CSotD: Complaint Department
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In this Candorville (KFS), Lemont echoes my feelings about scabdrivers. I don’t think we even have taxis out here in the sticks, but I’ve been to a couple of conventions where I got to sample both the licensed cabs and the unlicensed drivers, and I’m sticking to my original thoughts, which echo Lemont’s.
I know an Uber driver, and I met another Uber driver I really liked in San Francisco last year.
But I’ve met a lot of pleasant cabbies, too. I was in a cab in Louisville and as we went past the Ohio River, I said, “So that’s where he threw it,” and the cabbie said, “That’s where he threw it.”
He certainly didn’t have to ask me who I meant or what the guy threw.
But I’ve called too many Uber drivers who park down the street and expect you to find them, and the cabs at least are marked. Even if they weren’t, they tend to pull up where you said you’d be.
All that before we get into the scabdriver part of it all. Do whatever you want, but don’t say you support unions and then undercut the folks who pay for licenses.
Granted, American companies could learn from what London cabbies go through to earn that badge.
I doubt Reverend Jim would pass.
Still talking about roads and transportation, I like this Arctic Circle (KFS) except that she’s pedaling that bike but I’ll assume those eeeee’s indicate an electric motor.
I’ve got a couple of friends who ride e-bikes, but they use them on trails with their dogs and go at moderate speeds.
On the streets in town, it’s diffo and I wonder if maybe e-bikes should be classed as motorcycles, though that wouldn’t solve the issue of e-scooters that I’ve run into — nearly run into — when I’ve driven in Columbus. But maybe confine them to bike lanes?
I’m not against them. I’m just against swooping. It reminds me of that old doggerel:
Here lies the body of William Jay
Who died maintaining his right-of-way
He was in the right as he sped along
But he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong
One more for the road: Frazz (AMS) decries people who buy pickups and have nothing to pick up, and I’m assuming she’s thinking of those monster trucks that are all the rage.
My only gripe is that they’re hard to see past if you drive a normal passenger car (there are still some), but it reminds me that, back in 2007 when gas prices were high, I did a story in which I talked to dealers in rural Maine to see if they were selling more of the smaller light pickups.
They said no, because even the workers who only need a place for a toolbox and aren’t hauling huge loads need a truck that won’t shake itself to death on backcountry dirt roads. Which around there, and around here, could just mean going home at night.
But I can’t account for non-workers who feel they need them, which is who she’s referencing.
Non Sequitur (AMS) didn’t make me laugh because it immediately called to mind the fact that the popular routes to the top of Everest are reportedly festooned with frozen doo-doo, which I guess is inevitable though maybe climbers should be required to carry plastic bags like we do in the dog park.
I also gather the route is festooned with frozen bodies of people who didn’t make it to the top, or did, but then didn’t make it back to the bottom. I continue to be amused by movies in which getting to the summit is the triumphant end of things.
Never mind the outhouse. Hollywood seems to think there’s an elevator up there.
Not a complaint about today’s Grand Avenue (AMS), simply an observation: “Frosty the Snowman” is not a Christmas carol. Neither are “Jingle Bells” or “Winter Wonderland.”
It snoweth alike upon Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and even atheists.
Frosty didn’t have to wear a top hat. The lyric just says “There must have been some magic in that old silk hat they found.”
Unbind your mind. Coulda been a yarmulke or a turban.
Off the Mark (AMS) drops the first fruitcake gag of the holiday season, and I will complain about this, because I like fruitcake. As a little kid, I didn’t, but I also disliked the sips of coffee I snuck from time to time. When I became a man, I put aside the things of a child and grabbed a cuppa coffee and a slice of fruitcake.
Howsoever, I note that Mark Parisi uses a yellow fruitcake, and that stuff is genuinely wretched. They tried, I guess, to come up with a more acceptably bland alternative to the dense, dark, rum-soaked real thing and ended up with a compromise nobody wanted. And that would fall apart if you stuck a sword in it.
I recognize that fruitcake is simply a thing for cartoonists to make jokes about, but as the father of young children I also learned to shuffle when I walked.
I like fruitcake, and have never stepped on a Lego in my bare feet.
A pair of observations sparked by this Pearls Before Swine (AMS):
The Christmas-themed one is that “God rest ye merry gentlemen” needs a comma. They are not “merry gentlemen.” The lyric is wishing them merriment and should read “God rest ye merry, gentlemen.”
The other is a warm memory of walking home in the evening in summer school after my freshman year. I’d pass a house where an elderly African-American man sat in the dark listening to the Cubs game on his radio.
I’d say “Hi,” and he’d respond, “Jes’ fine.”
It took me awhile to realize that “hi” is short for “how are you?”
I learned a lot in college, not entirely in the classroom.
One of my professors was a Dominican from Cambridge who had worked on a translation of the Bible, and, if he were alive today, I’d make sure he didn’t miss Man Martin’s serialization of Genesis. You shouldn’t miss it, either.
I know he’d like it, because one day he told us the don in his house had discovered the Hittite civilization.
“And when he died, we stole his furniture.”
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