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Will Someone Give that Man a Drumstick!

16 Tuesday Aug 2022

Posted by danielwalldammit in General

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Authority, Bureaucracy, Communication, Fast Food, Food, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Lost in Translation, Modernity, Translation

“I want a drum stick”

The old man hunched over the counter at the Kaintuck Chicken Massacre with his eyes glued on the roasted chicken. I couldn’t quite hear the young man behind the counter just yet, but I could see the old man pointing at the piece he wanted.

“I want a drum stick”

This time I could year the young teenager responding; “Do you want a 3-piece or a 5, piece. The meal comes with…”

“I want a drum stick!”

The old guy knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted a drum stick. A decade or two earlier, this old fella might have adapted his order to the menu, but now the details were clearly nonsense to him. He was pointing right at the piece he wanted. Why wasn’t that enough?The kid, for his part, wasn’t authorized to act on the desire for a single drum stick. The buttons on the cash register didn’t include that option. He needed to translate the order into something else, something that fit the categories he was allowed to provide. In a few years, the young man might have had the confidence to attempt an explanation, but the old man wasn’t listening anyway, and he had no idea how to deal with the situation. so he just kept repeating himself.

The old man, of course did the same;

“I want a drum stick.

Somewhere in the back, I imagined, there must be a manager, someone endowed with sufficient authority to just give the old man a drumstick, perhaps resolving the technical problem by putting it on the house. Maybe, maybe not. A manager might well have insisted on the usual categories just as the kid had. In any event, there was no manager up near the cash registers. So, the kid just kept repeating the official options.

And the old man just kept repeating himself.

Decades later, I can still hear the old guy’s words as I took my own order out the door.

“I want a drumstick!”

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Things You Learn When Dating a Mexican Woman

30 Thursday Dec 2021

Posted by danielwalldammit in General

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Dating, Ethnicity, Humor, Love, Mexico, Perspective, Racism, Spanish, Stereotypes

270296412_10160437607328488_1882011151292854340_n

It’s rather surprising to find out just how often a U.S. citizen can be told to go home or asked about where she (really) comes from.

It’s also infuriating

***

Contrary to popular opinion, a word doesn’t become Spanish by adding an [-o] to it. Using this construction does however make most any word irritating to her.

This can be useful, amusing, or painful to you, depending on the details.

***

Rolling your Rs can be damned difficult.

***

A speedy-Gonzalez voice is not funny. (She told me to add that it’s also kind of racist.)

***

Taking a Mexican girl to a Mexican restaurant is not likely to impress her. You may hear comments such as “rice doesn’t really go with this” or “why would you put lettuce on that?” Also, don’t be surprised if she prefers Italian food, Shabu Shabu, or Korean BBQ.

Date her long enough and you may yourself ruined for an awful lot of Mexican restaurants.

Thanks Moni!

***

It turns out that an awful lot of famous Mexicans are actually Spaniards, and apparently that makes a difference.

***

What a lot of us assume to be Mexican accents are actually northern Mexican accents. And apparently, this too matters.

***

Anything you say about Mexico, Mexicans, or Mexican culture is racist. Anything she says about white people isn’t. This is how girlfriend privilege trumps white privilege.

…and it does.

***

Don’t be surprised if music you think of as Mexican strikes her as redneck country music, or at least the south of the border equivalent thereof.

***

Christmas is celebrated on Christmas Eve.

Because of course it is.

***

Virtually every western you’ve ever loved has some Mexican character vamping up the stereotypes to the point of personal embarrassment.

She will feel that embarrassment first.

Then you will feel it more.

***

You will probably pay dearly for every tongue-in-cheek comment you make in this post.

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Dammit!

21 Saturday Aug 2021

Posted by danielwalldammit in General

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Dan Bunin

“You’re not a dildo!”

This was the worst insult my friend, Dan Bunin ever leveled at me.

At least it was part of it.

Of course, he said this after having just called me a dildo in the first place. We were playing a game of D&D back in college, and zingers were par for the course. So was a certain degree of genuine bickering over details long since forgotten. Still, this comment seemed a bit much. Dan was genuinely frustrated at me at that moment, and the awkward silence that filled the room suggested I wasn’t the only one who noticed. I had just resolved to just move on when Dan announced his change of heart, and told me I wasn’t a dildo after all.

