Too Much Tequila, Too Little Sunscreen

Introduction There is no end to the things you can rant about if you put your mind to it. The list of stuff that pisses me off is endless. Here are my latest rants on life’s little irritants and inconveniences: Transformers, AC Adapters, Chargers, and Other Such Junk Have you taken inventory of the electronic devices in your life that require AC adapters for either primary power or battery recharging? I have about thirty of these things; half of which I’ve forgotten what they’re for. All of these “charger” gadgets are simple AC to DC converters that transform our 115 Volt AC power to the low level DC voltages used by integrated circuits, micro chips, and battery recharging circuitry. My rant is not that we use these charging devices; it’s that every electronic gadget requires its own unique power cord and AC Adapter. They generally produce 5 or 12 Volts DC and deliver it to the device through a two wire connector. We need to force the manufacturers of this stuff to standardize on a single DC voltage and a common connector. Then all of the electronic devices in our homes and offices could use the same AC adapter cord. We could finally throw away all of these “chargers” that are cluttering up our lives. Who has the action item to solve this? We Miss You, Jim and Tammy Faye Who can forget Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and their religious talk and music variety show, The PTL Club. They told us PTL stood for Praise the Lord but we latter learned it really stood for Pass the Loot or maybe even Please Tip Large. They wrote a whole new chapter in bible thumping rip-offs. They dubbed their unique ism, “Prosperity Theology”, a religious teaching that taught us that God desired the material prosperity of those He favored. The amazing thing is their conspicuous consuption scam worked. They were raking in over a million dollars a week to support their lavish life style, theme park, and Tammy’s cosmetic bills. They epitomized the greed, our love of corny pomp, and the shamelessness of the 1980s. Their glitzy appearances naturally complemented their greed and shameless bible thumping. Jim looked like country and western singer with blow-dried, helmet hair, clad in loud satin-like suits while Tammy wore really heavy, I’m talking heavy, makeup, particularly globs and globs of mascara with huge false eyelashes under her tatooed on eyebrows. She topped all of that off with Dolly Parton-like, big-hair, blond wigs. Can you believe we sent millions and millions of dollars to people that looked like that? Anyway my rant is not about the poor Bakkers; they were actually funny. But, they may be the poster boys for the TV evangelists that I really want to rant about. These pseudo religious scum bags exemplify everything I dislike, no loathe, about religion in the U.S. today. I know I’ll offend a lot of you with this rant, but what the hell, I feel strong enough about these jerks to risk pissing you off. Don’t you just hate it when someone talks down to you? That’s what these TV preachers do in spades. They slant their sermons to the average eight year old in all of us. Having some intellectual light-weight explain simple things to me like he alone has broken some difficult code drives me up the wall. I don’t want to be lectured to by some yoyo that thinks it’s his role in life to interpret the words of God for us simple folk. And, what’s up with their opulent, overly gilded sets and those huge mega-churches? Are they having Donald Trump over for dinner after the show? Wal-Mart Shopping I can’t put my finger on the one thing I hate most about Wal-Mart shopping; it’s probably the whole degrading experience. Or, it could be that my patronage of Wal-Mart is a vivid reminder that in my retirement I’m on or near the bottom rung of the economic ladder. That’s probably it, Wal-Mart is a constant reminder that my Nordstrom shopping days are over. My disgust usually starts in the parking lot where you have to fight through the shopping carts the other shoppers are too lazy to return. I do my best to ignore the homeless guy and his dog living in the rusted out rattletrap parked next to the cart return. Greeting the greeter and knowing that his real job is deterring shop-lifting depresses me even further. I push my obligatory cart, (they don’t offer hand held baskets), down the aisles trying my best to forget all the Wal-Mart case studies we studied in business school. It was Sam Walton’s genius to realize that to succeed as the lowest price retailer you had to have the lowest cost structure. No magic to his madness, he squeezed his suppliers unmercifully, optimized his supply chain, and cut customer services to the bone. So, I know when I pick an item off of Wal-Mart’s shelves that I am holding the cheapest possible product from the lowest cost or lowest margin manufacturer, presented and sold to me with the least amount of customer service. Reassuring, huh? The check-stand experience rounds out my fun day at Wal-Mart. The check-out clerks are either bored silly, pissed-off about something, or too new to know how to ring up my head of cabbage. Don’t even think about buying something complicated to ring up like screws, bolts or other loose hardware. You’ll be there all afternoon. The highlight of your Wal-Mart shopping experience is seeing all of your purchases stuffed willy-nilly into a host of Wal-Mart monogrammed plastic bags. These bags are not packed to help you transport your goods home; their only function is to add individual handles to all of your normally handle-less purchases. You’ve got to load your cart with your 74 randomly filled plastic bags quickly because the checker will leave them on the carousel, ignore you, and turn to provide her version of customer service to the next person in line. Divas and Other Pains-in-the-Ass Don’t you just hate these bitches. We, ordinary people, bestow all of life’s rewards: fame, fortune, and lives of privilege, on these losers and they rub our noses in it. Wikipedia defines a diva as a star who is is arrogant, difficult to work with, high maintenance, manipulative, fussy, highly strung, privileged and demanding. Lovely! These aren’t the folks you’d want to share a bucket of KFC chicken with; these folks are bad, bad. We ought to do something about them. I don’t know what, but something. My research into pain-in-the-ass divas produced an impressive list of really difficult people including folks like Jennifer Lopez, Cher, Demi (Gimme) Moore, and Diana Ross but all sources were unanimous in their pick of Sharon Stone as diva numero uno. Let’s talk about Sharon a bit and see if we can figure out why she’s so difficult. When Sharon was doing the sequel to Basic Instinct she demanded five pages of additional perks on top of her lucrative salary. They included: three nannies, two assistants, first class travel (if a private jet was unavailable), a presidential suite, chef, deluxe motor home with all the amenities including VCR and cellular fax machine. She also needed a chauffeured car plus a convertible sedan for herself. She demanded to keep all wardrobe and jewelry worn in the movie that weren’t rented. And, oh yea, $3,500 per week per diem for her bodyguards. Want to work with her? Hire her? Why would we spend a cent to support this pain-in-the-ass, prima dona and all of the others like her? ©2009 by Bob Rockwell