This morning when I arrived at the internship the radio was on, playing an ad for a Ricky Skaggs/Bruce Hornsby tour. The ad mainly billed it as a bluegrass event.
They it played a bit of a bluegrass cover of Superfreak.
My brain exploded. It wasn’t pretty.
Generic, a bicycle messenger for 14 years, said she participated in some of the early Critical Mass rides but got turned off by the hostility and arrogance of some of the bicyclists.
“There are more reasonable ways of going about making your point,” she said. “
As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I am a bicycle rider. I ride nearly every day. On the road. In traffic.
For those who don’t know, critical mass (no, this doesn’t get a link) is a kind of regular rolling protest where a bunch of cyclers do everything they can to be assholes to drivers.
Yeah, fuck that.
I’m going to say this in small words so the self-righteous holier than thou fucking ninnies who do this shit can understand.
Roads are for cars.
Yes, the reckless adoption of personal motor vehicles after WW2 was a terrible thing for America, Earth and humanity in general. I really do agree. This is a person who has never had a driver’s license. I hate driving. I hate what cars have become. I hate their status symbol nature (not that bikes can’t be status symbols, right, fixed gear snobs?) I hate their pollution, I’m really tired of listening to people bitch about the price of gas.
But none of this changes the incontrovertible fact that:
Roads are for cars.
Large scale bike commuting is not what American roads were built for. It’s not their intended purpose, it’s not their design. Roads are for cars. Frankly, bikes don’t belong on roads. We only ride on roads because there’s nowhere else to ride much of the time. We’re the interlopers, we’re the problem causers so really, ride your bike, and shut the fuck up. This was your call, don’t go whining about it because it was kind of a bad idea.
There are no good guys in the bikes vs. cars debate. It comes down to people are assholes, whether their feet are moving or not. Yes, drivers tend to get lose in their little metal and class womb and don’t check their mirrors and don’t look over their shoulders (believe me I know this from my pre-cycling days of walking a lot). But, really, from my experience, it’s cyclers that cause the majority of problems. I’ve seen this as a cycler, as a passenger on public transit and in other peoples’ cars.
Cyclers do the dumbest fucking things. They cut off cars (and massive multi-ton busses), they don’t signal, they split lanes, they run red lights and then they get assy because they’re behaving stupidly and compound the error with the same bullshit that all self-absorbed jackasses do.
They protest.
Well, fuck that. Critical mass events should be crushed. Tear gas, charging horses, the lot of it. It’s a fucking riot and it should be treated as such.
1. Hot Fuzz was pretty good. Dude at work thought that “pretty good” was less than an enthusiastic endorsement. So let me be clear I laughed my ass off at moments, including things that weren’t obviously comedy.
Let me explain. Pegg/Wright productions function two, maybe even three levels. One is parody. This is what Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are billed as, and they are. But the second is, well, the genre. SotD WAS a zombie movie and HF IS a buddy cop action movie. The maybe even third level is a commentary. I guess it could be a subset of parody, but I TOTALLY missed his on SotD, b/c I don’t like zombie movies. With HF I was catching all kinds of things that could be described as satire if not outright ridicule of action movies.
For instance, this really isn’t a spoiler, Nicholas Angel goes to the showdown covered in guns on a white horse. A white horse. I was the only one laughing at that, but it was fucking awesome because action heros are frequently presented so ridiculously that they might as well be riding into the climactic showdown on a white horse. Hot Fuzz makes explicit what the Bruckheimer crowd might not even realize they’re implying.
And that’s what caused, less than an hour after I got out of the theater. Hot Fuzz called for thinking. An action movie. You had to think! A lot of the humor was much more subtle than I expected, and there were also some conditions imposed by the commentary that I thought limited the action, but the boys have to go their way all the way.
Just like buddy cops.
Doom says check it out. I’m deffo seeing it again.
2. I honestly didn’t expected to write that much about HF. #2 is kind of underwhelming. Internship continues, the instruction is still coming to the fore now that I’m getting hands on. I spend much of Wednesday and Thursday tearing apart broken air conditioners which is a much more effective learning tool that I’d have thought.
