have a friend in Chelsea who happily gives up her apartment and stays with her boyfriend when we come visit.

Crowdsourcing Christmas

Futurismic: New Fiction From Jason Stoddard

He was nine when Dark Christmas came. He knew there were lots of different kinds of Santas. But when the first robotic Santa went rushing from tree to tree in his front yard like a soldier in a wargame, he knew something was wrong. When two more Santas, shiny with human sweat, appeared from the street and chased the robot down, David knew that something had changed forever.

New short science fiction on Futurismic combining “the magic of Christmas” with Web 2.0 buzzword-concept “crowdsourcing” and a little bit of the dark side of capitalism and the American Way.  It’s a nice, quick read.  I like the way the author tells the story as a father explaining Christmas to his daughter.  In fact, it’s very much like an old fairy tale before they were all Disney-fied and the dark parts taken out.

Congratulations to the Vice Presidents daughter

Report: Vice president’s lesbian daughter pregnant – CNN.com

Mary Cheney, 37, and her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, 45, are “ecstatic” about the baby, due in late spring . . .

I like how CNN had to make sure they mention in the headline that she’s a lesbian.  That’s because everyone knows that lesbians have babies with two heads and shoot beams from their eyes that turn straight people to gay.

T-shirts and more t-shirts

Tcritic – Daily T-Shirt Blog

Ever since the dude from Preshrunk stopped updating regularly, there has been a t-shirt-shaped hole in my RSS reader.  But no more.  Ever since BoingBoing pointed me towards the list of blogs that I’m not cool enough to be reading already, I’ve added Tcritic to my daily reads.  Awesome t-shirts, not too much commentary (You know how some of us bloggers get long-winded and rambling.  I mean, not me, of course).

Were just going to take our God and go over here

Episcopal Churches To Vote on Departure – washingtonpost.com

Many Episcopal churches are voting very soon on whether or not to leave the umbrella of the U.S. Episcopal church because the U.S. church has allowed a gay bishop in New Hampshire.  I’m a little torn.  First, I fully support the right of a church to decide that they want to leave the organization because the organization did something they don’t believe in.  But it’s sad that two churches in Fairfax County, VA, where I live, are so upset over a gay bishop that they want to ally themselves with an African Reverend, Peter Akinola, who thinks holding hands with your gay partner in public should be punishable by jail time.

I assume that most people voting to leave will say that it’s not just one gay bishop in a state most of them will never visit, but rather the direction the church is heading by allowing him to become a bishop, and that’s certainly valid.

I wish some positive stuff about religion would make the news.  I know there are religious groups doing good things out there.  But the only ones that make the news are the intolerant ones.

I’m going to stop here, because I’ve lost my train of thought.

Saturday afternoon

It’s actually quite a nice day out.  It was a little cold this morning as we lost our flag football game, but it’s 47 and sunny now.  Excuse me for a moment . . . Ahh, that’s better.  Sorry, just had to take a quick break and drink a little Bell’s Oberon that we got from Whole Foods just half an hour ago.  We were there trying to find key limes for a pie, but had to settle for regular limes.  Hopefully our hosts this evening won’t notice.  The wife will probably tell them.

Anyway, I took a little detour down the beer aisle, because I knew they had Bell’s, and wanted to see if they had anything new.  Turns out they did, as they did not have Oberon last time.  It’s out of season now, so this is maybe the dregs of the summer run, but, contrary to what Budweiser might tell you, beer doesn’t have to be bottled in the last week to taste good.  And honestly, lukewarm skunked Oberon is better than freshly bottle Budweiser anyway.

So we picked up a little sushi, and a little Bell’s, and even a new flavor of Odwalla bar.  It’s so new it’s not even on their website yet.  It’s called Choco-Walla, and I haven’t tried one yet, but it’s sure to be delicious.

The cat is currently trying to drink my beer.  I might have to lock her in a closet.

Complaining through song

Treehugger: The Complaints Choirs of The World

Global Warming got you down? Wish your city had better recycling programs or more bike lanes? These are some of the issues that the Complaints Choir of Helsinki and the Complaints Choir of Birmingham are singing about.

If I could sing, I would totally want to do this.  These two groups sing about their complaints.  I’m sure my compatriot over at VentBox will be interested to see this, as well.

Score one point for those of us who call it complaining rather than venting.