For instance, I can be behind closed doors in a bathroom stall when lo and behold, some idiot struts in and cozies up to the urinal that is directly adjacent to my stall. He’s so close that his shoes practically penetrate the boundary of my personal space. I can literally stare at his twitching foot while I’m sitting on the commode. This is horrible! Why do men do this repeatedly, when there are other toilets that are farther away from me?

Continuing the Men’s room rule: If there are a line of urinals in the bathroom, do not for any reason come and stand next the one I’m using. Everybody knows that! Everybody, except for half the men I encounter in an actual bathroom! What is wrong with you people? Let me be clear. I never want to stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone and urinate together. Ever!

Furthermore, men, when you’re reliving your bladders, it isn’t necessary for you to deliberately force out a fart while you do it. I mean, really. One may slip out here and there, but to proudly fire off your farts amongst strangers isn’t the least bit appreciated, I can assure you.

I’ve also noticed that a man who is occupying a stall will start blowing their nose when I walk in the bathroom. They’re obviously making a halfhearted attempt to cover up the sound of their sputtering ass. I have news for you fellows, you’re not fooling anyone. You’re noses are almost never clogged, and besides, I can still hear the painful echos of your bloody diarrhea throughout the bathroom.

And another thing. If I’m already in a stall minding my own business, don’t come waltzing in the bathroom and fiddle with the sink for 10 minutes. I have this experience regularly. Men walk in the bathroom and begin rinsing the coffee pot or their lunch containers, and run the water at full blast for what seems like an eternity. All while combing their hair, or staring in the mirror performing some other mindless ritual. This is a public bathroom, not a shower or a kitchen! Get the hell out!

I can’t imagine a single man disagreeing with me on what I’ve just wrote. Still, I say this knowing that tomorrow, one of the terrible sequences of events mentioned above will inevitably transpire before me yet again. Good grief.

I don’t even realize I’m overdoing it. I tend to write and hammer out words as though I’m speaking out loud to someone. I find myself inserting commas at random in an effort to invoke a slight pause in the flow of the message. I want to sprinkle commas everywhere! I’m not certain of to what degree of grammatical correctness any of my comma usage actually is. I’ll leave that to the experts and future historians to decide.

I started to wonder if commas at some point in the far future will gradually get weeded out from all written text. At least perhaps that could be possible for all casual writing. Along with the advent of emails and text messages it seems that written language will inevitably get more simplified over time. Perhaps some day it won’t look unnatural to have a whole body of text without any commas. Could you imagine such a world? I wonder if I could ever bring myself to write an entire blog post without using a single comma.

Wait. I just did.

Even worse is listening to music on the go and using my iPhone to do a Google search in Safari for the lyrics of what I’m listening to. Pages load slowly with the crazy amount of ad content that comes with them. Usually once a page is usable, it’s typical for a pop-up ad to show up about something stupid (like buying ringtones) and I have to zoom the page to click a tiny “X” to close the overlaying window box. Horrible! I wish that everyone would make mobile-friendly sites. As for using apps, lyric-specific apps are a little lacking, as they have their own ads or incomplete catalogs.

I’m not trying to plug the site, but I tend to generally use 1SongLyrics. This site is a little less bloated than the others, but absent a better solution, I’ve chosen to settle for it.

I’ve long been calling for a lyrics site with leaner ads, but perhaps the perfect solution would be if Google would just give me the lyrics right inside the search results. They already do that with the weather and sports results. I don’t know if this would create a copyright issue, but I just want the words to a song without the fluff.

If anyone thinks they have a better solution, then I’m all ears.

Over the weekend, the local weather dipped below freezing. The overnight low was predicted to be 29 or 30 degrees. When I glanced at the weather forecast on my phone, I was prompted with a red “severe alert” icon. The alert turned out to be a mere frost advisory. Seriously, is a frost advisory actually severe? I think not.

The same is true for drought conditions. Over the summer, I’d often hear news reports that parts of the state were in moderate to severe drought. It was reported that the western part of the state was currently in a severe drought. I seriously doubt it. In my mind, a drought so bad as to be labeled severe means that all trees have died away and the dirt has dried to a bleak desert sand.

Also over the summer, I’d frequently see ozone and air quality alerts mixed in with the weather conditions. The ozone alerts, however insignificant to the average person, were most always labeled as being severe. If conditions outdoors were severe on a daily basis, the population would have long since withered away.

Almost nothing is truly severe. I’ve had enough of this. When something truly severe does come along, I don’t know how it will be described. I suppose the verbiage could jump to “extreme” but that word is just as overused and nearly equally as meaningless.

I chose to write this today because a friend of mine at work was out today because she’s home sick from having a flu shot a few days ago. What is the point of this shot if it makes some people sick?

Everyone save your time and money; avoid the flu shot sham.

I never back into a parking space! For one, I drive terribly in reverse. It takes me two tries to get it right. The thing is, I’m going to have to back up one way or the other, whether it is when I arrive or when I leave. If I choose to do it when I get there, I have to do it twice to fit in the space correctly, wasting even more time. And again, doing so would also waste the time of people behind me.

