Airing of Grievances 2014

Today is Festivus. I just realized. Here are the Airing of Grievances for this year.

Pins in dress shirts--
How many pins do we need? And how do you dispose of pins? Do you just throw them away? Are we to depend on the plastic of garbage bags to somehow prevent pins from poking through? What if, WHAT IF they just wrapped dress shirts folded up in plastic without pins? Will they somehow get unfolded in there? If they do, let me go back to my first question. How many pins do we need?

Online videos with mandatory ads longer than the videos themselves--
We live in heaven now. Access to any media is available at any time out of thin air (well, air filled with possible cancer-causing satellite radiation). The only cost (besides cancer) is equal time spent on buffering ads.

Crap streaming from my phone--
All this free media is beautiful on an LTE or Wi-Fi phone connection. Not my phone though. Strangely the shorter the vid, the harder for my phone to process. Bizarro world. Vines are excruciating. Hey phone, keep it together for seven seconds. Seven.

Crap conspiracies between internet providers,  phones and everything else--
All these sites and podcast centers tell us that we can conveniently stream anything! They want us to stream and not download. They're like, "the internet is everywhere, so you can stream anywhere!" The internet's not everywhere. It cuts out all the time. More importantly, Wi-Fi is far from everywhere. LTE or 4G or whatever is MORE everywhere -- but that what we're paying for. Phones want to be streaming away from Wi-Fi so I can give more money to AT&T who then give more money to what I watched who then hire more ads.

My crap phone--
I need to charge the thing three or four times a day. I make a call it takes off 20% of the battery. Sometimes it drops to 1% for no reason. Sometimes it's at 60% and then shuts down suddenly and won't start up again without being plugged in. The juice is in there, it's just compartmentalized.

Vulture theater cleaning crews--
Hey, I like to watch the credits okay? You don't need to perch with your ineffective broom and pan waiting for me to leave. There's still a movie on. They don't show the music credits until the very end and that's my favorite part of the credits. And what's up with everybody jumping up right at the soonest moment the movie is over anyway? You paid to see the movie. Was it that unbearable that you have a physical need to run outside? You're all getting up at the same time, so you're actually going to need to wait in LINE to get OUT of the theater. Why do you want to do that? Maybe watching a few credits will even things out and then maybe the vulture cleaning crew will hold off until I'm actually done watching the film.

Lights on at movies--
Hey, I know we need to worry about shooting spree people everywhere now, but turn off the house lights during the previews please. And yes, I know people are still coming in and looking for their seats, but those people are terrible. MOST people are terrible. MOST people come in 15 minutes after the time on the ticket. MOST people should be put to sleep. You're all the annoyingest moseyingest slack-jawedand should have come to the movie on time when the best part of the movie is on -- the previews. Your lights are in my vision surrounding the screen. Hate.

Moviepass--
Notice I have a lot of hatred for cinema this year. I've been spending more time there thanks to my convenient Moviepass app. Anyway, it broke twice today and their customer service often doesn't work on the app and sometimes they just say "uh, just buy the ticket yourself and then take a picture of your ticket and maybe we'll reimburse you." Okay, well, you don't have a point then.

Stuff on screens--
I probably had too much.

Labor--
Who likes it?

Money--
It never made me happy.

Happiness--
It was never properly defined.

Grief--
It's what I love.

Love's in Jeopardy, Baby

Four years ago, I prepared a list of 100 things to accomplish in my life.

On Monday, I'll be a little closer to accomplishing #7.

Every year I attempt the online test to get on the Jeopardy! TV show. I've done this for four years running I think. But it was this last time (after waiting for an email for several months) that the folks at Jeopardy! finally got back to me.

I'm taking a trip down to Las Vegas on June 23rd for an in-person interview, additional test and mock game to test my ability to know questions to things and provide television-level charisma.

Since this is the beginning of a long-running dream come true, I'm treating this like an important job interview complete with a haircut and new pants from Express (they're real dark denim, so they're kind of like what a yuppie would wear to a job interview).

What I need from you:

1) Interesting facts about myself (part of the paperwork includes a request for five interesting anecdotes to gab with Alex about (even though I'm pretty sure Alex won't be there))

2) All knowledge you have about every subject

I suppose it's a shame I didn't have this opportunity 15 years ago. I was much, much, much, much smarter then.