I knew better than to think I was totally off the hook here, so I just waited for the punch line.

“If you were a dildo, women would like you!”

…and the whole room burst out in laughter.

I couldn’t stay mad of course. I was too busy laughing right along with the others, but the joke served its purpose. Dan broke the tension even as he got in one more shot. Fair enough, I thought, and we enjoyed the rest of the game.

This was over thirty years ago, and I still chuckle every time I think of it. It was typical of Dan’s wit, and his humor. It’s also typical of the other memories he brings to mind.

I remember once shutting a door in Dan’s face for no reason whatsoever. He opened the door back up a moment later with a very confused look on his face. I really couldn’t think of a good way to follow that up, so I asked if I could borrow five bucks. Dan just laughed and fished the money out of his wallet. I remember once coming out of the library at UNLV and wondering what all the shouting was about down at the student union. Turns out Dan had just about picked a literal fight with the entire fraternity community. (All of them!) I remember countless dinners at Korean BBQs where the running debate was about whether to order two meals for every one person or just the usual three meals for every two people. I remember playing straight pool with Dan and his brothers at the Q-Club. Back then, making a really great shot was as likely to earn you an insult as it was to get you a compliment. Suffice to say, Dan gave plenty of cause to call him an ‘asshole’ during those games. I remember attending a few wild parties at Dan’s on New Years Eve, and I remember noticing when those wild parties had dwindled to a table full of old guys complaining about the state of the world. I also remember that a good portion of the open questions we came up with sitting around that table seemed to get deferred to Dan. In a room full of smart people who didn’t normally hesitate to study-up on a good question, we had somehow gotten used to the idea that Dan was the one who would actually know the answer.

Back when we were both college freshmen, I remember Dan once turning to me in frustration as someone else was talking and saying the guy was wrong, but he just didn’t know how to explain it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this sort of problem wasn’t going to plague Dan for long. His career as a successful trial lawyer has long since put to rest any lingering doubts as to his ability to explain why somebody was wrong.

I also remember speaking to Dan at the end of an online gathering a couple Friday’s back. He was excited for his coming vacation, and I couldn’t help but be happy for him. He and some other friends had been planning this trip all summer. I figured we’d talk again this coming week. I’d see him smoking a cigar with a drink in his hand, his partner Violet sitting beside him, and Dan and the others would tell the rest of us all about their adventures. I figured we would still be hearing the stories all the way till Christmas!

We won’t be having those conversations after all, not with Dan. To say that I am heartbroken doesn’t even begin to tell the story.

I was going to end this with a platitude about cherishing your friends while you have them, but that kind of schlock seems unworthy of Dan’s memory. I doubt anything I just wrote is worthy of that memory, really, but I’m trying not to make it worse here at the end. The truth is that Dan Bunin will be very sorely missed by an awful lot of people. The world always got a little smarter when he entered the room. It got more interesting, and it got a lot more fun. In his departure, Dan takes an awful lot to smile about with him. I can’t help thinking the world has just become a much more tiresome place.

Dammit anyhow!

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And …winner!

26 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by danielwalldammit in General

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Bullies, Chicago, Homeless, Humor, Mockery, Street Corner, Streets, Unexpected, Wit

Right on this corner, I believe

For a brief period of my life (in the early 90s), I lived on the south side of Chicago. It was an interesting experience, to say the least.

I remember one day seeing a couple young men laughing at one of the local homeless guys. This particular individual was always stoned or drunk, or both. Often, when he approached me, he couldn’t even put the words together to ask for change; he just held his hand out. He was often in bad shape. At least once, I found him passed out on the street, with his own piss flowing out over the curb. This time at least he was up and moving with some purpose as he walked by the young men, both of whom were well dressed.

Laughing, one of the young men shouted back at him; “Hey do you remember me?”

“Yeah.”

“Really? Who am I?’

“You!”

I’m not sure this particular individual knew he won that exchange, but the two men mocking him sure did.

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Flirt-Spammers on TikTok

31 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by danielwalldammit in General

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Advertizing, Bots, Flitation, Internet, Pornography, Social Media, spam, TikTok, Videos

This is just a short videoshowing what an influx of spammers on Tiktok looks like. (I swear, I’m not converting this blog into a TikTok support page; really I’m not!)