So, all of you stop backing in! Having said that, I do often back into my driveway because my car is always covered in dew or ice when I leave for work in the morning. I don’t like to back out at those times and risk running over a kid going to the bus. That is a special case that gives me a reason to make that kind of effort. Other than that scenario, forget it.

What a lie! Miller High Life is honestly the worst beer that I can imagine. It is truly horrid. In no way imaginable would anyone under any circumstances mistake this swill for a beer that was even slightly expensive. Trust me. Never drink this beer. Ever. This is false advertising at its best.

Every New Years Eve, while the partygoers in New York City are living it up in Times Square waiting for the ball to drop, another copycat tradition is underway in downtown Raleigh. In Raleigh, we have the acorn drop. Yes, you heard right. It is a large acorn on a pole that they lower at midnight to celebrate the new year. Lame. What is the point of this? New York is in our time zone and people who actually have a life can celebrate the real ball dropping, in real-time.

Even more stupid is the fact that the acorn is dropped early every year at 8:00 PM so that families and small children can witness the drop, chiming in an hour that is absolutely meaningless to all parties involved. To artificially celebrate the new year before midnight is a complete disgrace. Let’s just do away with this. I’m embarrassed.

Today is Groundhog Day. Up in the city of Punxsutawney, PA, the famous groundhog comes out to see his shadow. Don’t get me started on how silly the tradition is. If you look at the historical records, you’ll find that ole’ Phil sees his shadow like 95% of the time. But I digress on Phil. My real complaint is that Raleigh, NC has to copy this tradition as well. We have our own groundhog celebration, except our groundhog bears the eye-rolling name “Sir Walter Wally.” Give me a break.

I’m curious if other cities and states have similar events to those I’ve listed above. All I can do is shake my head at what a complete waste of time and resources all this crap is.

Music content is something I do want to own. I listen to my music over and over again, and cherish my collection. I don’t want to pay $15 a month to listen to unlimited music. No way. I don’t mind paying for tracks and albums. I prefer it. They are mine and I own them. Seeing the public calling for a subscription model for music irks me. That is just what the record companies want you to do, provide a steady revenue stream from subscribers. I say no! I’ll keep my music that is rightfully mine.

Too many business today are thinking of instituting a monthly or annual subscription fee to use their products. Word has it that Windows and Office may adopt that business model in the future. Yuck! Subscriptions are a way to suck more and more money from consumers. If digital content in the future will be comprised of a slew of subscriptions, then the hell with it.

Dear N&O:

I have a great new name for the N&O. I call it “The Pews and Observer”. I don’t subscribe to the paper, but often glance through the papers of my co-workers. I find that nearly every day the Life section is filled with religious articles. Most of the Life section these days is actually the Faith section, which I find disturbing. In my opinion, the N&O is nothing more than a religious publication. It’s hard not to feel that way when I’m bombarded with regular features such as “The God Squad” and church bulletins.

Take away the advertisements, the religious propaganda, and most of what is left is collection of articles ripped straight from the New York Times and the Associated Press. That’s not much of a problem because those articles are clearly the best ones. However, I can read them in the actual New York Times, or on the Internet.

The only local N&O staff writer that I look forward to reading is Barry Saunders. He pens an insightful and entertaining column. Hopefully when the paper industry breathes its final breath, Barry find valuable work elsewhere. Sadly for the N&O, once the daily print newspaper is a thing of the past, nothing of value in Raleigh will have been lost.

The vast majority of the time, restaurant bacon is served up as a shriveled, wet, greasy, white, uncooked blob of fat. Does anyone other than me know what a cooked piece of bacon even looks like? It is a cooked crispy brown. Everywhere I go the bacon is barely cooked, limp, and consists mostly chewy fat.

This problem is particularly bad a fast food places. They are not alone, but Wendys and Jersey Mikes stand out in my mind as being among the worst offenders. If I order a club sub at Jersey Mikes, I have to refuse the bacon. If I forget to opt out, I end up with a disgusting sandwich, layered in bacon that has the texture of stringy, sinewy, chewy fat. I lose my appetite trying to sever it with my teeth.

I’m fed up! Making bacon isn’t very hard. It’s easy to make on the stove, in the oven, or microwave. How does one mess it up? I don’t understand. I’ll no longer accept bacon in my food when I go out to eat. I’ve had enough of feeling sick to my stomach after pulling a white, fatty, uncooked blob of fat from my sandwiches. I’m done! I’ll have no more of this.

Below, I’ve posted a photo that I saved from the Yahoo News page a few days ago. I think it clearly illustrates my point.

• A minivan of any kind
• A Buick of any kind (old people are the only Buick-owners out there)
• Anyone driving and wearing a hat (always heard this–and pretty true)
• A very old “Uncle Jessie” kind of pickup truck (it is only still running because it’s never been over 35 mph)
• A PT Cruiser (the crappiest, slowest car on the road today)

I think we should have a series of screensaver channels. I envision a bunch of random imagery, being it flying toasters, kaleidoscopes, or anything one can think of. While we’re brainstorming, imagine an aquarium channel, or a crackling fireplace channel. I often want to put something on in the background that doesn’t have moving pictures or dialogue. This seems like a grand idea that’s just waiting to be tapped. What do you think?