3. Still nervous about the future. Honestly things are pretty rough right now, which is exacerbated by my crowded schedule.
4. Red Sox came back to make the hated Yankees their collective bitch last night! Le yay!!!!! I wonder if they’d let me wear my Yankee Hater hat at work tonight.
Okay, I gots to run. Will someone that’s reading this on their flist try to comment? Let me know if you don’t hear back from me in a day or two.
I’m getting pretty nervous about the future. I’ve been crunching numbers to figure out what kind of wage I should be looking for. My budget doesn’t look so bad, assuming I can get into some kind of restricted income housing. But my student loan payments are going to be a lot bigger than I thought they’d be. I get a six month grace period on that, but it’ll take at least that long to pay off. My hours at SoLo should be going up as summer gets here so that should help.
As long as I get a job right away. Which is, of course, the rub. I’ve been keeping an eye on jobdango/monster/the want ads and there are jobs but I’m not seeing a whole hell of a lot that are entry level. There’s a job fair at PCC May 1st (I can’t decide if that’s an auspicious or ominous date). Hopefully that will help. One of my instructors (in a class that was specific to Facilities Maintenance, not HVAC service) said as graduation approached companies would come looking for us. The state Employment Department says that associate degree holders “have a competitive advantage” in the field. So, I guess all I can do is hope. I’ve always known this was a risk, if not a gamble.
My student loan interest is tax deductible, plus tools. So I guess my CPA gets at least a few more years out of me. Speaking of “tools” I bought a new LED flashlight. Man, is that fucker bright. I was playing with it at work and getting some shit from the other kitchen pukes. Oh, yeah, like they aren’t looking for things to slice n’ dice when they get a new knife. Pffft.
Alarm goes off at 5:17am.
Eat breakfast. Check e-mail, ride to internship (~20 minutes of tire rolling), intern, bus to school, eat, school gets out 8:30 at the absolute earliest. Bus/ride home. Bed by 10pm if I’m lucky.
Last night I wasn’t lucky.
This work/school shit is for the birds.
The screenplay is done (yay! Done!) and I really should be starting on my manuscript’s newest draft (which I think is going to be an extensive revision, but not quite a rewrite). But when? The logical answer is, and used to be, on the bus, but I’m paranoid about someone stealing my bike while it’s on the bus. So my laptop stays in my backpack. I do lock my bike’s front wheel to the frame when I put it on the bus, but I need to see the grab to keep someone from getting too far away with the bike if they decide to run with it. Chances are small, perhaps, but I can’t afford to replace the bike.
And then there’s sleep. Bah, fsck sleep.
Seven and a half-ish weeks left of interning.
It’s pouring buckets right now. I think the rainy season is giving me one last hurrah.
Hurrah!!!
Lent is over. I drink pop now.
True to form for me, the first can wasn’t An Experience. I drank it, it was good.
The biggest thing about Lent was trying to figure out where I could eat with no pop. Taco Bell was right out. Definitely need fizz after that. Pizza was problematic for the same reason, so I had to eat pizza at places there was beer. Shame, that. At work I had to make sure to buy something to drink with food. Usually it was Gatorade.
No longer a problem. \/\/007!
Have stuff to do before krav maga today.
Two extraordinary things happened today.
Thing the first, I used a pick. Someone ran over a stop sign last week and I was dispatched with another engineer to dig out the concrete it was in so we can reinstall with new concrete. I’m wielding the post hole digger and, well, if you’ve used a post hole digger, you know they fscking suck. Just about the time I’m thinking: I wonder if they have a pick, other engineer says, “I’m gonna go get the pick”.
rox!
Thing the second, only two (or so) days after updating my monster.com resume, someone called me about a facilities job. Not sure if they’re willing to wait for me to finish school (there is an “available on” date on monster for me, it’s the Monday after gradution) or if it’s appropriate for a rookie engineer, but we’ll see. I think it was my MS Office experience that got me the call. Still, good sign.
And baseball season has started! Go Cubs! Die Yankees!
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