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TikTok II

29 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by danielwalldammit in General

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Animals, Donald Trump, History, Humor, Politics, religion, RPGs, Social Media, TikTok

So, I am still on TikTok. It’s actually kinda fun. In the native language, I guess I am mostly on ‘political TikTok, but I pretty much talk about whatever I feel like at the moment, just like I do here. I don’t dance though; that does not happen.

It’s an interesting challenge, trying to make a point in 1 minute or less.

Ironically, I am experiencing this constraint as a sense that the format is too long. See, I’ve never prepared my speeches or classroom lessons on a word-for-word basis. Some technical points, sure, I spell them out precisely and read them off a note, but most of my public speaking is off the top of my head. I have a general script in mind and improvise my way through the details. If I feel like I flubbed a point, I just take a minute to restate it. That’s what I normally do. With only 1 minute per video, however, that just isn’t an option. So, every word counts. The trouble is that I can’t seem to speak for 1 whole minute without screwing something up. So, the fact that I have only 1 minute means I have to make it through a whole minute. Oh the paradox!

So, Moni comes up wondering what I’m mad about. It’s my own fumbling tongue.

Yes, I know, you can record a TikTok in segments. I still think the better vids are all-in-one takes, and anyhow, I like the challenge. …except when I flubbed it for the umpteenth time in a row.

Anyway, one thing I do not like about TikTok is the lack of any useful curating features. I might be missing something, but at the moment, I don’t see any means of organizing vids and bundling them up into themes, etc. So, I am going to do that here, at least with a few selected vids. Yes, Isome of these may appear in more than one category. I plan add to this page from time to time, unless I wake up one day and say to Hell with all of it.

I am mostly doing this for myself, just to keep track of what’s what, but I sorta hope, someone finds a few of my vids amusing at least. If anyone is curious, I hope you enjoy the content.

Anyway…

Falls under the category of “Well, I thought it was funny” – My Girlfriend Fails at magnets, A Man from Nantucket, Quotidian, Confirmation Bias, Meow Wolf, Covid Hair, Unprovoked Attack on generation X, Euphemisms and Dysphemisms, I Try Not to Do This, Grass is Fluffier, I’m Negative, Trump 2020, Dunning and Kruger, My Last Wish, My Recipe for Scrambled Eggs, Lost in translation, My Hubris,

Alaska Themed Posts – The Beach at 4:30am, Susitna River, Matanuska Glacier, Whittier, Bubble-Net feeding, Sitka Sea Otter, Barter Island Bears, The Duck-In, Ward Lake, So Blue, Polar Midnight, Frozen Ocean,

Animals – The Story of Hippie Cat, Chet, A Birthday Kitten, Intruder, Bubble-Net Feeding, Sitka Sea Otter, Barter Island Bears, Christmas,

Misquotes: A Government Big Enough, A Free People, Trump Didn’t, In matters of Style, The democracy shall cease to exist,

Critical Thinking – Whataboutism, Stupid Questions, Emotions, Authority of the Dictionary, Fixing Trump, Facts and Feelings, Conspiracy Porn, The Race-Card Card,

Education – Cold Reading the Textbook, Study Questions for Winter, Keywords, Debunkitation Failure, Intimidation Check,

RPG Gaming – A Holy Sword, Witchcraft, Witchcraft II, An Evil Paladin, The Story of Bob, A Double Crit, Old School Gamer,

History Happens – Confederate Statues, Study Questions for Winter, Debunkitation Failure, Custer’s Critics, Treaty Rights, The Duck-In, Ward Lake, United Fruit, Unsolicited History Lessons, Religious Freedoms,

Fricking Donald Trump – Trump’s Wall, Euphemisms and Dysphemisms, Whataboutism, Trump’s Lies, Independence Malice, Right Wing Patriotism, Who Told Me to hate Trump, Trump and Truth, Trump Versus the Handicapped, Deplorables on Obama, Trump’s Accomplices, About Megyn Kelly, Trump Didn’t, Trump 2020, Fixing Trump, Socialist Healthcare, Trump’s Healthcare Plan. Damnit Obama, Character Matters (Sometimes), Trump Loves Him Some Stats, The Boy Who Cried Fake News, Until the Fat Man Takes his Hands off the Nuclear Codes, Couch Potato With a Phone, Nathan Poe’s Election, Election Fraud, An Illegitimate President, When Trump Realized He Lost, Jill Biden’s Doctorate,