I suppose ads on these channels would be inevitable. That is unless they are provided as extras from your cable/satellite provider, such as the digital music channels are today. Ads would have to be very limited as to not be a distraction. A simple bottom banner, or once-per-hour commercial breaks would be okay, I suppose. The owner of these channels wouldn’t have to pay to produce original programming necessarily, so ad revenue wouldn’t need to be that high. What a great idea! Let’s do it!

In the past couple of weeks, nearly every prime time show that I’ve taped on my DVR either has had a thunderstorm warning, amber alert, silver alert, or local election results on the screen during the show. It is ridiculous! I don’t care about any of those things! If I want live election results, I don’t expect to find them on the channel showing American Idol. If a bad thunderstorm is coming, then too bad. What do you want me to do? I’m already at home! If a child or old person has gone missing, then I probably can’t help you. The person you are looking for is not standing in middle of my living room, so I suppose I won’t be seeing them tonight.

I think I’m at the front of this complaint. I believe the voices against this will grow louder once it becomes more commonplace and obtrusive. This must stop immediately! It makes me feel like every channel is going to go the way of the TV Guide Channel, which today has about 1/4 of the screen still reserved for the program listings, while the other 3/4 are ads and pointless programming. Gimme a break!

Personally, I hope they fail…and fail miserably. I am no fan of Microsoft. Their decades of corporate greed and endless bullying of their rivals has left a bitter taste in my mouth. I think the company should have been broken up years ago. I believe they still operate a monopoly today, at least in the business world, and they abuse that power at every opportunity. Microsoft is all about stealing others’ ideas and claiming them as their own. I have watched for years as they relentlessly stomped on anyone trying to get a foothold in the business. The systematic destruction of the Netscape browser was among the most personal.

I think Microsoft’s web services stink. I do not like MSN or the new Live.com. Funny, I remember when Microsoft bought Hotmail.com and made it their own. It went from being a cool, hip place to send mail via the web, to a bloated, cumbersome service littered with advertisements. I remember once, years ago, when Microsoft updated individual user preferences for Hotmail account holders to include incorporate new privacy options. In doing so, Microsoft forcefully and deliberately set each and every user account to allow their addresses to be used for targeted advertising. Is that what you expect from a company you supposedly trust?

I happen to like Yahoo. The site is still a great online destination, and they have an immense array of product offerings. I admit that I use Gmail instead Yahoo Mail, but that doesn’t mean Yahoo is lacking. I do read Yahoo News and visit My Yahoo on a daily basis. I also use the Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Widgets, Yahoo Answers, Flickr, and Del.icio.us, just to name a few.

If Microsoft becomes the controller of Yahoo’s services, I am planning to cancel each and every one one of those services when/if it goes into effect. I won’t have any part of being a Microsoft web customer. Period.

Go away, Microsoft. Leave Yahoo alone!

Last night I opened a pack and I could only stomach one of the two rolls. It just wasn’t good, and had little taste. Today’s Swiss Cake Rolls taste so cheap and industrial, they are like biting into moist rolled-up cardboard. They have the texture of something made from chemicals and heavy machinery. I swear that over the years and decades they must have dramatically changed the recipe, and are just riding out their success using the original box. I don’t plan to buy any more of these, at least for a very long time. They are not the least bit good anymore.

I have been a member of two gyms in the past. Neither membership was worth the money I paid. I rarely went, and when I did, the cool equipment was often taken. Using free weights usually involved sitting next to a beefcake who is pumping ten times what I am trying to do. The same beefcakes were there most every day. And despite the fact that the gym was always crowded, the owners were always out trying to recruit new people to join. Banners were put up outside offering rates far below what I’d already agreed to pay. Gyms come and go. They most always eventually go under, or get bought by another company, who under the guise of a new name, still go out and try to rip people off.

I don’t plan to pay for a gym membership again. I think the whole business is a big racket. They count on people not coming very often, or giving up all together. If I ever get serious about working out, I’d rather spend money on a Bowflex machine that I can use at home.

Wal-Mart is always slam-packed. Parking and shopping are a logistical nightmare. They install nearly 50 checkout lanes in the supercenter, but I never see more than about 8 in use at any given time…if that. Waiting in line always takes a whole 10-15 minutes before you can even place your items on the counter. There are always people ahead of you buying $300 worth of milk, Sam’s Choice soda, and other stupid nonsense.

The store greeters almost never say hello to me when I walk in, but always have to harass me on the way out by looking at my receipt all the time. Then you have to work your way past a slew of charities and girls selling cookies on your way back to your car, which is parked a half-mile away.

