Stan Geiger

Rant Time

How's about a rant? I might as well issue one. I ain't doin' much else.

Ya know, my mammy has a range in her home. It was purchased before I was born (I'm 53 years old). It looks like it just rolled off the showroom floor. Much of the credit for it looking so new goes to mom. She has always taken very good care of her stuff. Still, the thing works. It works just like it did in the '50s.

Somewhere in my archives, I have the electric razor my daddy used in the '50s. Mom gave it to me. I haven't seen my daddy since the early '60s. It's not likely that trend will reverse. He's been dead since the late '80s. I tried shaving with the razor in the '80s. It was a rough go. I wouldn't care to try again. But I bet I could plug it in right now and it would fire up.

Meanwhile, I just tried to fire up my DVD player---a Toshiba my sister gave me for Christmas, oh, maybe four years ago or so. I have rarely used it. In fact, it spent the first year or two in my possession in the box in which it came. I finally hooked it up and used it a time or two. When I tried to use it for the first time in a while, I found it no longer works. It gets no power. It's plugged into a surge protector with a few other things. They all work. The DVD player appears to be of no use to anyone.

I have a new TV, a digital TV. I run over the air. I have no cable or satellite. I find I can't get all of the available channels with a given rabbit-ear setting. I have to move the thing to one spot to get one channel, but then I lose another. It's like living in the '50s. To make matters worse, last fall I found that virtually all of the college football bowl games---a few of the things I actually like to watch on TV---were unavailable to over-the-air viewers.

I'm really getting tired of this world.

We have all these geeks that come up with new gadgets that take money from people while providing very short useful lifespans, either because they are designed to fail or because they will be outdated in the space of weeks. We have lawyers that claim to be guardians of the gate to justice but aren't there when people really need them because there is no money to be made. We have doctors that claim to know everything but really don't know their elbows from their assholes yet still figure they should get paid like gods for "treating" somebody until that somebody dies. We have a plethora of Ivy League MBAs running businesses that can't seem to do anything but fuck up. We have those politicians---elected or unelected---that don't seem to want to do anything but pass out money to selected individuals or entities so they can keep their jobs.

Perhaps I should consider taking all of my money out of any institutions, placing it in a hole somewhere, buying a rifle and a fishing pole, moving into the wilderness and living day by day, until these so-called "best and brightest" can figure out how to make something---anything---work.

How does that sit with you, geniuses?

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