23 posts tagged “rant”

I've been meaning to post on this for ages but dang, my blogging has gone down the tubes lately, relegated to the occasional political rant (I feel obsessed, sigh) and funny Youtube videos. I used to be full of far more curious and intelligent banter. Maybe I should get back to that.

So my neighbors. Let's start with the awful ones.

When we moved into this neighborhood it was peaceful, quiet and we were surrounded by people who were nice and kept to themselves. No craziness. Well, except for the Chinese delivery guy being robbed down the street a few years back. Other than that, pretty peaceful. Reesie (happy late bday!) used to live 1 block away so she can probably attest to this.

Everything changed a year ago when they tore down the ugly green shed next door. At first we were excited, because the shed was pretty hideous overall. What we didn't anticipate is the monstrosity that the put on the super super tiny lot--two connected townhouse condos with barely any more square feet than our own apartment, just piled high in three tall floors (plus a basement) that block out our sun and give us a view directly into the houses of our neighbors.

Bitch Door

We're talking perfect clarity of everything that happens in front of the windows. I could easily throw a paper airplane between our windows and theirs without much fear that it would go astray. Our kitchen windows look into the two bedrooms of the house in the back. Our dining room window looks into the bathroom and laundry room of the house in front. The office windows look into one of the house in front's bedrooms. The front door of the house in front is right below our dining room window...see right. We can hear everything said on their porch or in their house (if windows are open...thankfully they have central air so they keep them closed) and I'm sure they see and hear everything in our house.

The balcony looks over the backyard of the house in back, which was very nice when the couple moved in. The stupidly rich couple. The rich part is not as annoying as the stupid part. They never had a moving van come--it was all brand new furniture. Every day a new truck from Crate & Barrel, some teak furniture place, etc. Every day the guy drinks a $60+ bottle of wine after work (we can see in...and my husband used to sell wine, so he knows those labels). They spent $640k on maybe 1200 square feet...and most of it stares into our house or our landlords below. The rooms are miniscule (that square feet is spread over four floors) Their big bedroom balcony has a view of our roof...our our balcony, which we sit on nearly every night so they abandoned the idea of hanging out there before bed. Darn.

They have a VERY BIG and young black lab creatively named "Buddy." In the five months they have lived there I think they have used their gorgeous (yes, we covet) $3,500 grill a total of maybe 6-7 times...increasingly less as the summer progressed, mostly because of the dog.

You see, they never take Buddy for walks. I see dozens of people walking their dogs in this neighborhood (including the awful woman in the front condo that had the townhouses built...we'll get to her in a minute). Buddy just gets let out into the tiny backyard which was once quite nice. When they moved in--all that nice backyard changed. Over the summer the grass grew  and grew and grew and grew and grew...and still hasn't been cut yet. It's all folded over. And full of dogshit. Because they never clean up after poor Buddy. The lawn now has a massive yellow patch where Buddy has peed and peed and peed. And under the little balcony that goes from their kitchen (which we can look down into) to their backyard, Buddy has started digging. And digging. So now there is a ton of dirt all over their once nice bricked in porch. They don't even bother to stop Buddy. He is digging his way to China. Poor creature. I feel so terrible for him. He never gets walked...he's stuck in that house all day long and most of the attention no longer goes to him because stupid rich couple had a baby (we can see right into baby's room...watch her change diapers while we do dishes, etc.).  Poor dog. He's probably so jealous of the baby--and with such a tiny space, I bet they get rid of him soon. It would be to his benefit...maybe someone would actually take him for a walk sometime.

As for why we think they are stupid? Because..WHY ON THIS FUCKING EARTH WOULD YOU SPEND $640k ON A HOUSE WITH NO PRIVACY AND NO SPACE? Especially when you could spend that and get a cute little house with a yard that is not connected to another condo and doesn't stare into your neighbor's house...less than 1/2 a mile away?

The woman in the front condo we just plain hate. The couple in the back we pity for their stupidity. But the woman with the white lab in the front condo? HATE. Joe has horrid names for her.