And almost worst of all; Wal-Mart and their owners think bad language in music is sinful, and only sell watered-down versions of popular CDs. Tampering with an artist’s work should be illegal. Absolutely never, ever buy CDs or movies at Wal-Mart! Ever! I’d much rather shop at Target. The cleanliness and style of Target is simply no comparison to the likes of evil Wal-Mart, its disgruntled employees, or its customers.

The worst fact of all is that I read in the paper today, September 5th, that the hurricane forecasters have revised their prediction for the 2007 year to reflect less storms. Too late, buddy! That is like someone betting on the score of a football game, only to up and try to change their prediction at half-time. Get real. If you have the nerve to predict the storm activity for the next decade, at least stick to the crap you shoveled out before the season got started a few months ago!

My complaint is that in their advertising, they claim they have the fewest dropped calls of any cell service. I can’t imagine this is true. I just personally feel that if any other network has more dropped calls, they wouldn’t even be in business. We have had Cingular for years and make the majority of our calls in the capital city of our state, North Carolina. Even here, we have had dropped calls day after day for a long time. For the record, I have used a Nokia phone and today I use a Razr V3. Even when the call doesn’t drop completely, it is still stuttered all too often. Since becoming AT&T, the company seems to have stopped using the least dropped calls claim. Now their slogan is More Bars in More Places. That may be, but why even with full bars am I hearing so many drops in the calls I make?

Cingular isn’t alone in this problem, I’m sure. It frustrates me that the providers are investing so much into increasing web bandwidth and other new toys that have nothing to do with actually talking. I want my calls to be clear as real life, without any hiccups. I think this is possible. Why don’t we have it? Remove all the other features and give me clear calls.

It kills me how much electricity is wasted in my office. People leave their computers and monitors on 24 hours a day, and they are even encouraged to. During the week, I log off of my computer and do leave it running for easy access the following morning, but I at least have a decency to shut off my power-hogging monitor when I leave every day. It stuns me how you drive past office buildings, and see all the lights on, with computer monitors and fans blasting. How hard is it to cut back on this? Aren’t these businesses interested in saving money? I just think it would make more sense to shut as many devices off during the night as possible if no one is going to be present to use them. If you work in an office of 100 people or more, you can imagine how much electricity this all must add up to. Replacing old CRT monitors for more power-friendly LCDs would help a great deal, too.

I won’t even go into the fact that people are allowed to have individual space heaters at their desks. During the hot summer, the air conditioning can keep it quite cold in the building; apparently so cold that some turn on their personal heaters at their desk. It is unbelievable. If the energy industry wants to find a good place to encourage conservation, I say start with large office buildings. You won’t believe the amount of wasteful consumption!

I can’t help the fact that we have cars that run on oil and gasoline. I wish that wasn’t the case, but I am not about to drive any slower to save a few nickels and dimes. My car’s A/C doesn’t even work, so I am saving already. If you want to save on gas, go buy a more fuel efficient car and ditch the SUV.

Later, still a couple of years ago, I bought a portable Memorex CD, radio, and tape player. This was the kind that sits on your desk, but has a handle, and is small enough to carry. It has turned out to be pretty awful, too. The sound is okay, actually. That is not the problem. The performance of the CD player is not good. This is especially evident when you try to loop around the end of the CD back to the beginning. It takes forever. When you open and close the CD lid, it has the snap and feel of a 10 cent piece of plastic. Plus, the radio gets horrible reception. Absolutely horrible! And the tape player, while rarely used, ate a book-on-tape that I had borrowed from a friend. Overall, it is a really crappy device.

While I am ususally a stickler for buying top brand electronics, I went with the cheaper Memorex brand while trying to get the cheapest buy I could at the time. I have since learned my lesson. You really do get what you pay for. Memorex sucks. The name is worth no more than the bottom of the barrel companies named things like SimpleTech or CyperPower. I have bought plenty of their writable CDs and DVDs over time, and do not recall having any issues with them, but I doubt I’ll be buying any more.

I am most distraught by an article on the front page of the N&O today. A state agency is considering allowing bow hunting in the city limits to thin the deer population? Only in backwards North Carolina would something like this actually come to pass. This is an asinine idea. I do not want anyone in my city limits, or especially my neighborhood hunting with a bow and arrow, or any other weapon for that matter. Have people lost their minds? The deer population isn’t too high…the human population is too high! These deer live in the woods which we cut down for more strip malls and townhouses. Anyone who takes pleasure in hunting and killing an innocent animal is seriously lacking morality.

Today, on this particular morning, they debated a story that is stirring in the United States, which until today, I was unaware of. The parents of a young disabled girl have had doctors perform surgery on her and give her some type of hormone concoction to essentially stunt her growth. She will remain a child forever and never grow into an adult. While I know they may have their own reasons for choosing this, I still find it disturbing that they call her their “Pillow Angel”.

As always, the anchor asked for listener feedback, as they do every day after a hot story. Today, shooting from the hip, I wrote them a brief email. At the end of the program, pushing 10 AM, they actually read my letter on the air! I was floored! Owen Bennet Jones was hosting today. He said, “…and here is a letter from Craig in the U.S.” They didn’t give my full name, thankfully, but as he started reading, I scrambled to pull up my computer’s Gmail window, showing my sent message. I then read along as he echoed my exact words to a worldwide, global audience. What are the chances that they would broadcast my letter, of all the ones they admitted were pouring in? I was, and still am, absolutely stunned.

