thinglets: Hallowe'en and the Ten Things Wrong With It

storm'o'lantern

Is it just me or does Hallowe'en seem more culturally devoid every year? I know. I get it. I'm kidless. And while baby goats shouldn't be a consideration for one's love or hate of Hallowe'en, I'm thinking back on my own childhood at memories of All Hallow's Eves gone by and realizing that there really aren't that many fond memories. I'm not saying I hated the event, in fact I remember, at the time, having a certain anticipatory delight in thinking up costumes and gathering free candy. Quite simply, the costume/candy ritual was fun, but did not inspire near as many found remembrances as other holidays.

Let's take a sobering look at Hallowe'en: pre-pubescent, confused children try to hide behind dollar store Transformer masks as they threaten homeowners with vigilante violence unless they fork over individually-wrapped sugar confections. Clearly then, Hallowe'en has come to serve several purposes:

1) attempt to feed disenfranchised children once a year and allow for governments to forgo actual food subsidies.
2) satisfy the powerful dentist lobby, where 4 out of 5 dentists agree more candy is a good thing... no, bad thing... well, privately, a good thing.
3) seeks to encourage indentured servitude of cane workers in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
4) bows to the snack food lobbyists who don't have tons of money, but keep the assistants of government officials knee deep in Junior Mints.
5) endorses gang swarming for the purposes of intimidating the middle class.
6) allows our vampire overlords to come out one night a year and feed on Blood Red Twizzlers.
7) makes lower class kids feel inadequate when they have to wear their Superman Underoos as a costume.
8) enables the rarely-seen-at-other holidays "razor-blade-in-the-apple" lunatics.
9) forces adults, who would never otherwise think of dressing up, to participate in a drunken costume party ritual.
10) remind me, that despite all else, for two years I had the coolest stormtrooper costume in town.

lovehate: Finding Your Inner Geek (Part Two - Tools)

While I endeavored, in Part One of Finding Your Inner Geek, to show how geek culture is just as applicable to fishing as it is to computer or internet technology. The argument stands that any knowledge of the microcosm of a topic pushes one ever-further toward a level of geekdom. The relevant medium used to explore that relationship with fishing was print periodicals that refined from the generic to the hyper-specific Euro-published Carp Web.

The standard seemingly set by any geek culture is dancing on the fine line between the zen-like esoterica revolving around the people, places and things and the unbridled acquisition of stuff. As one moves up the chain from Hobbyist to Ubergeek, the winnowing of things occurs as knowledge and expertise fills the need for experimentation. But there are people who know how to exploit the Threshold Geeks and Geeks who's prime motivation to buy everything about everything within their field.

And so go the trade shows/conventions/conferences that, with much hype and grandeur, promote products like they've found a cure for cancer. Perhaps nowhere, outside of computer or gaming technology, do products get pumped out with minor tweaks and no real differentiated functions that those of tools.

Everyone knows the tool geek. Whether it's you, your father, mother, sister, brother, someone in your life owns several redundant pieces of hardware (actual hardware, not a 5-bay tower) that do exactly the same thing.

To prove this to you, I offer up the following questions:

1) Do you know someone who owns more that one hammer or drill?
2) Do you know someone who owns more than one set of router bits?
3) Do you know someone who has a collection of tool aprons with various logos?
4) Do you know someone who wears a "Black & Decker" or "Ryobi" hat or shirt?
5) Do you know someone who goes shopping at Home Depot "just to look"?

Like any geek continuum, names beget opinions and opinions beget arguments and purchases beget bikini-clad women in calendars holding power tools with conspicuously-placed innuendos in quotation marks that include words like drill, pound, hammer, screw that inspire clever quips like "grinder, I don't even know'er", or "sander, no that's okay I like'em rough". In fact, porn geeks and tool geeks could probably speak exactly the same language and mean completely different things. When talking about a Ridgid Clipped Head Nailer with consistent driving power, adjustable depth of drive, and rear exhaust, who would've thought one could be discussing the menu options at Paris Hilton's new bordello instead of an item in a Home Depot catalogue.