Other Politics – Flip Wilson, Healthcare Elasticity, Church State Superman, Confederate Statues, Mort’s Cigaerette, A Morbid Thought on Climate Change, Climate Change and Externalities, All Lives Matter, Goddammit Soros, republic versus democracy, Priming for War, Still Your president, Political Christians, Citizenship and Rights, Alibi Buddies, Facts and Feelings, Weaponization of the First Amendment, Rosa Parks and Guns, The Electoral College, Electoral College II, Negligence as Principle, White Privilege Edition, The Race-Card Card, Gun Control Curious, Religious Freedoms,

Religion and the lack thereof – Flip Wilson, Church State Superman, Hating God, Prayer Meme, Belief as a Choice, “atheism”, Political Christians, Prayer of an Atheist, Weaponization of the First Amendment, Happy Holidays, The True Spirit of Christmas, Cartoon Bible,

People seemed to like these ones – Independence Malice, Who Told Me to Hate Trump*, Trump Versus the Handicapped, Deplorables on Obama, Trump’s Accomplices, Trump’s Healthcare Plan,

* This is my most popular video to date.

(Last Updated – 12/29/20)

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Holiday Hard!

24 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by danielwalldammit in General

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Ambition, Christmas, December, Decorations, Effort, Holiday Season, Holidays, Overdoing It, Work

I like our tree this year

One of the worst things about Christmas is watching people work too hard at Christmas. People do it in different ways, but they do it all the time.

Normally a moderate man, my father once Christmased up a big decoration for our rooftop. It was pretty cool, and as we lived just off Highway 18, people all around Victor-Valley, California certainly noticed it. So, of course he tried to top himself the next year, and again the year after that. I don’t recall when it got to be too much (though it might have been when we moved to a colder place). I do remember at least one year when the whole thing was more trouble than it was worth, …to him, I mean. The stress was apparent. Afterwards, we settled for a few strings of light.

And it was good!

Of course, Christmas lights can be a whole other kind of Hell. They could be a really special Hell back in the 70s. Hell, it was Hell just being my dad’s assistant in the annual battle of the Christmas lights. One bad bulb could ruin a whole string, and some of those could hide really well. I swear some would work only when you tested them, but when you moved on, they just conked right out. The struggle to find the one bad bulb was just the battle you fought after the one to untangle the strings in the first place. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen some amazing Christmas displays. Really wonderful stuff! I only hope the people who made them actually enjoyed working on the project.

…and I suspect there have been a few who didn’t.

Moni is a sweetie!

And then of course there is the competitive gifting. As they say, it’s the thought that counts. Yes, but money too expresses a thought of its own, a thought that doesn’t go away just because we sometimes talk like we don’t care about it. So, we dollar-up our Christmas love and double down on the price of our holiday thoughts whenever possible. It isn’t just the individual presents though; the spectacle around that tree can be a project in itself. That project got out of hand more than a few times when I was a kid. I noticed the beauty of the result, and I enjoyed playing with more than a few of those gifts. If I noticed the crankyness of the tall people around me, I didn’t always make the connection.

Some people just try way too hard to fill the space under the tree with as many gifts as they can. It really doesn’t have to be a mountain of packages that will take all day just to get through.

Well, for some people it does, which is precisely when Christmassing up the gift-giving gets to be a bit too much yule-tide cheer.

…and more than a few folks end up paying the cost of the holidays off well into the new year, the interest paid on credit cards being just one more holiday gift.

Hell, if a corporation can be a person, I suppose, it can receive a holiday gift just like the rest of us! It can even get that gift in the form of 21% interest paid well into late Spring.

And then there the tree itself! It can always be bigger, can’t it? At least it could if it weren’t for the ceiling, but then there are ways to flesh out the total tree display. You can Christmas up a tree a little more each year, making it bigger, brighter, full of more tinsel, decked out in brighter ornaments with each passing holiday happening.

A well decorated Christmas tree can be a beautiful thing.

Getting it there can be more trouble than it is worth.

