Not the Happiest Place on Earth

I just had to run down to the Liberty Tree Mall to get some clothes for my upcoming trip to The Happiest Place on Earth. I stopped to get a bite to eat at Subway because I was starving, and it was the first place I saw. Behind the counter were two Registry worker types that obvious weren't following the Jared diet and really hated their jobs. The minute I started to order, I knew I didn't want to eat there. These two women were just miserable. Big ugly pouts on their faces. I ordered some pre-named sandwich that looked yummy in the picture, so I didn't think I would have to make a lot of decisions. "What kind of bread?" "What do you want on it?" "Do you want it toasted?" All with a big scowl. I guess I gave all the wrong answers because I ended up with the most disgusting sadwhich I've ever had in my life.

Rule number 1 of marketing a chain: You can spend a fortune to market yourself as a friendly, healthy, fast food alternative, but if the customer's experience is a boilded bag of chicken microwaved on soggy bread, and the customer service is akin to the RMV, than all your marketing dollars are wasted.

Here's a visual of my experience. Was going to use this as the top of post photo, but it was just a little TOO disgusting.

Colors Named After Vegetables

Sometimes when I'm doing home improvement projects myself, I don't know my ass from my elbow. In this case, I don't know a friggin avocado from an artichoke.

Was going to take advantage of the relatively warm weather today and start to paint my shutters. After going through our usual obsessive-compulsive color speccing (I tend to be a little gay when it comes to picking colors for the house. Am worse than the wife, actually), and testing on the back side of the garage last spring we settled on Benjamin Moore color # 2141-10. Or since everybody has to be fucking Martha Stewart these days, Artichoke. But sometime between last spring, when we picked the color, and last weekend when I went to buy the paint, I transposed vegetables in my mind & went to the paint store and plunked down $75 for two gallons of Avocado paint.

So I just got things all set up today, pulled out the primer & started painting. Color looked a little bright, but since it was just the primer, and was still wet, I didn't worry that much about it. Got through the first shutter & it still looked wrong. It looked more like something I'd dip my nacho chips in, or worse yet, something I'd see after having many too many margaritas with my nachos, than something I'd want to hang on my house. So I check the top coat can & it looked pretty much the same. Then I dug out the test can from last Spring & sure enough, it was supposed to be Artichoke, not Avocado. God damn $75 down the drain because I remembered the the wrong fucking vegetable.

Now the paint store says to bring in the cans & they'll see if they can turn Avocado into Artichoke, but I figure I'll just end up with pukey looking Asparagus or something.

Icy Martinis and Bad Fish

OK, enough politics for a while. Back to more important things.

Like why can't the new trendy martini restaurant in my town figure out how to make a martini that isn't full of ice chunks? Any why are they only half full?

It's not like we get out to trendy martini bars very often with two little kids. Maybe we aren't up on all the trends. Like we know it's correct to serve red wine in a much oversized glass, so it can breath (or some such nonsense), but when did this become true of martinis? And it's not like this was an oversized glass. It was just a much undersized martini.

And what's with the ice chunks? This restaurant, Mandrake in Beverly, is very cool, great atmosphere, and has been open about a year. We tried it out when it first opened and had the exact same experience with the drinks. Gave them a pass because it had only been open a week. But by now, I'd think they should know how to make a martini correctly. I mean, I wouldn't expect a perfect martini at a beer joint, or at the 99, but when you have a martini menu, you should be able to make a fucking martini without shards of ice in it.

And then there is the tuna problem. I am a bit of a tuna snob. Tuna can only be cooked one way: RARE. The best tuna dishes I've ever had were cooked by a chef named Brian Kilroy who worked at the late, great Love Noodle in Salem, and then hopped around to several other restaurants on the North Shore. It was perfect every time. Seared, sliced, and served over asian noodles and vegetables in a killer soy wasabi sauce. If you ordered it any other way than RARE, he would refuse to make it. He was the Tuna Nazi.

Mandrake's tuna appetizer was cooked correctly, but it seemed like it was prepared between a few hours and a few days before it was served. Yuck.