While Nascar followers are total realm of geekdom in themselves, there is a Venn crossover with people who cheer for the cars with their tool brand emblazoned on the side. When your girl can draw the Dewalt and Makita logos before the age of four and your boy knows Milwaukee as a Hole-Hawg drill instead of a city, when your spouse's best friend Stanley is a worn tape measure, when the only glasses and mugs you have in the kitchen cupboard have Bosch etched on them and were won as a door prize at a stag and doe or golf tournament, you have a tool geek in your house.

And all of this proves only one thing: that the person you stereotypically think is biggest redneck you know might also be the biggest geek you know. Does someone in your family know more about one topic than you know about computers or the web? Can your partner name 200 kitchen utensils and prizes a collection of melon ballers - ball'er I don't even... nevermind. Can your grandmother talk intelligently about 20 different kinds of needlepoint? Do you know ANYONE that scrapbooks, because trust me, I guarantee you, there is no such thing a hobbyist scrapbooker; they are either a full-blown scrapbook ubergeek or they've given it up.

Find your inner geek and point out the inner geek in others, then go fishing.

tool orgy

lovehate: Questions W5H

questions

Who is the person that I occasionally catch the fleeting glimpse of in the mirror that causes me to double-take in confusion?
Who can explain the musical success of singer who cannot sing and musicians who cannot play?
Who greenlit Beverly Hills Chihuahua?
Who is that ING Direct guy and what ad wizards decided to put him on the air?
Who abducted the hearts of cities and replaced them with bowels?

What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
What cannot be defended against by a big enough cereal box fort?
What makes people think Comic Sans is acceptable for a business document?
What incredibly effective lobbying effort has kept the fax machine around this long?
What makes us afraid to see our strengths in others?

When did children learn to give up before high school?
When did keeping up with the Joneses dictate every suburban house in America besmirched by siding?
When did Prince see the white cliffs of sanity and decide "parachute optional"?
When will we tear the roof off the sucka?
When will we finally take everything back?

Where can I buy Silly Putty?
Where is east of somewhere and west of nowhere?
Where do animated gifs go to die?
Where does cloud computing go after the rain?
Where did I go wrong?

Why has style replaced substance?
Why is it that best ideas come to mind in inverse relation to my proximity to a pen?
Why is it that as much as pop culture lets me down I am inexorably drawn to it?
Why would loving deities permit suffering?
Why do so many people care about the acceptance of strangers?

How can our gift of seeing the big picture so obscure our ability to see the details?
How did we not rise up as one when networks placed bugs on our screens 24/7?
How does a litre of water from a machine cost more than a litre of gas from another?
How did everything become so diposable?
How do I start loving more than I hate?

lovehate: Waste Not Want Not

There's something to be said for the frivolous, the ridiculous, the plain unnecessary. A slapstick pie in the face, while absurd and useless, is often funny if timed properly and, while many may question the humor, most will not recoil in abject horror that a pie or two is being wasted while people go hungry.

I can also appreciate that at buffet restaurants around the world, on a daily basis, tons of food is left on plates and subsequently discarded while the occasional patron will lament, "what a waste!"

I am also one who will often buy DVDs that you'll find shrink-wrapped a year later on my shelf. I will take semi-annual treks to Las Vegas where the useless has become commonplace. I will waste time with the best of them. Waste is not an unknown or unwelcome concept to me on many levels. Why then am I left awestruck in amazement at the recent practices of a fast food establishment?

No more than two days after getting an email from a friend about his recent trip to Taco Bell that netted him about a dozen packets of hot sauce for his three Tacos, I made an infrequent trip to the Bell and placed a dinner order consisting of a 7-layer Burrito, a Meximelt, and a Double Decker Taco. What resulted can be seen in a quick summary of the numbers:

3 items purchased (all of which could have sauce used on them)
23 packages of "Border Sauce" dispensed (12 Hot, 11 Mild)

I'll admit I did indulge in one packet of sauce for the Taco, but, beyond that, the rest of the "Border Sauce" remained.  The practice does beg some intriguing questions including:

1) Is a single package supposed to represent a "recommended" serving for a single item? (If so, there's some real arithmetic upgrading that needs to be done by PepsiCo for their employees.)
2) If this is not a serving, why not change the package to accommodate what the suggested serving should be?
3) While they often ask if you'd like hot or mild sauce, why don't they ever ask how much if the threshold can be between 1 and at least 23?