Did I mention that special ornaments have a special way of falling from a tree branch? Seriously, the chance of breaking an ornament is directly proportional to its cost multiplied by its sentimental value.

…and the cost of the carpet.

And then of course there is the baking! A few Christmas cookies can be a lovely way to celebrate the holidays. But of course you don’t just need the sugar cookies (though you need lots of those). You also have to have the cinnamon stars, and those powdery white cookies too. Don’t forget the chocolate candies, and the hard candies! Maybe, some…

Give it a rest!

You’ll be too tired to eat them!

***

The stockings are grinchy this year

It’s funny, the way this holiday with all its themes of family and sharing can bring out the worst in people. Black Friday doesn’t seem to produce a body count anymore, at least I hope not, but the holidays can still deposit a whole butt-load of stress under the tree. Between the fake war on Christmas, obnoxious relatives at the dinner table, and the usual holiday loneliness some folks experience this time of year, the holiday season can sure produce a lot of strife and misery.

I suppose that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Make a point of any virtue and you create a special room for a little vice to grow. What makes Christmas especially troublesome is just how earnest people can be about it.

We really do work at this damned holiday!

At least some do.

Christmas can really be too much!

Among all the other hazards of Holiday Hell, the ones we all know, there is also the hazard of those trying too hard at this Holiday. We don’t talk about this holiday hazard too much, I don’t think, possibly because it doesn’t give us anything to fight about. The fake war on Christmas gives us that, at least. Holiday depression shapes up a good story to tell a therapist, a bartender, or at least a divorce lawyer, but being up till 6am putting the holiday cheer in proper order just seems too natural to some of us. Obnoxious relatives give us gripes to last the whole year. Those we will tell our friends, perhaps even the friends we will gripe about with our relatives over Christmas dinner. Hell, Holiday hell, gives us a lot to gripe about, and a good gripe is a gift well given. But working too hard at the cookies? There is nothing to complain about there.

Is there?

Perhaps not, but there ought to be a little cautionary tale in the matter.

For those who may be in the midst of trying to put together that bicycle before you go to bed tonight, still struggling with a troublesome string of lights or just working at another pan of cookies, don’t forget to save a little time to enjoy it all.

Fuck that!

Save a lot of time to enjoy it.

***

That said,

Someone I love is downstairs working a little too hard to clean up an already clean house so that we can enjoy it tomorrow. I better go see if I can help her.

***

Happy Holidays everyone!

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Television: A Loathe-Like Relationship

02 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by danielwalldammit in General

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Cable, Entertainment, Free Time, Friends, Lost, Myboys, Supernatural, Television, TV

My old cable company (back when I used to live in Flagstaff, AZ) sucked all kinds of rot-water. I lost track of the number of times I would come home on a Friday night to find my service had been cut off for no reason, or the connection just didn’t work, and because the cable company was closed for the weekend, I could not get things fixed until Monday, just before heading back out to the Navajo Nation for the week. Pay-per-view never worked, and of course there is the usual problem of umpteen channels of nothing worth watching.

Hated it!

I also remember watching about the 5th or 6th episode of MTV’s Real World in a row one night, and mumbling to myself; “What could possibly be more stupid than this show?”

I was alone, of course, but a little voice in the back of my head spoke loud and clear; “You watching it.”

One day, I moved across town, and at a certain point I realized this little mini-migration, along the fees for changing various services over to the new location, was going to cost a little more than I could afford on my next paycheck. So, I asked my cable company if I could delay one payment for two-weeks. I could have started with any number of other companies, but for some reason I called these guys first. They said, ‘yes’, and that was enough to solve my problem.

…or at least it would have been, had the person who actually said ‘yes’ to my request been authorized to do so, or even if that had been possible under their actual policies. Apparently, this was not the case. My service was cut off. Nobody cared that I had been told explicitly that I could do this, but they were happy to take my payment along with a couple extra fees and schedule a time to reconnect me.

I told them ‘nevermind.’

My initial plan was to save up and get a satellite dish. I figured it would take about a month to save up the money. What I didn’t plan on was kicking the television habit altogether. By the end of that month, I no longer needed, or wanted television. I had somehow just gotten used to life without it. I watched plenty of movies, and the internet enabled me to catch many great scenes without submitting myself to a whole show (or a whole series), but I no longer wanted continuous access to television.