Below is my letter (which I am a tad embarrassed about, since I wish I could have worded it a bit more clever than I did at the time when I hammered it out). I fully admit that I can’t imagine how difficult their daily lives must be, and I don’t really know what my opinion is of her condition or of her parents difficult decisions without experiencing it first hand. But the story made it to the news desk because it was so stirring. Hyped up on coffee, I was stirred and at that moment, I wrote:

I have just learned about the 9-year-old girl Ashley who had her growth stunted by her parents. This is outright child abuse. I don’t know their circumstances at home, and I certainly couldn’t care for this child 24/7. However, the disturbing piece of this story is the fact that they call her “Pillow Angel”. That lends me to believe that they wanted to keep her small as much for their own reasons as to whatever benefit it would have for her care. I feel like these parents are very sick people and should have their child taken away from them. –Craig

While their statement does hold some truth, I personally think it would have been wiser to choose an actual person of the year instead of copping out and saying that everyone is. Then again, if this was, at least in part, an publicity stunt, then it worked. After all, I just visited and bookmarked their site. I guess they succeeded.

In the past, I have been an early adapter of new tech toys. But today, I think DVDs and digital cable are both good enough. I don’t care if the picture gets any sharper, to be honest. It already looks way better than those clunky old VHS tapes that we used to use. And once we went to DVD, we didn’t have to worry about tapes wearing out, adjusting the tracking (remember that?), slow fast forwarding and rewinding, and lousy picture quality. And we now have 5.1 surround sound along with crisp, clear pauses and slow motion playback.

I don’t see how they can pump any better of a picture through the cable or satellite feed. When I go into a store like Best Buy and see the new HDTVs, the picture quality on them is not that noticeably better in my opinion. I imagine this is mostly to blame on the source of whatever they are playing, which doesn’t look HD. The dark pictures are shimmery with little pixels where the video has been too compressed. So why would I want to spend thousands of dollars on a new over-hyped TV when the displays at the store aren’t even that spectacular looking?

I am in no hurry to adopt any of these new offerings. My cable bill is in the stratosphere as it is, and I don’t need to add a lineup of HD channels that probably offer only a moderate improvement at best.

I have noticed new TV commercials that have been airing for AOL. They have been plugging their video site. Look, Google tried to get into the video business and found themselves stomped out by YouTube. Their solution? Google bought YouTube. AOL doesn’t stand a chance in this arena. One of the greatest features of YouTube is the fact that videos are all played with the Flash Player, which basically everyone has installed on their PC. When I visited AOL’s video site, trying to watch my first video prompted a warning that the AOL video player did not support the Firefox browser. Say what? I closed the page and haven’t been back.

Honestly, other than the AOL Instant Messenger, which I use myself, the company doesn’t have an active cool presence anymore. Even the AOL IM has grown so bloated, hogs so many system resources, and is so full of junk that I use other programs like Trillian and Gaim to access my buddies on the AOL network. They have squandered a great concept, and one which got its start on America Online.

In the long term, I don’t expect them to succeed. I haven’t even mentioned their disastrous merger with Time Warner some years ago. I don’t know where that all stands today, but I don’t see AOL being much of a brand name in years to come. Don’t be sad, because even if I am right, we won’t be missing it anyway.

So, the other day, we get to the register with our cart full of stuff, and low and behold, they don’t accept MasterCard. What?! When you are using credit, they only accept Discover card, which the Sams/Walmart empire have made some exclusive deal with. That is absolutely absurd. Most places shun the Discover card, yet Sams only takes that one particular card. Most people would have to use a credit card to just cover the insanely high bill after shopping there, so is everybody who shops there okay with this?

We just left half of our shit in the cart at the register and bought only the stuff we could pay for with cash. Needless to say, we have no intentions of ever returning to Sams Club. Screw that place.

Irking me further is their continued branding of consumer products with their logo. Today they have product offerings like Disney Mobile, which is a cell phone plan for families. What does this have to do with anything they are supposed to be doing? They sell so much merchandise, and none of it is hand-crafted by Disney employees. Do you think they have their own phone and computer manufacturing facilities? No. They just brand it by putting their name and logo on it. The Disney PC is the most barf-inducing of them all. See the picture below and you’ll see what I mean. Whose dumb idea was this piece of crap?

The only thing keeping Disney on their original business model is their constant releases and un-releases of their classic movies from their famous “Disney vault”. They re-release them, then pull them, over and over through the years, each time getting more over-the-top with Platinum and Ultimate Editions, and so on. Everybody stop encouraging them and boycott this crap.

My message to Disney is to keep all of your merchandise behind the gates of Disney World, make some new movies that are good, and get out of the electronics business, and out of our homes.

