A Bucket of Spam...well the Price is Right

Here are more things that bother me.

Hospital Wait Times

There is nothing good about waiting at the hospital. You're feeling like crap, the seats are uncomfortable, the reading material is boring, the atmosphere is depressing, and you're likely to catch something worse from the guy next to you coughing up fistfuls of phlegm who looks like he's been waiting so long that the hospital was built around him. I recently had to go to get a prescription and had to wait for more than three hours to have the doctor spend 60 seconds to diagnose and push me out the door. Three hours is a lot of lost recovery time, cause I certainly wasn't healing while sitting in that cloud of viruses while reading a readers digest encrusted with mucus. The worst part is, a few days later I had to return to get a note from the doctor for work purposes. This time around I was marked as "low priority" and it took me more than five hours to get that note. I should have told them I had swallowed a grenade, then I would have gotten in under two hours I'm sure.

The Price of Eating Healthy

I'm sick of hearing people acting impressed or surprised when they see a celebrity trim down after having a child, or losing a lot of weight before or after a movie role. It's easy for celebrities ... they're rich! We all want to eat healthy, but each time I go to the grocery store it becomes abundantly clear why I don't eat as well as I'd like. We're supposed to have 5-10 servings of fruits and vegetables a day but if you live in a family of three or more, you're looking at 30 servings a day, so prepare to go broke. Healthy food is expensive, in small quantities, and doesn't keep long, but unhealthy food is cheap, abundant, and will last until the end of time. You could buy organic vegetables and make a salad...or here's a loading pallet stacked of kraft dinner enough to feed you and your family for 6 months. Hell, you still have cash left over to buy some industrial tubs of mayonnaise, and a couple crates of hot dogs. No wonder we're all fat. If we were rich and could hire our own dietary advisors, personal trainers and chefs, and eat properly portioned fresh foods every meal. But since we're on a budget, it's more bologna and cheese whiz sandwiches.

Batteries

Buying batteries for anything is a pain in the ass. They're expensive, don't last as long as you'd want, and the next time I buy AA's only to find that I needed AAA's, I'm going to head butt a glass cabinet. Plus, there are too many choices! You got alkaline, rechargeable , nickel-cadmium, nickel metal hydride, lithium-ion, zinc-carbon, silver-oxide, and about a dozen sizes and shapes. If you don't get it right then you're basically feeding your digital camera money. I'm sure companies have the technology to make long lasting universal batteries, but they don't because then they couldn't sell as much. Them and the light bulb people are in cahoots and I hate their guts.

Stay Tuned Kiddos!

I love listening to people in their 40-60's reminisce about television from when they were kids. They talk about how there were only two or three channels and that the stations shut down by about 9 o'clock at night. They had little TVs and little choice what to watch.

Here's what I imagine someone like myself will sound when they reach that age...

"Papa! Tell me about when you were a kid."

"Alright, but take off your virtua-helmet so you can hear me."

"Okay, I'm listening."

"Well when I was young, we didn't have it so easy like you kids today. Take the TV, for example. We only had about 70 channels to choose from, and we could only watch a few at a time with picture in picture."

"You mean you couldn't view all your favorite channels simultaneously as one streaming visual?"

"Ha! I wish. No, if we wanted to see what was on the other channels, we had to push the proper numbers on our remote controls to find it. Or if we couldn't remember the right number we had to just look at each channel one by one until we found it."

"Holy shit! One by one? That must have taken a minute!"

"Watch your language! But yes, it took a long time. And we only had a 52 inch high definition television that we had to share with the whole family."

"Didn't they have the wall-o-visions back then?"

"Not a chance! Our TV's were nowhere near the size of the ones you got today. The sure they were high definition, but we had to pay extra to the high def channels. It was rough. And the most we could watch in a day was 24 hours. We could only dream of something like Hypertime Television stations."

"That ... sucks."

"Indeed...now you run along, Billy. Go play your games and watch out for the WereLizards"

"Sure, Pops."

Yeah, that's what he future will be like. It's gonna be weird. Especially with all those WereLizards running around.

Tales From a Broken Family

I don't really feel like giving any explanations. Here you go.

Gas and Grass

Oh man, the grass grows fast. Summer has exploded onto the scene and the trees and grass are unleashing a tidal wave of green. At this time of year that we must play the mowing game and struggle to keep up.

With the amount of land at my family's home, and the limited equipment to cut it (one lawnmower) the task is now comparable to fighting zombies. It's a losing battle.

And speaking of losing battles, have you seen the price of gas? Of course you have. These days you could spend $50 to top off a full tank. You go to get gas and you think the decimal point is in the wrong spot ... but it isn't!

People are saying that we need to develop alternative fuels to end our dependency on oil, and I agree. It would be great to power our cars with corn, water, or baby penguins, but what about developing new forms of transportation? I say we should focus on portals or matter transporters. You know? Like in the movie "The Fly".

No, wait! I recall something unfortunate happening involving some kind of insect. Maybe a wasp. But I think there is still some hope in the portal idea. Sure it would put airlines out of business, but think of how much money they'd make if they converted to Portal Stations. I'm sure there would still be line-ups like crazy, and just think of the hassle of going through security and immigration when you can travel across the world the blink of an eye. On second thought, I'd just rather stay home.

Gives me more time to curse at the grass.