That was that!

***

Letting go of television was one of the best decisions I ever in made in my life. I listened to a lot of great music, and I watched some great movies, and I dabbled at writing some things myself, to no avail of course, but I did find the experience a lot more satisfying than your average television show.

When asked about my seemingly freakish existence without functioning connection to a television service, I used to tell people it wasn’t that I wouldn’t want to watch TV, but rather, that I would sometimes watch it all day whether there was anything on it worth watching or not. (That Real-world-binge late on a Friday night comes to mind!) Ever since I was a kid, I recall, getting into a certain kind of mood, one that just made sitting in front of the idiot box seem like the perfect way to spend an hour, or a whole weekend. If that mood hit, I was watching something, even if that something disgusted me. Saying ‘no’ to television service was a way of saying ;no’ to that mood and the wasted time that went with it.

People usually responded to this explanation by telling me how to set up an antenna or steal my cable service.

Seriously, it’s almost as though some folks just can’t imagine a life without television. Life without TV must be an unfortunate existence, they seem to suppose, and so they respond to clear statements of preference for life without it as if it is a clear cry for help in getting television after all.

Ah well!

***

Things I noticed during my time without service: Some things about television got more interesting when I didn’t watch it regularly, and some got less interesting, a lot less interesting. I mostly remember the latter.

Laugh Tracks: They annoy the hell out of me now. I’m not used to them anymore, and when I hear one I feel personally insulted. All to often, a show runs with a joke that isn’t even remotely funny and uses the laugh track to try and convince us that it’s worth laughing anyway. This didn’t bother me when I was younger, but it sure does now. Those of us who grew up watching television have been trained to go along with this. My laugh-track training now has a glitch and so a laugh track is often enough to take me right out of a show altogether.

I hate them so much!

Made-for-Television Documentaries: the average television documentary crams about 5 minutes of information into a half-hour show. How they manage it, I will never know. The information these shows reveal is consistently lame, because just like so much television fiction, their stories are shaped by people who don’t trust an audience to handle anything but common television tropes. Add to that, the necessity of re-introducing the audience to the whole story at the end of every commercial break, and you have a whole bunch of fluff. If you are watching one of these documentaries for 8 minutes or so, half of that is reiteration of whatcame before and half is telling you something that won’t introduce anything new into the world of your present understanding. It really isn’t worth the time it takes to watch it

Or even to fast forward through it.

There are some amazing documentaries out there. They are not made for television.

News: I never noticed this pattern until I left off of television for awhile, but once I went without for a few years, it jumped out at me plain as day. If you were to measure the amount of time most news programs tease a story over the course of a day and then measure the amount of time they spend on the actual story, you would find that the former often dwarfs the latter.

All day, some of these stations just keep telling you about what’s coming up on a certain news segment that evening. The show starts, and they remind you about the story t the beginning and the end of the first segment. They do a commercial break and then they tell you the story is coming up soon, then remind you its coming after covering something else. This happens again, because they saved the big story for last. Finally, the story comes up and in the 5 or so minutes that follow, they add 1 or 2 new pieces of information to the stuff you already knew and the story is over before you even begin to get into it.

If these guys spent half as much time covering a story as they do selling it, they might be worth watching, but that’s a damned big if.

Drives me nuts!

Good: What I like: There are certain things I enjoy more once you stay away from television for awhile. I just can’t find many patterns to them. I do think it’s mostly in the area of humor. Because I am not constantly exposed to some clichés, they seem less cliché to me. So, a show that is actually just recycling that one great inspiration from the first season may get a bigger laugh out of me than they would if I had been watching it all along. Others in the room may wonder why I am laughing at all, but for me, the joke is new. Their delivery is polished, and it’s perfect. I’m laughing my ass off at a joke everyone else already finds tiresome.

Random Television Sets: The first thing most people do when they walk into a hotel room is turn on the television set. I still did this for years after letting go of TV in my own home. Somewhere along the line I stopped doing that. Nowadays, I will stay for several days in a hotel room without even looking for the remote, much less hitting the ‘on’ button. It’s the same when I visit other people’s homes. If television viewing is the activity of the day, I used to plop down and enjoy it with them. Nowadays, if someone is doing something else in another part of the house, I am a little more likely to seek them out than to sit down with the television viewers.