It is ridiculous that kids have to go through this in the first place. Let’s just all put an end to it. I have made a promise to myself that this year I am just going to say no to every one of these offers. I am not going to throw my money away this time and something I won’t even enjoy. I suggest you do the same.

The reason that school was structured for students to have the summer off was mostly for agricultural reasons. Now that this is not so much the case anymore, why continue it? The kids are going to class the same number of days every year as they would without year-round school. Schools are overcrowded and if converting traditional schools to year-round calendars saves from building more schools, then go ahead and do it.

One day, all schools will be year-round and anything otherwise would be silly. So go ahead and convert them all. Like I said, it is the same number of calendar days anyway. They get big vacations every nine or so weeks. So what if there isn’t one giant summer in between.

Let’s do them all. Why not? It would be more like the real world…except with more time off.

While I am on the subject, for some reason McDonald’s “fancy ketchup” is the best tasting ketchup. Do you not agree?

And while I’m at it, why don’t we create another section where I don’t have to hear idiots singing Happy Birthday?

I decided to boycott Wendys after one-too-many bad meals there. This was October of 2005, and I haven’t been back since. I am not exaggerating when I say that at least half the time, the food is terrible. I am saying that at least every other time I go, it is a complete waste of my money and time. Their fries are never good, and usually have that “sitting around” feel about them. The square burger patties are nothing to brag about and the photos of their burgers make them so generic looking. They look like they were in the frozen foods section at Sams. Their popular Frosty is way overrated, too. It isn’t very good, and is usually on its way to being liquid chocolate milk when it gets handed to you.

The only appealing thing about the place is the speed of the drive-thru. It is super-fast and efficient. Why? Because all of their food was made hours before you showed up. And the taste proves it.

Except for speed, everything else about Wendys is absolutely terrible. It took me a long time to admit it, but think about it, and admit it to yourself. When was the last time you ate there and actually enjoyed it? As for me, I can’t even remember.

I especially hate orange flavorings in cooking. Meals that have orange-flavored beef or chicken are absolutely horrible. I don’t believe that I ever liked that kind of thing, but even more so today, it smells like somebody sprayed the food with 409.

With the exception of real oranges and orange juice, everything else orange should be abolished.

The next time you see an ad for a “Cyber” anything, be sure to laugh and think of me…because you heard it here.

Besides, that is why newspapers have a dedicated Sports section. I say, move all such news to that part of the paper and keep it there, permanently.

It did cross my mind that perhaps it is a possible selling point to put some sports news or scores on the front page. This would only be true for newspaper vending machines where someone would walk by and see it and perhaps be more likely to buy the whole paper. But, I doubt it. Sports fans have much better options than a daily paper. With several dedicated cable ESPN channels, local broadcasts, and the Internet, sports in the paper at all is near-obsolete. By the time a sporting event is printed in the paper the following morning, the vast majority of people who care would have already known the outcome through other media sources, or probably watched the entire game on TV.

I am not advocating getting rid of the Sports section of the paper, I just wish editors would keep all such related news in that area. I suppose I can forgive the Superbowl result appearing as the main news headline on the front page, but that is one day out of the year. The rest, in my opinion, can be forgotten.

There are always forty people in line and the stamp machine is always conveniently out of order, or is out of change. This happened to me two days in a row at two different post offices this week! I just had to leave. I didn’t have time on my lunch break to wait in that kind of line. If the post office itself actually had to directly compete against another company, such the way banks do, customers would never tolerate their lack of service. People today just universally accept the way the post office is and have grown numb to their ways.

The post office reminds of me a slow, uncaring government service like the DMV. They are so slow! That is a story of its own, but the mail service comes accross the same way, like a bureaucratic mismanaged operation. If they cared about making customers happy, they would put a drive-up stamp machine outside of the post office building. And make sure it works! Sure, you can buy stamps at the grocery store, but they are usually marked up, so that a bad option.

I’m sure it is no coincidence that the mail normally comes around 4:00 every afternoon, but on Saturday, it somehow manages to get here before noon. If they can deliver it that early on Saturday, then why not do it that way every day of the week? It has also long been time to start delivering the mail on Sunday. Every time I order something online, the looming Sunday is always in my mind. That one day interrupts the flow of everything. That causes you to, again, on Monday have a line of forty people in front of you at the post office when you get there. Granted, the only good thing about the mail not running on Sunday is that it probably saves on traffic congestion and air pollution.

For me, I use every online banking and bill payment option for every account that offers it…and every institution should have online billing by this point in time. I don’t mail off payments and I turn off paper bill options whenever possible. It isn’t that I don’t trust the snail mail, it just takes too long and always has a way of making me angry.