We hate her mostly because she took advantage of our landlords, who are 86 and 94 and didn't know, couldn't protest all of the violations that were made when the put the house so close to our house. When they used our lawn for the equipment when building the condo--and never fixed it. When not giving any consideration to the fact that our landlords have lived here for 65 years...and now their property value and their peacefulness disappeared in one fell swoop. Even worse, the crazy woman in the front is fucking the union boss of our town (who is a 20 yrs older fat man), so even if my landlords could have protested much of how the house was built/where, etc. it would have gone nowhere. She's very involved in local politics, even having a party for some woman running for state senate in a neighboring precinct. She had a beer barrel out on the sidewalk and all these old fat politicians being drunk and loud in the middle of the afternoon (I was home sick as a dog and couldn't even take a nap in my own house...but calling the police wouldn't have mattered because they were all city politicians). There is more but that's the most of it. We just plain hate her. HATE her.  The only saving grace is that she pretty much built the stupid house to turn a profit so we expect her to sell and move in a year or so.

So now onto the CRAZY.

Two Chinese families moved in behind us. They are nearly identical in the sense that there is a couple with a child (girl below, boy above) the same age and one male family member (grandfather below, uncle above). They have barely any furniture...mostly just mats on the floor (because their stupid landlords ripped out half the trees and branches in back so now they have no privacy...when we're on our balcony we see everything).

The uncle has Tourette's syndrome.  In college I dated a guy who had it so I recognized it. It's really unfortunate--some people have it far worse than others. This uncle tends to make very VERY loud grunting noises. You can hear him when he's in the house and especially when he is walking the little boy (must be around 1 year old)...we refer to it as marching baby...they make the little boy walk and if he falls they pick him up and make him walk again. Relentless. So while the uncle isn't crazy (or not that we know) it's a little disconcerting having the extra odd, random noises. He doesn't work...is pretty much home all the time.

Both families spend an awful lot of time walking the babies. Several times a day they take them out in the stroller or make them walk. Those kids get walked more than any of the dogs in the neighborhood!

On to the crazy...Grandma.

Grandma is nuts. In her defense, she's probably totally out of her element. I don't think she speaks English and she sure as hell doesn't understand the culture. Part of the reason that the little girl gets walked so much is that she has nothing better to do so she walks around and around the neighborhood with her. But I think she is still a little off her rocker.

We see grandma sitting on random porches in the neighborhood. We've seen her sitting on our stoop several times, despite the fact that she lives next door and walks just fine. I've seen her on various porches all over...not just on the edge near a sidewalk, but where she has to go up a walk to then sit on the porch. It's very odd.

Across the street is a very nice Chinese American family with two young kids. Crazy Chinese grandmother will go and stand on the edge of their yard and just stare. Just stand there and stare at them. I've seen her do it dozens of times and they just ignore her. You can tell they are really weirded out by the staring.

It's the naked thing that really gets us.

Yeah, the NAKED thing. Not just once but several times. 

I mentioned that we can see into their apartments...Gamany was over and she had a nice view of crazy grandma staring at us one night...but fortunately for her grandma wasn't naked that night.

She was the next week. We were having dinner on our back balcony and Grandma had taken a shower and came on into the room, flipped on the light and came right to the window, buck naked and stared up at us, breasts leaning on the windowsill. It was purposeful and directed right at us. Joe backed up so the balcony pole was blocking his view. I leaned into my hair and snuck peeks here and there to see if she would leave. Took her a good five minutes, but finally. Oh my...was frightening.

The week after, she did it again. And a few days later, again. Very purposeful and very scary.

I see her in the neighborhood walking the baby all the time. I can't even look at her...I just get that horrible vision of her with her breasts on the windowsill. It's absolutely frightning.

Needless to say, we're stepping up our efforts to pay down some debt and save to get the hell out of here and buy our own house....

That's what the RIAA is saying in its latest round of lawsuits. According to this Washington Post article:

in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

This is pretty damn shocking all around. Essentially it means that the only music that is legal to have on your iPod or other mp3 player is music that you bought online. Which is ridiculous. It means that pretty much every single mp3 player owner is in violation according to what the RIAA is now trying to push forth.