***

My significant other, Moni, has very different ideas about television.

She likes it!

After some pretty serious battles over the matter, I finally surrendered, and we ended up with cable service connections after all. It’s a big house, I can usually escape the television if I want to. I do find that a couple of decades without the box have left me much better prepared to just walk away fro the television set than my younger self could manage. I can look at a television without feeling the overwhelming urge to sacrifice my day to its mind-altering effects.

This is a relief.

When that cable guy first showed up, I had visions of a hours spent grumbling in front of reality television or some such atrocity. I felt like an addict teased with my former drug of choice.

Happily the temptation has proven less than tempting.

For the most part.

***

One of the unexpected benefits of life with my own personal ambassador for television is that she has introduced me to a number of shows I missed during my years away from the box. The experience is hit or miss for me, but the hits have been worth the time.

Arrested Development: This was truly a brilliant show. I am sorry I missed it the first time around, and ever so grateful to have been introduced to it after the fact. I could watch the whole thing again, to be honest, and some day I probably will.

I gushes because it’s good.

Becker: Amusing, but not enough to keep me watching.

Gilmore Girls: This is also amusing, but somehow, I doubt that I’m in the target audience for this show.

Friends: I remember really enjoying this show when it first came out (back when i still had television service). I particularly enjoyed a lot of the Chandler humor, specifically, the way his tone of voice often failed to match the content of his words. He could concede a point with all the conviction of a man declaring absolute victory. (That still makes me laugh.) And of course, the girls were crush-worthy. None of that mattered by the end of the first season though. The show was already old, and frankly the Ross character was so far under my skin that the very thought of watching another episode made me a little queasy. I mean, well done to David Shwimmer! A lesser actor could not have made me hate his character so much, but I do think I was supposed to like him. I just don’t.

Moni watches friends all the time now. I have several episodes memorized, just from chance moments passing through the living room while it plays for the umpteenth time. …Grumble! I still laugh at some of the jokes, and I still cringe at others. Ross still makes me want to gouge my eyes and ears out with a broken ink pen.

Monk: This was really clever. The cleverness got old though. I enjoyed a season or so, and that was enough.

Myboys: One of my old college buddies plays “Kenny” in this show. I knew it was a good run for him, and I was happy to see him have it, but I had no idea how cool the show was. When Moni met Mike at a New Year’s Party, I finally got some notion of just how great that gig must have been for him. (She totally freaked!) Moni made me watch the entire series of course, and I enjoyed every episode of it.

Now if only Superstore would make more use of Mike!

Lost: We watched a season or two of lost, and I just wasn’t down to keep at it. I get tired of story lines that keep pulling the rug out from under reality, and this was clearly a worst offender. (I had heard complaints about this feature of the show before, and I must say, I was surprised to see just how bad it was.) Why invest yourself in plot point if the writers feel free to take it away in the next episode and just tell you the whole thing was an illusion, only to rip up the new reality once again at the start of the next season.

The Mindi Project: This is fun.

Community: I had no idea Chevy Chase was on television back when this was showing, and I can’t believe I missed it. Also, I think I was 2 or 3 seasons in before I realized Donald Glover was Childish Gambino. Moni was playing the America video, and I think my response went something like this;

“Hey Donald Glover is doing a parody of the America video, but why would he make fun of that… You know, he’s sticking pretty close to the original here, he.. oh!”

Ah well, I’m old and I’m white. I’m really not supposed to know about rappers anyway, am I? Anyway, “Community” was fantastic. The paint-ball episodes are especially brilliant. Hell, they are absolute genius. I don’t mean ‘genius’ for television. I mean genius! I would watch the whole series all over again, just to see one of them one more time.

Walking Dead: I tried binge-watching this. The zombie scenes get old when you watch them back to back. My internal monologue usually goes something like this; “Hit him in the head! No, now, hit that one in the head! Be careful, somebody is going to slip or something and one will almost get you, then someone will fix it (usually), and then you guys can just hit the rest of them in the head….” Suffice to say, there wasn’t enough good stuff happening outside that theme to sustain my interest. I quit a few seasons in.

Downton Abby: This was interesting. It was also irritating. I may try to explain both feelings in a post some day.