So while we will probably give Mandrake another chance at some point, it is on a 6-month probation for shitty drinks and stale tuna. One of our other favorite North Shore restaurants, Finz in Salem is also on a 1-year tuna probation for the bland, overthick, seared on only one side slab I got there this summer. Rare tuna is good, but a two inch thick piece of raw fish with no flavor is not.

Why are all my friends Republican?

Here is just a sampling of comments from my Republican friends after Tuesday's big thumpin'. For some reason I tend to have many more Republican friends than Democrats. They are all terribly misguided, but I can't seem to do anything about it. This doesn't even include the most anti-liberal, FOX News talking-point spewing, illegal alien fearing (although safely ensconced in alien-free Marblehead) Republican nut-job buddy, who I nearly came to blows with in a bar on the eve of the Iraq war when I correctly predicted just about everything that has happened over there. I have yet to hear from him, but have no doubt that there will be no change in his no-holds-barred anti-liberal tirades.

Anyways, here's a sampling of emails from the others.

• I suggest you start the process of getting your pistol permits to carry concealed weapons now. The Democrats are in power and as bad as Massachusetts is now, it will only get worse. May the dear lord take pity on Massachusetts; I almost puked last night listening to Ted Kennedy introduce the Devil. In fact, I couldn't listen; I turned off the TV, kissed my children and started battening down the hatches. This is Jericho.


• These guys are in over their head. Just wait a few years after we've paid higher taxes and on the surface a few social/ education programs look a little better (as might the economy) We'll also have a deficit of 4 billion instead of 2. By the time his or Murray's term is over (Patrick is out of here if a Democrat is elected into the Oval Office), it will be 1989 all over again, our economy will be in the tank and more people will be out of work. Not to mention the criminal pardons. Cranky, you will rue the day you decided to go back to the dark side.

At least one is only a wishy-washy Republican.

• You know I voted for Healey but to be honest, I held my nose while doing it.

In addition to this, my brother-in-law persueded (certainly with some help of the race card) his normally Democratic 85 year-old mother of all the scarry things that could happen if Patrick was elected & drove her to the polls so she could vote against the Dems.

Jeeze, I need to do something about my political circle of friends. I guess this is the perils of living in the suburbs. But if you judged me by my friends and relatives, you might think I lived in Mississippi, not Massachusetts.

Bullshit News

When I read the story on the front page last month saying the spring floods had washed away much of the area's mosquito larvae and that this would be a milder than normal year for mosquitoes, I just knew that the story would turn out to be bullshit. Or that within days I'd read a story that said the exact opposite.

Now, after the first real summer weekend, it's clear that the mosquitoes certainly weren't washed away, and are heavier than ever this year. Just another case of the news media grabbing some "scientific study," splashing it on the front page, or top of the newscast, whether or not it has any basis of truth.

How to run a news business in the 00's: Just grab yourself a scientific study that has a good headline, and fills 30 seconds of airtime, or 20 column inches of your newspaper. Accuracy is unimportant.

You might as well not even watch or read the news, because chances are half of it isn't even true, anyways. One week a glass of wine a night is a great health benefit. Next week, a glass of wine a night can increase your risk of colon cancer.

Tonight at 11: More bullshit news.

Hosed again!

My wife has done it again. Heard some great and wondrous product advertised on the radio, and gone and shelled out 30 bucks for it, and left it for me to deal with it being a piece of shit.

This time it was this wondrous Liquid Lime she heard advertised on her garden god Paul Parent's show. So your lawn can be greener in two days rather than five. Never mind that our lawn is half dirt anyways. Of course it's obvious to me and anyone with a cynical bone in their body that behind every product hyped on any radio talk show is some type of payola deal.

So the stuff comes in this jug, with this little flimsy hose end adapter. The directions on the jug are completely unintelligible. Sort of tells you what area it should cover, but makes no mention of how the "convenient hose end adapter" works or how much to spray in any one place. And the adapter is a complete piece of shit. It doesn't even have a full set of hose threads to hold it on the hose. Just these little grooves, that barely hold it, even if you don't turn the water on or move the thing around at all. Turn the water on and it squirts out the back end all over you. After about a dozen tries, I finally got it to hold and not leak too much. I very cautiously made it through about half the back lawn, and then the piece of shit adapter let loose and soaked me all over. And it hadn't even used barely any of the stuff in the jug, so it doesn't seem like it was even mixing right.