The Howell case was not the first time the industry has argued that making a personal copy from a legally purchased CD is illegal. At the Thomas trial in Minnesota, Sony BMG's chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, testified that "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Copying a song you bought is "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy,' " she said.

But lawyers for consumers point to a series of court rulings over the last few decades that found no violation of copyright law in the use of VCRs and other devices to time-shift TV programs; that is, to make personal copies for the purpose of making portable a legally obtained recording.

don't copy me!

The article goes on to talk about how the recording industry is refusing to move out of the dinosaur age and into the digital world. Instead of being innovative and changing their business model, they are spending craploads of money on lawyers to charge teenagers and college kids hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines that they cannot afford to pay.

I have been thinking this for such a long time--how stuck in the past the RIAA is. I used to work in the record industry and for the most part, it's run by a bunch of old stodgy men who wouldn't know a creative money making idea if it bit them in the ass. In this day and age, you don't own the consumer. They are smarter, better informed and you can no longer walk all over them by charging an 80% markup on your products. They just don't go for that. What they want is collaboration, integration, discussion and ways to feed the obsession that they have with the artists they admire. There are ways to make money...but the old way is increasingly not going to be one of those ways.

I subscribe to eMusic, which I think is one of the coolest music services out there, especially if you are into indie music. I've found more interesting artists through that service than I ever dreamed. I've stocked up on lots of music from indie bands that I would never have heard about from some record company promotion. Instead I relied on suggestions from other members, recommends based on reviews of music I know and by being able to listen to snippets of the music before I purchased. I can buy whole albums or just songs. I often will choose 2-3 songs from an album to see if I like it, then will go back the next month and get the remainder of the songs.  I pay $25 a month for 100 songs...which is about 6-8 CDs...which would cost you at least $60 on iTunes. The thing is, I'm more likely to buy more music over time because I have greater value. And in turn I'm discovering more music, and may go to shows and buy merchandise of the bands that I discover. If I had to rely on hard CDs or iTunes, I wouldn't buy as much. I imagine that those costs are what drive teens to the free download sites.

Love Love Love!

Record companies need to pay attention to these new types of patterns and learn to diversify their product offerings. Services is where it is at. Because of eMusic I have been slowly stocking up on as much of the Labrador catalog as I can...I've found that I really love the music that those crazy Swedes distribute. If it weren't for a service like eMusic I would never have discovered them nor would they have been likely to get money from me each and every month as a result. I'm a steady customer now...looking for more tunes by the same company vs. just buying one offs like I typically do from other labels.

The RIAA should hire me to help the labels revamp their marketing strategy. It's not really rocket science--you just need to have an understanding of the audience, the new technologies and be willing to take a leap forward and create the next hot revenue stream for today's generations of music lovers. Sigh. Instead, I shake my head, my mind absolutely boggled by their scare-tactic, doomed-to-fail campaign against people who just plain don't know that what they are doing is so wrong in the first place. Instead of spending money to keep money, spend a little money to develop ideas to make more...

Methinks that the lawyers are running the show. Lots and lots of dollar signs to be had for those guys!

Until I was twenty years old, I think I had only met one or two other Crystals in my life (btw, 90% of us spell it just the way it should be...the Ch, Kry varieties are few and far between). Now they seem to be everywhere. There are three in my company...two of them in my department. They're all over the Internet, as I'm sure you know. And they are on TV a LOT...but here's my beef:

Why are all the Crystals you see on the Net or on TV trashy girls?

A friend of mine from England always used to tease me when he first knew me...about how Crystal is a trailer trash name there. I never believed him but now I am beginning to wonder all around. Springer always has a Crystal on the show (a recent one I caught had a fat Crystal in a kiddie pool full of mud with a pig), as does Dr. Phil. If you ever see a Crystal being quoted in a news story they're usually toothless hillbillies or they have such terrible grammar skills that you can barely understand what they are saying.

