Come to Zion, Come to Zion

Because it's a great place. It is THE place, despite what Brigham Young said, as far as I'm concerned. Which is what has compelled me to write this entry. There is about a 98% chance that you, loyal reader, also make the following mistake, so this entry probably will not be a popular one. But that's okay because something needs to be said...

Let's cut to the chase. It's not "Zion's National Park". Nor is it "Zion's". Zion ain't a person, and he doesn't own the park. IT'S JUST ZION.

Z I O N period.

But don't just take my word for it, take a good long gander at the actual park sign:



See the apostrophe and the "S" after Zion? Yeah, me neither. Now, that said, see if you can identify what's wrong with the following sentence:

"We're going to go on a National Park tour. We'll start at Yellowstone's, then hit the Grand Canyon's, Yosemite's, Bryce's, Capitol Reef's...and end at Zion's."

(choose your own adventure blog, ala those books way back in the day):

If you identified 5 errors please go to the beginning of this entry. If you identified 6, please continue to the follow paragraph.

Congratulations, your comprehension skills are most impressive. The End.

Bogie dumptruck! Incoming!!

I want to know who it was that decided that "rolling through a stop sign" is a dangerous criminal offense which warrants police officer harassment (I've gotten a ticket for this before), but who also thinks that it's perfectly okay for uncovered dumptrucks with a small mountain's worth of gravel shrapnel and other deadly stone-like projectiles to go barrelling unrestricted down the freeway.

Why are they allowed to do this? There is such a hubbub made about the road-side bombings in Iraq, and yet you hear nothing about the dump-truck induced war zone in our very own backyard. Am I the only one who has been driving along I-15, minding my own business, when all of a sudden a virtual shotgun blast of dirt and rocks begins to pummel the front of my vehicle?

And of course Murphy's Law dictates that you're most likely to have one of these unpleasant encounters after the installation of that nice, pristine new windshield. :) Surely there is a law against this on the books somewhere. My prediction is that it's just a matter of time before a large enough chunk has just the right combination of momentum and shape to be able to penetrate the windshield safety glass and maim an otherwise innocent driver.

Then and only then will the gatling-gun rivaling freeway "nuisance" reach the criminal equivalent of the vile and wicked stop sign roll.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night...

...nor spell check, nor common sense, nor...

I took this picture today at the Post Office in East Bay in Provo with my phone camera (hence the kind of crappy quality - sorry):

Two things. First, I don't know what a "Guaranted Delivery" is, but I sure as hell ain't payin' no $16.25 for it. Oops, $16.25 is the starting price. I can only imagine how much you'd have to throw down for some "Nxt Daye" service. Our tax dollars at work, baby!

But wait! On further thought, it all makes total sense now. I guess I can forgive them one little typo. Think about it...the Post Office isn't just an expensive D.I. alternative to rid yourself of your annoying packages. They actually have a plan in place to deliver them to the address you wrote in bold letters on the front. In fact, they guarantee it!

How do UPS and FedEx compete with such mind-blowing performance?

The REAL Maverik Monster

Maverik has this stupid ongoing promotion about some supposed monster running around doing I don't know what. This guy:



If a descendant of Bob Marley, Mr. Spock and Predator had a kid with Smurfette...and then you mixed in some wicked-cool shades, you'd have yourself something very close to Mav's monster. Now, I believe I go to the Maverik just about as often as anyone, and I've never seen it. I don't know anything about it, except that it won't seem to go away. Hey Maverik, what does your stupid fictional monster have to with my craving for a Jalapeño and Cheese Bahama Mama, or perhaps a $1.99 hoagie from Leopold's Deli with all the fixin's, anyway? I'll tell you what. Nothing.

But the Predasmurf is not even the point of this entry. :) You've got a monster alright, Maverik. It's that heinously disgusting place in the back you pass off for the men's restroom. Gross! GROSS!! And when I think a bathroom is gross, trust me you have a problem.

How does a bathroom even get like that? It seems like if you did absolutely nothing to it from the day that building was constructed, it still would only be half as bad as it currently is. I would venture to say there are some new compounds growing in there that science has yet to identify. How many bathrooms do you suppose there are where you actually increase the amount of bacteria on your person after attempting to wash your hands?

Sick!

But don't worry, North Springville Maverik. You keep putting those 12-packs of Diet. Dew in the cooler and I'll see ya in the morning. :)

A "Titanic" Oversight

Every week, especially during the summer, you constantly hear in the news about how the latest blockbuster movie just broke a bunch of box-office records. They've made up some real doozies, too, just so they can report on them being broken. For example, "Movies that never hit #1", "Second Weekend", "Theater Drops", "Widest Indies", etc.