1. I will not be sending out any physical greeting cards, thanks to another postage increase taking place in January. Besides, I hate the post office.
2. I will not go to Jiffy Lube, no matter how overdue I am.
3. I will never, ever buy music CDs at Wal-Mart where they water down offensive song lyrics, regardless of what CD I am buying.
4. I will stop the habit of buying bread every time I go in the grocery store, which I rarely end up eating, anyway.
5. I will not eat at Sbarro in the mall and pay their utterly outlandish prices. After paying $9.52 for two pieces of pizza and a drink the last time, I will never eat there again!
6. I will not buy any more gel toothpaste, which makes me thirsty and mucks up my toothbrush with gunk you can’t rinse out.
7. I will not buy any gum in a big multi-pack. I am tired of getting down to the last pack and when biting into a stick of gum, it shatters in your mouth, it is so dry and old.
8. I will not be tempted by Booberry and Frankenberry cereals next Halloween when I go to the grocery store. I am tired of having rainbow colored crap the morning after.
9. If I have to pay $5.50 for a sad excuse for a sub at Subway, I’m going to go ahead and spend $7 on a real one at Jersey Mikes. Those pathetic little triangles they try to pass of as cheese at Subway are ridiculous. What you get for your money is ridiculous, too.
10. I will no longer be eating at Wendy’s, which I have decided once and for all, is gross. Half of the time, the food is not only bad, but terrible.

Let me clarify that last sentence. I like reading emails, the newspaper and magazine articles. You know, things that are short and have an ending that I can see with my own eyes on the same piece of paper. What I do not particularly enjoy is reading books. I’m sorry, I just don’t. I have probably read no more than a dozen or so novels in my entire lifetime. I have read one or two really good books out of those dozen.

I think reading books is a waste of time. For some reason, the appearance or perception of someone reading a book is more positive than someone who watching TV. I don’t know why. There are probably just as many stupid books as there are stupid movies. Someone reading a romance novel is wasting more of their time than someone watching a movie like Braveheart, in my opinion.

Reading takes too long, too. With a movie, I can get a rich experience in less than two hours. That is what I am talking about. It takes me weeks to read a book. I read very slowly and after two pages, my mind starts drifting to what is going on around me. If that isn’t the case, then I find myself eventually slipping into following the words and turning pages, only to be really be thinking about what I am going to do the next day. While holding the book, my life is ticking away and I am following words on a page at a snail’s pace. Boring!

I am not trying to promote movies, I just demoting books. It is a matter of time spent. Personally, I like to be doing five things at once. I can play a computer game, hear a new CD, and watch a TV show all at the same time. When I curl up with a book, I feel lonely and isolated. I have too much to do and too many ideas of my own to sit still day after day, reading a book that drags on for what seems like forever. Condense it all into a short story, and I might be interested.

Just think about how much of your life you spend reading books and try to remember what happens in any of them. I bet you can’t. So why bother. I’ll wait for the movie.

It’s too bad that the appalling “safety first” mentality of today’s adults has already stripped away every ounce of joy that comes with being a kid. Now they have taken aim at the right to drive. I think driving is a right and not a privilege, despite what most people will tell you. Unless there is sufficient public mass transit where you live, you have no choice put to own a car. And you have a right to be mobile.

Today, laws restricting youth driving are ever-growing in number with each passing year, varying by state. Laws that restrict the time of day that inexperienced drivers are allowed to be on the road, a limit on the mere number of passengers they can have in their car with them, school requirements on maintaining your license and a threat to raise driving ages all undermine this magical transition into early adulthood.

Let me be clear that even though some teenagers may act childish, a sixteen-year-old person is not a child. I think that every teenager who is sixteen years of age should be able to drive a car without any restrictions imposed on their freedom. Though, I don’t think anyone should be given a brand new car at their sweet sixteen party, as too often seems to be the case with some of these brats.

The topic which made me want to toss my opinion into the ring is that of the modern “black boxes” that parents can now purchase for their son’s or daughter’s car. A line has been crossed, and the obsession over safety has finally gone way too far. I think these units are asinine to say the least.

This machine is connected to the car and is supposed to serve two purposes. 1) Some omit a squeal or rattle when the car is being driven too fast. 2) It records all of the driving data so that nosey, untrusting parents can then dissect all of the details of their child’s driving habits using their home computer. Some boxes are even fitted with GPS tracking devices that tell them when and where the car was driven at all times!

I think this is complete madness. If you don’t trust your son our daughter with a car, then give them one. This is Big Brother at its worst. What is next? Recording all of the conversation in the car at all times too? Where does it end? Are insurance companies going to someday require drivers to outfit their cars with these intrusive machines? I believe that everyone has a right to privacy, including teenagers. Sometimes, it is downright necessary to go 90 miles an hour if you have to pass someone on the interstate. So what. Everybody has done it and most continue to.

I hope there isn’t a big market for these silly gadgets. My fear is that there is. I wish this would all stop before it even gets started. It’s bad enough that traffic today is so congested and gas prices are soaring. Now there are cameras at stoplights that take your picture as you pass through the stoplight that you didn’t beat to red. Take a giant helping of that and a side order of 24-hour in-car monitoring. It is a depressing day to be young and not so free.

I opened the paper today and was blasted with sticker shock at staggering amount of money that the Wake County school system claims it wants in the next ten years in order to overcome overcrowding and budget problems. 5 billion dollars? Has someone lost their mind? It is absurd that property taxes and fees will skyrocket to pay for this.