Granted, I'm older than most of them, so one would think that my name came about on the early side of the naming trend. There is a theory about how names come about, starting with affluent parents and then trickling down to the masses until the affluent parents move on to other names. But my parents were never overly affluent. Just your typical middle-class family. I think it was a result of my father liking unusual names more than anything. They weren't even hippies.

I have always loved my name because it was different and fairly unique. Now though, I find that whenever I see another Crystal on tv or see a picture on the Net, I just want to cringe. My god you Crystals, can't you brush your hair, cover up just a little (there is a HUGE difference between sexy and trashy, sigh), lose some weight, stop smoking dope, walk out on the abusive boyfriends and quit making me want to cover my ears (lots of overly freaky religious Crystals) and eyes?

Sigh.

If you ever saw the show Dead Like Me, there was a fat ugly Crystal who worked in reception. Stranger still, one of her coworkers was a sweet pretty thing named Misty. My sister's name is Misty...very strange to see two characters with those names on TV!

The Alarm

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Scored tickets to Psychedelic Furs, The Alarm and The Fixx on July 10! I'm a huge Alarm fan--they were the positive anthem to my teen angst (contrasting with the Smiths). The Furs and The Fixx are just gravy on what will be a super show already, in my opinion. Of course, it's not the same Alarm of old but Mike Peters can still belt them out, so I'm happy.

And for those of you joining Vox just to put your two cents in about Morrissey and tell me that apparently I have terrible hearing (actually I think you just scored better seats than me), it will please you to note that he appeared to me last night in my dreams, in a hospital bed, hand to his neck gesturing at how sick he actually is. Then when some other person in my dream came up alongside the bed, he jumped out and strangled her with the cord from the telephone on the bedside stand, a maniacal look in his eye.

Guess he told me off for being skeptical. I'm sorry Morrissey. I love you dearly but it's not like this is the first time you have walked off stage at a show. When you cry wolf so many times and you actually DO end up with a throat infection, what's a very sad girl who only wanted to see her most favorite mournful hero supposed to think? I just hope to god you reschedule your show or my husband is going to ban me from letting me spend money on you ever again...

Hot! or just dripping wet.

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Last night, in the 90 degree heat, Morrissey complained a bit about how it was too cold in the David Letterman Theater the day before. In such a large venue, it's sometimes hard to hear the things that entertainers say but apparently he was complaining that the cold messed up his voice a bit. After the next song, "Let Me Kiss You," which, by the way, sounded perfectly fine, he ripped off what was probably a $200 baby blue cotton shirt and threw it out into the audience.

Nearly 50 year old Morrissey shirtless. Who'd have thunk it? I'm not sure it was a good thing.

But maybe I'm bitter. Because he went back to, presumably, put on another shirt as he did multiple times when we saw him at the Orpheum in 2004 (omg was it that long ago?). But he just didn't come back. Finally one of his little stooges came out and said that Morrissey had lost his voice. No one wanted to believe it...people thought it was a joke and continued to stand around. Next thing you know, the lights went up and people began to shuffle out, VERY unhappy.

I just don't believe the voice bit...there was no sign of any struggling voice in the six songs that we did hear. It was drippingly, repressingly hot in the audience, and I imagine it was 20+ degrees hotter under those lights. Personally, I think Morrissey estimated how many long-sleeved shirts he was going to have to go through and how miserable he would be through the next 65 minutes and called it quits.

We milled around for a bit, and the only saving grace to the night is that I ran into old friends from my long ago high-tech startup days and we managed to catch up and make plans to meet for drinks in the next few weeks. Good friends that I had always wished I hadn't lost touch with, but now that connection has been reforged again. So thanks Morrissey, for cancelling your concert so I could hook up with them.

Otherwise I am waiting for my refund or the date of the rescheduled show. They told us to check the LiveNation site at some point today to find out what will happen. They supposedly want to reschedule, if so, Morrissey might redeem himself a little bit. Otherwise, I think Joe is never going to let me give that man money again.

Sigh. Morrissey, why did we get the dramatics last night???

writing. me. getting my mind off of personal crap. obsessing about things that are good for me instead. not twittering my life away on things that I shouldn't be.

the reincarnation of my other blog.

and no, vox, I love you too much to go from here!