But that they have all these uninteresting stats they've made up to report on is not what bothers me. Nay, they can slice and dice, and then re-slice and report until the cows come home. What my gripe is this entry is their apparently cavalier attitude towards what I feel is a HUGE factor in all this movie money bean counting. And that is adjusting the totals for inflation. Or more accurately, neglecting to do so.

The studios must think that if they report a movie as having broken some money record, that will stir people up and instill in them the desire to go out and see it. You know, see what all the "fuss" is about. And they are probably right. But it doesn't change the fact that, over many decades of movies, this endless parade of new broken records is completely and totally meaningless when you don't adjust for inflation.

One way to think about it...a dollar was worth much more in, say, 1977 (the year Star Wars was released), than it is now. So to directly compare it with the dollars that Spiderman 3 just made, which is precisely what they do, is mathematically retarded. Put another way...think about what a movie ticket cost in 1977. Probably on the order of $2. The last movie I went to, 30 years later (2007), was $8. These poor older movies don't stand a chance.

The purported king of the movies, in terms of box office total, of course, is Titanic. But if you adjust for inflation, which you must do, Titanic places at a much less impressive 6th place, all time. Sorry Titanic, you lose! You're not even the king of 5th place, much less the world. :) All hail the true king of movie revenue, Gone with the Wind (1939), with an adjusted dollar total (2007) of no less than $1.3 billion dollars....compared to Titanic's paltry $844 million. And to round out the top 5, we have Star Wars at #2 ($1.17 billion), The Sound of Music at #3 ($937 million), E.T at #4 ($933 million), and The Ten Commandments at #5 ($861 million).

The next time you're listening to the entertainment news and they break out with "Spiderman 4 just broke the record for the most earned during a full moon in a spring month"...I want you to remember this post. :)

The Secret

You've probably by now heard of...



Ooooh. The Secret. Sounds...secretive. Well gripe fans (fan?), I am here to demystify the secret for you. This thing (video and book) has started to pick up a lot of steam lately. But, I actually heard about it from some girl who was completely sold on it like a half year ago, and decided to download a free copy from my favorite bittorrent site, err, paid for a legitimate copy to stream and watch from their website.

Okay, I actually did download a free copy. Normally I wouldn't mention that, but it's kind of important to the point I am going to make with this entry.

Now, the purported secret in the video (spoiler warning) is that "hey, you can have anything in the world you want, you just need to think about wanting it hard enough and the universe is bound to magically provide it for you." Does that sound absolutely absurd? Yes it does. But that is pretty much the gist of this video, folks. They just spend 2 hours explaining the same thing in different ways and from different people. Oh, and they use fancy, ancient looking fonts and cool red seals and stuff. You know, to lend credibility to the absurdity.

And now, the actual secret. You've probably heard the saying "A fool and his money are soon parted". The secret of this whole thing is that the creator has taken said parting of fool and money to amazing new heights. The secret is that while people who watch and believe in this load of horse excrement's lives suck as bad as ever, probably more so with their new found lack of motivation to actually do anything, the author of "The Secret" is about to land their private jet on the new freaking island they just bought.

I applaud you, "The Secret" creator. Pure genius. Way to simultaneously harness people's laziness and greed for your own benefit. A dazzling performance, to say the least. My only gripe is that I didn't think of it first. :) J/K.

"Fortune Cookies"

I'm a little bewildered by how an idea as bad as fortune cookies seems to never a) go away entirely, or at the very least b) evolve into something better.

Other than being sugary, and as such somewhat resembling dessert since they come at the end of the meal, they are lame in every way. They're not good to eat by any means. It's clear that the inventor's goal was to come up with the very simplest combination of "able to house a piece of paper" and "edible". That stale stick of gum that comes in a package of Topps baseball cards is like a bacon-wrapped fillet mignon in comparison.

And there's nothing fortune about what you'll find printed on the paper. A fortune implies some kind of prediction of the future. Instead you'll find phrases like "You are not illiterate." (Statement Cookie), or "You will obtain your goal if you maintain your course." (Conditional Cookie), or "Don't worry about money. The best things in life are free." (Advice Cookie).

I guess I would argue that "Fortune Cookie" is a misnomer in the very strongest sense of the word. These certainly are not cookies and they ain't tellin' any fortunes.

The concept of the f-cookie could, however, be salvaged. And I am here to tell you how. :) The no-brainer step 1, of course, is come up with a real cookie. A REAL cookie. Not some khaki-colored physics model of a 4 dimensional object. Pecan Sandies are good. I've been known to enjoy an E.L. Fudge on occasion. Oooh, I know! How about one a them Granny B mega-cookies with the delightfully thick and frothy pink frosting. Any of those would work. Lots of choices.

