Friday, September 30, 2011

Friday Ramblings...

Just some stuff on my mind as I drove around this afternoon...

-Driving down the highway this afternoon I saw a group of convicts picking up trash on the side of the road. First off, it is a little hard to believe we still do that. Given the way the legal system works these days, you would have expected someone to have complained about it being embarrassing to the prisoners and brought a lawsuit to end the practice by now. I mean, they've been doing this kind of stuff forever. It's just weird to me that this survived and drive-ins failed. Still, that is not what got my mind going. Those guys are picking up trash because they were convicted of some kind of crime. Trash that got there by people littering. Littering is a crime. It's kind of a chicken-and-egg kind of thing. Also, what do you think are the odds any of those people were convicted of littering?

-If the person in the car ahead of you is taking too long to get on the gas when the light switches from red to green, I'm all for giving them a quick honk to bring it to their attention. This afternoon I was the fifth car at a light. The first car failed to go and the guy behind that car was on his horn in about half a second. Typically I give it a five-count, but I'm not going to get on someone who wants to do it faster than that. What made this particularly dickish was that the guy with the quick trigger-finger was driving an 18-wheeler, which doesn't have a normal horn - its got an airhorn. Do you want to talk about overkill? I was four cars away and I jumped, so I can only imagine what the guy in the front of the line did. New rule: if you're going to use an extremely loud airhorn in your vehicle then you had better give the people ahead of you a little more leeway about pulling away when the light changes. No need to scare them half to death when it takes twice as long for your truck to get up to speed anyway.

-I was passing a dentist's office outside of the center or town and on the lawn out front was a woman sunning herself in a beach chair and a bathing suit. Now, this particular dentist's office was in a building that holds businesses on the ground floor and apartments above it. It appears that the woman was a tenant and decided to put her chair on the only patch of lawn available to her. (I'm assuming, of course. Maybe she was an employee, it was a slow day and they take casual Friday's very seriously at this particular office.) The point is, she was not exactly giving off a professional vibe. Just something to I want anyone thinking about renting out the space above their business to consider when you are interviewing potential tenants.

-Could we, as a people, get together and pick one set of measurements for clothes? I bought a couple shirts in the last couple of days, both allegedly the same size. One fits me great, the other looks like it would be tight on my nephew. Both of these shirts are from athletic companies and both are based in the United States, so it's not like they can claim some kind of problem converting from metrics. This annoys me to no end because I hate trying on clothes in stores. I like being able to grab and go and I can't do that when I'm not sure what that clothing company's definition of XXL is.

-Day after day the news paints a very bleak picture for the American economy. Well, if you ever want to feel better about it I recommend going to the nearest outlet store. You'll see large group of people and not a single one of them will speak English. Honestly, how bad can we be doing if all these people are still coming over for vacations and shopping? I know they have a great exchange rate, but whatever their reasoning they are spending money in American stores when they could be doing it anywhere. I'm pretty sure I would get a damn good bang for my American buck in places like Nigeria right about now, but you don't see me hoping on a plane. I think the demise of the US is greatly exaggerated.

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