I have no idea if the product in the jug is any good or not. Of course the wife will tell me to go spend another 30 bucks on a garden sprayer and apply it that way, but the fact that they would sell the shit as "just attach to your hose and spray" when you can't even get it to stay attached to your fucking hose, makes it more likely it will just be returned to the store. Actually it will probably end up stuck in the corner of the garage with all the other useless crap we've bought that doesn't work.

Contractors Suck

Our house is a money pit, and a magnet for bad contractors. We've owned it for about eight years. Put about as much money into it as we originally paid for it, and still aren't finished. We've hired at least two of the worst contractors in the Boston area, had to threaten to sue one in order to get enough money back to fix all the shit he fucked up. And now that we finally have gotten the fat fuck to give us some money back, we now have to find someone that we can trust to do the next phase of the job. Of course now we don't trust ANYONE.

The next phase involves reshingling the entire house. Over the last couple weeks, I've gotten quotes and time estimates from several contractors. One estimates that the job will take two weeks. Another estimates that the job will take three months. Now what am I supposed to do with that fucking information. Two weeks sounds like they will ship in a whole crew of illegal aliens, who will madly rip the house apart & throw up the shingles, about as good as the fuckhead who did them the first time. Three months seems to work out to about $100 per shingle.

This is the case with everything. After getting screwed so bad the last time, I research everything to death. Every builder who comes out, I ask more or less the same questions. Every one answers them differently. Every one tells me that the guy who told me something different doesn't know what he's talking about.

What's a poor homeowner to do, but learn how to do everything himself, so he doesn't have to live at the mercy of these assholes.

Yikes, my kid's a Yankee

It was bad enough when I accidentally bought my 5 year old son (that is NOT him in the picture) a Derek Jeter glove. Now I find out that his first T-Ball team is The Yankees. How can anybody in Greater Boston do that to a kid that is in training to be a lifelong Red Sox fan. If peanuts are banned in schools, shouldn't the name Yankees be banned from youth sports in Greater Boston as well? For psychological reasons.

I mean, I just had to explain to the kid why I had to take down his Johnny Damon poster. It's not like he was crushed or anything, but he has been to Fenway, he understands that we root for the Red Sox, and that we root against the Yankees.

He knows that electrical sockets, smoking, and The Yankees are all bad, so he is old enough to question why his team is called the Yankees, when the Yankees are bad. And he's not completely buying my explanation that only the New York Yankees are bad.

Apparently the coach is a Yankees fan, and actually requested that his team be the Yankees. The final game of the season is going to be The Yankees against The Red Sox, and I'm going to have to be out there yelling Go Yankees!. Now, I don't want to be one of those bad sports parents already, but this is just wrong.

Trailer trash neighbors

We live in a very economically mixed town outside of Boston. Bought a house here about eight years ago, and have put a ton of time and money into fixing it up. It's a nice neighborhood of older houses, in very mixed architectural styles. The houses across the street are big Tudor style houses. About 100 years old. They are worth about a million bucks each.

Out our back door (which is our main entrance, and where we spend most of the time) is a 1970s style raised ranch. It hasn't been painted in 20 years. There are big piles of discarded lumber in the front yard. A couple partially dismantled cars sit in the dirt driveway. There is one of those plastic garages for the "good" car. A couple big piles of dirt with weeds growing out of them are on either side of the yard. Four trash cans sit outside the FRONT door. Until recently when the kids were out of diapers, the Diaper Genie sat on the front step.

There are four generations that live in this house. A nice old lady, a next generation couple that must be either her son or daughter (this seems to be the skankiest generation). A young couple that must be their daughter and her husband. And two little kids, just about the age of ours.

They have a pool in the back yard, and about 50 people come over nearly every weekend in the summer—they must have the best house in their circle of friends. They have one of those extra large blue plastic tarps that they make a tent out of. It usually goes up in the back yard around Memorial Day, and stays there till the first snow in the winter brings it down.