Thankfully, I have already come up with a two-part solution to the school system’s budget and overcrowding. It is important to note that my solution does not add any additional taxes to households that do not have children, such as my own. I do not believe I should have to pay for any of these extra costs and fees, since I do not have kids and have zero intentions of having any in the future. It simply is not my problem. Overcrowding and overpopulation are here to stay, forever. What about ten years from now? The school system is going to be back begging the public for money through ballot initiatives and bonds, after their five billion is gone and spent.

My statewide solution: Effective in 2006, every parent in the state of NC with a child 17 years or younger should have to pay an additional tax every year to the state in the amount of $700 PER CHILD. Where are they going to get this $700? They are going to get it from the $700 federal tax credit that Washington hands down in tax deductions every year. That money should be taken away and put to the local school coffers. This may serve as a small reminder that the more kids you churn out, the more the tax man is going to be coming to collect. Again, adults who do not have children, or whose children are over 18 do not have to pay this tax.

If that isn’t enough money to keep operations growing, then allow me to present the second part of my budget solution. Immediately put a halt to all out of town sports games for public schools statewide. Also slash, or eliminate, the budget for sports uniforms, trips, dinners, awards, ceremonies, practices, etc. Get those meat heads out selling cookies and washing cars like the poor kids in the band and drama department have to. How much does transporting sports teams around the state cost every year, dare I even ask?! Kids should not be taught in trailers when the athletics department is running away with this much funding.

If that still isn’t enough, the system will get a few dollars out of me when I buy a lottery ticket next year.

I am very aware that there are lot of people who work outdoors, and the weather affects them greatly. But for the general mass population, it does not matter at all. It certainly shouldn’t matter to the people I work with, since we work inside. Yet my co-workers talk about the weather forecast and the temperature constantly. I want to ask: Who really cares? The only time I’ll find myself outdoors is when I am walking the few feet between my car and the building. Other than those brief moments, I have little to no contact with nature.

Almost daily, when I come back from lunch at work, someone will ask, “How’s the weather outside?”. Here’s an idea, look out the window and take a guess. Let’s see, it is December, so it must be cold. And no matter how cold or hot it is, who cares! I am not living in the jungle or something where it will matter. My car has a few useful inventions on it: wipers, a/c, and a heater. So don’t tell me it is too cold or too wet to bother going out for lunch, or leaving the house.

Shouldn’t everybody get over this cultural obsession with the weather? It is getting so old. Everybody has seen rain their entire lives. Yet they all continue to talk about it every day like it is something new. Equally as annoying is when we hear a loud and sudden crash of thunder when I’m at work. I hear gasps and oohs and ahhs all over the room. Get over it. It happens. Nobody is going to be harmed. Folks, none of this is new. It has always been, and will always be around forever.

Dear N&O: The article in Wednesday’s paper called “Starbucks Buzz Baffles Clayton” was a complete waste of space.

Peggy Lim, the author, needs to go find work elsewhere, or at least go find someone to interview who lives on the planet Earth.

“People here have never heard of Starbucks,” says an ignorant geezer, on this third trip to Bojangles. Where do you find these people? This old man does not represent the majority of the population. The article itself even said that the Great Wall of China has it’s own Starbucks! Yet people in Clayton are clueless? The fact that the persons sought for interview about this were 3-time-a-day visitors to the Bojangles is absolutely pathetic. This kind of reporting lends itself to the widely held belief that reporters deliberately find the trashiest rednecks to interview after disasters, such as a tornado. It is almost as though Peggy Lim took the job of writing this article as a joke. Some of us are tired of drinking so-called coffee from Dunkin Donuts and Bojangles, which is probably just dirty water with a brown crayon stirred in it.

Tell 63-year-old Harold Parrish, the interviewee, to pull his head out of his enlarged-prostate-ridden ass.

I’m writing to be the first one to say that they need to move on from the cow ad campaign that they have been running for the past several years. Sure, it was cute when it first came out. When I first drove down the road and saw a billboard with a cow standing on it painting the words “Eat Moor Chickin”, I was amused. But they have run it into the ground with their yearly calendars that come out at the holiday season. There is a cow for every month. Of late, they have gone over the top with some of these. Chick-fil-A needs to do something else and quit trying to sell people calendars of cows year after year that they don’t stock enough of anyway. Personally, I’m ready for a change.

I remember when Taco Bell stopped running their Chihuahua campaign. I was disappointed at the time and didn’t understand why the moved on to the “Think Outside the Bun” slogan. But looking back, they did the right thing. I can see that now. They ended it before the amusement was worn to the down the nub. Likewise for Geico, who pretty much quit featuring the little gecko and went with the totally off the wall thing they do now.

So I have now started a blog for this purpose; to write about stuff that is on my mind. I have a few ideas in my mind from the get-go. I’ll start out mild and save bigger issues for another day. I am going to try to steer clear of too many political attacks on here. I’ll try to keep that under control. I want this to be fun and lighthearted.