The conspicuous number of packets also allowed me to realize that Taco Bell now incorporates witticisms onto the packets like:
"Bike tires scare me."
"I'm in good hands now."
"So many tacos so little time"
"Pick me. Pick me."
"You had me at Taco"
"Live life... Take two."

While that last example had me starting to understand the culture of waste that has not only permeated Taco Bell, but almost every other food establishment, there was a final packet that really summed up the event: "Live life one sauce packet at a time."

Now while I doubt the Taco Bell parent corporation of PepsiCo has taken to hiring existentialist philosophers for Border Sauce packet blurbs, this last jolt of wisdom did leave me with an optimistic tinge and perhaps the one redeeming quality for this condiment onslaught. I figure that my life is now good as long as I have sauce packets left to enjoy. Considering I may frequent Taco Bell twice a year and this trip I only used one out of 23, I figure I've got a guaranteed 12 years of life without fear of accidental death. If I ever am planning on doing something risky, I can just head back to the Bell and reacquire a bounty of new packets to carry me through the remainder of a long life sponsored by the Pepsi Corporation and a subsidiary that once wanted me to take my own life by forcing a precocious chihuahua on my psyche.

While I honestly hate the indifference and complacency that led to an employee dumping such a condiment cluster bomb into the trillionth plastic bag that will be hitting a landfill somewhere near you, I've gotta love the fact that, for one brief shining moment, I believed fast food guaranteed my future.

lovehate: Diplomacy

As I sit in a hotel room in my provincial capital after a few glasses of wine and few hours of socializing, I am readying myself for a night's sleep before getting up tomorrow to spend the day lobbying Members of Provincial Parliament about some of the shortfalls of public education. Now don't get me wrong, I've bemoaned professional lobbyists before as a cancer to our political system, not because of any perceived insincerity or wrongdoing, but more because of the financial influence they wield in the backrooms of parliamentary power brokers.

So, when I say I'm going to lobby, I am stopping short of calling myself a lobbyist. I prefer to think of it as an advocate, even though my anger rises when I have to think of myself as an advocate for public education because politicians are not picking up the slack. Although there is a position and a script that is expected to inform my conversations, I really hope to achieve one thing: motivation through sincerity. I hope, at least, that sincerity can win the day because I don't have any cash to spread around. And with sincerity as my only tool, and words as my only medium, I will try to move politicians to taking up a fight for something that probably rarely crosses their radar. Herein lies the problem. My message is clear, and the way I would like to express that message is without reservation, without filters, without worrying about playing a game that I do not want to even understand - the game of diplomacy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong believer in tact and communicating a message with grace and persuasion, but considering a time span of 5, 10, or 15 minutes to engage someone in a dialectic about an issue they may not want to move on, may not want to believe in, or may not even want to hear, should demand an abandoning of the so-called rules of civilized discourse.

I want to sit down, look across a desk and say, "Surely you can see how f'ed up this process is... why won't you do anything to change it." When they respond with a shrug and an excuse I want to storm, "You idiot! Don't you get that this problem leads to that problem and the money you spend here will save you money over here!"

And when a final look of bewilderment crosses their faces with a tone of resignation that, in a perfect world, what I'm proposing might be a useful thing, but realistically it isn't going to happen. I can respond with, "Well of course it can't happen if you're not even willing to get up off you ass to try. You spazz! You stunner! You moron! How can you claim to represent the best interests of the people who voted for you, and even the people who didn't vote for you, if you're just going to sit around playing it safe, not ruffling any feathers? How can you advocate for your constituents if you're unwilling to take a stand? How can you tell me you agree with something, but in the end, give it up because your cohorts think it unpopular or radical or impolitic? How can you ignore the people you're supposed to represent?"

Of course I would like to say that, but in the end I will have to read the inside cover of the box and figure out the rules. I will collect $200 when I pass GO. I will climb up the ladders and slide down the snakes. I will only follow the colored directions in my very own Candyland. And I will shout "Yahtzee" and wave my hands frantically when rolling five of a kind.

While I believe that stark honesty can be brutal in some situations (especially between friends and loved ones), there is usually an opportunity to mitigate a message with time and gentle persuasion. Short timeframes demand short messages, and while I appreciate that some of the shortest are not appropriate for some company, they are often the most memorable. After all the catch phrase on the Diplomacy box reads: Why say in a finger gesture what you can say with years of arguments and the greasing of palms?

diplomacy