Step 2, mix in some bona fide fortunes. No more statements, advice, etc. Scrap all that boring, non-fortune crap. Now, I realize that the word fortune sort of implies good and beneficial. But it doesn't have to. And this is key. If all the fortunes that people got with their cookies were good fortunes then this idea wouldn't be much better than the current state of affairs. "Everyone's a winner." "I'm okay, you're okay." "Everyone gets a good fortune in their cookie." These mind-numbing PC crap notions are eating us from within. What needs to happen is they need to mix in some bad fortunes. Oh yeah. There needs to be winners, and there needs to be losers. It's human nature. Something like "An IRS agent will notice you used Arthur Andersen" or "That tumor in your head will metastasize within the week." You see how that works? Think about how much more meaning the good fortunes will have given the possibility of receiving bad ones.

Slap one of those into, say, a big gnarly white cholcolate macademia...now you've got a real fortune cookie. :)

Ahead of its Time

With the so-called crossover vehicle craze in full swing, it's time for someone to stand up and give some credit where credit is due. Below you'll find the current Lexus RX 330. Ooooh, fancy huh? Personally I think they're hideous, but you see them all over the place.

Below the Lexus you'll find a circa 1980 AMC Eagle. More hideous still, yes, but you can't deny the uncanny resemblance. Make that bad boy silver, slap on some modern headlights and a fancy "L" logo in the grill...the Eagle would be selling like hotcakes right now. :) A car truly ahead of its time. Nice work AMC. Too bad you sucked so much in every other area that you are no longer with us. RIP.

10 O'clock News

I got a couple beefs with local news broadcasts. I suppose the simplest solution would be to just not watch...but where's the fun in that? :)

Perhaps you've heard the term "if it bleeds, it leads"? Are we really such a bloodthirsty people that, of all the newsworthy stuff going on, this is what we want to see first? I mean, you get home from a stressful day, you're looking to unwind...what better way to relax than get a quick rundown of who got raped, murdered, and/or severely maimed that day in the area?

Also, I hate hate HATE those stupid gimmicky stories they come up with to try keep you watching to the bitter end of the broadcast. And they announce that it's "coming up next" just before every commercial break. Only, it never really does come up next, but rather is like a 10 second afterthought they throw in at the last possible second. Once in awhile I will actually get suckered by it, watch to the end, realize what a fool I've been and then fester about it, internally cursing those tricky marketing bastages for the next 48 to 72 hours. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

"Tonight on Eyewitness News. A family of 5, driving home from their Disneyland vacation and while singing 'The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round' are tragically killed when a misplaced orange construction barrel, apparently completely neglected for several weeks, caused the driver to swerve and lose control of the vehicle. The vehicle then rolled once and spontaneously combusted. The fiery vehicular inferno continued to roll down the freeway another 30 times into oncoming traffic, ejecting its charred occupants one at a time, until finally coming to a smoldering rest. There were no survivors.

Coming up after the break, a rare three-eyed kitten was born this morning in the Galapagos Islands. Stay tuned for exclusive photos."

But there is no mention of the freaky Galapagian feline after the break. Or after the next break. Or even the next. What ends up happening, of course, is that you get a 2 second glimpse of some lousy cell-phone camera picture just before they say goodnight and the news ends..."My, that certainly was bizarre. Well, thanks for tuning in to Eyewitness News at 10. Goodnight."

And in writing this, I just thought of something else I hate about watching the news. :) Every last commercial in-between the gore stories is for some kind of prescription drug or ailment remedy. Clearly the target audience is old people. Okay, that's it, I gotta cut back. I can feel a few grey hairs sprouting as I write. Maybe I'll become an "Access Hollywood" man for awhile and stockpile some new gripes about it. Until then...

We can make a difference! I mean it!

It's "don't buy gas today" day. Yay! This is so going to work. Wait, why are there cars at all the pumps this morning at Maverik? I don't get it, it is such a good idea...

Oops, not it's not. :)

I've already done a gripe entry on this very topic, so I won't expound. But it's just fascinating to me how such a terrible idea has such amazing survival-power. It is the Madagascar Hissing Cockroach of ideas. No, it is the Tahitian Noni Juice of ideas. Anyone with an IQ over 20 knows it doesn't work, but there are just enough morons that buy into it to keep it around.

This is my meager attempt at a "The don't-buy-gas-for-one-day idea blows" campaign. Spread the word, people. Why, if you emailed 10 friends, and they emailed 10 friends, and then they turned right around and emailed 10 of their friends...everyone in the known universe would catch wind of this in like 15 min. If you don't understand the math it's okay, trust me I'm a mathematician. (note sarcasm)

Actually, I think I'm gonna go drive around the block 400 times. Whatever it takes to be able to fill up multiple times today. If it counters a simpleton's efforts to the contrary, and somehow helps to make this idea go away once and for all...well then it would have been worth it, despite the now hefty sum it takes to fill my rig. :)