They are always friendly to us, and we are cordial to them. Even invited us to a couple of their parties. We dropped in once, just to be neighborly. It was very frightening. There were about 100 people in the back yard under the blue tarp. It looked like a block party at a trailer park in Kentucky. We left very quickly. We felt like The Keatons dropping in on The Bundys.

Or remember the episode of The Simpsons where the neighbors were trying to sell their house, and the prospective buyers looked out the window just in time to see Homer, laying in a kiddie pool, looking for the hot dog he dropped in the water. "Oh there you are". Picture that scene.

So this brings up many questions and dilemmas.

• How do we teach our kids to not be judgmental, and that all people are created equal, when we go out of our way to avoid contact with this family.


• How do we tactfully ask if they could at least keep their trash cans outside their BACK door.


• When did we turn into yuppie snobs?


• What the hell is going to happen when the old lady kicks the bucket? Will even more of the extended family move in?


• If all the neighbors chipped in, how much would it take to get them to sell their house.


• What kind of tall bushy trees can we get, that will fill out very quickly, that we can plant in the back corner of our yard, so we can block the view of their house from our deck.


• How come I get nothing but porn, when I type "trailer trash" into Google Image Search. Oh great, now I'm gonna be in the top list of hits on Google for trailer trash porn.

Lost in the supermarket

Do you ever wonder why every drug store is a superstore now? It's because we have 20 different kinds of Colgate. Right next to 15 different kinds of Crest. Next to 50 other brands of toothpaste in a dozen flavors each.

And that's only the toothpaste aisle. Then there is the deodorant aisle. I like one kind of deodorant. The kind that's a gel, but not a liquid gel. Sort of a hard gel. But I can go to the CVS, stand there for ten minutes, looking at 500 kinds of deodorant, and still not find the one I'm looking for. See. I'm adding to the problem, because I have to have just the right kind of deodorant. I guess there are people out there who support each of the other 499 variations too.

And what about the cold medicine aisle. Must be 20 kinds of Robitussin alone. One for each possible symptom: cough, sneezing, congestion, sore throat. Then one with every combination of two symptoms. Then one with all the symptoms. Then each of those possible options in Cherry. Then the generic versions. CVSTussin in all the same options. So you stand there thinking. Well, I have sniffles and a cough, but I don't really have a sore throat. Where's the version for that? Oh, fuck it, just buy the one that covers everything, and get me out of this place!

It's nuts.

You know what causes this. Same thing that causes all the other ills of consumerism. Marketing! It's a thing called shelf-space. If there are more kinds of Colgate, then Colgate will take up more space in the aisle than Crest. And if you walk in and see more Colgate, then chances are you are going to walk out with Colgate. Why do you think I buy Robitussin? Because you walk into the cold aisle, and all you see is fuckin Robitussin.

So this is why the CVS is now as big as the supermarket was when I was a kid. And why the supermarket is the size of football stadium.

Fucking marketing.

[marketing] [products] [society] [suburbia]

Cookie cutter neighborhoods

This is a neighborhood that was built in my city a couple years ago. Before it was here, this was a forest. They came in and clear cut the whole thing. It was cheaper and easier to just mow down everything, than to leave some trees and create a nice wooded neighborhood. It's called Hawk Hill. There are no hawks, because they left when the trees were cut down. By the way, I'm not a tree-hugger, I just hate stuff that is cheap and lazy.

These are not inexpensive houses. They sold for $600,000-$700,000. Aren't they just the blandest things you've ever seen? If you had $600,000 to spend on a house, is this what you'd want? People snapped them up pretty quickly, though. I guess there is an allure to some people for a big, new, and open house, no how bland and sterile they look. First off there must have been a sale on beige, soft yellow and white paint, because that's all they used. 32 houses that just alternate beige, soft yellow, white, beige, soft yellow, white, beige, soft yellow, white. A few gray ones thrown in. Clapboard covered chimneys... big flat sides with no windows... a big rock ledge for a backyard, with another big bland ugly house behind it. Yuk, they are just awful. And starting at $600,000! Nuts.