Supernatural: This is the best and worst of television for me. There are times when this show reminds me of those days sitting in front of the television because that’s what I wanted to do at that moment and the story line just wasn’t quite bad enough to change my mind. Seriously, the endless plot twists with angels and demons and various powerful entities grow tiresome. A bit like all the warp-drive talk on Star Trek, the world-building narratives in this show just get old for me. That said, I am actually amazed that they somehow landed on a final story-line in which the heroes of the show actively plot to kill God himself.

..and the fan base is right behind them.

(Chuck is such a dick!)

And seriously, that is brilliant! Getting to this point has occasionally been a little tedious, but the shear audacity of this final plot line is just amazing.

When Supernatural is at its best though, it is when they are doing one of their parody episodes. Supernatural has done some absolutely amazing stories commenting on aspects of popular culture, or satirizing various television tropes. The trickster episodes are good for this. Whenever Sam and Dean find themselves in a completely different kind of of show, or suddenly deprived of their role as protagonists in the series, I know damned well I am going to enjoy what follows. Those episodes are right on par with the paintball episodes in Community.

****

Ah well! I’m not entirely sure what all this adds up to. I haven’t even talked about what television meant to me as a kid. Like so many children, that box was my main baby-sitter, and it had an awful lot of time to influence my ways of looking at the world. That said, this post has already gone on for far too long.

I am mostly talking about a medium that is rapidly evolving into new things. Many of the patterns I grumble about here have already changed. Others are changing now. Whether that is for the better or for the worse, I do not know. One thing that strikes me as I look up at the post above is just how much I have to say about television for somebody who has actively tried to avoid it for much of my life.I still say ‘no’ to television a lot, but as the rambling words above demonstrate, it is still a large part of my life.

Television is a big part of modern life.

Big enough to reach even its nay-sayers.

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If a Crotchety Old Man Posted on TikTok and Not A Millennial Noticed….

15 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by danielwalldammit in General

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Generation X, Internet, Microblogging, Online, Phone, Quarantinelife, Social Media, TikTok, Videos

Just me and my Covid beard doing the grumpy old guy thing. Still haven’t decided what I think of the place.

My Gal has probably got in the spirit of things down a little better than I do. Her stuff is actually kinda fun.

Ah well!

https://www.tiktok.com/@northierthanthou?lang=en

@northierthanthou

just wrong! #beer #disaster #fixed

♬ original sound – northierthanthou

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Alpha Schmalpha!

20 Friday Dec 2019

Posted by danielwalldammit in General

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Assertiveness, Bias, Gender, Gender Roles, Judgement, Leadership, Men, Perception, Women

DSCN0687It’s become a commonplace observation that women often get called a ‘bitch’ for doing exactly the same things that earn men a reputation for strong leadership. It’s a good observation. Whatever the mental twists and turns that explain this tendency, there is something about gender that seems to skew perception of assertive behavior, making roughly the same conduct objectionable in women and laudable in men.

The problem is ubiquitous. If you think you are an exception, then you probably aren’t. It isn’t necessarily a function of conscious bigotry and political commitments to support feminism don’t in and of themselves resolve the matter. I expect many well-woke folks have caught themselves grumbling at that bitch over there even as they admired this man over here for behaving in roughly comparable ways. (I expect many more never caught themselves doing this at all.) It’s a latent bias hard-wired into the social patterns of our daily lives and reinforced by countless layers of stereotyping and gender-based norms, many of which don’t come with obvious red flags telling us, “this way lies misogyny!” You have to think your way out of this kind of bias.

And then you probably have to do it again.

…and again!

…and (you get the idea.)

One thing that does bother me about the observation in question though, is that it’s practical significance is usually taken as obvious. When this observation is made, it is usually made in the service of getting us to reconsider harsh evaluations directed at assertive women.

“Okay, fair enough,” I usually find myself thinking. But I think there is at least one other implication here that doesn’t get near enough attention. If perhaps a lot of us should rethink our condemnation of misbehaving women, I think it’s at least as important to consider that maybe a lot of us are far too easily impressed by obnoxious behavior from men. Perhaps, we need to get a lot better at telling the difference between a man showing great leadership potential and one who is simply acting like an asshole.

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