The Curmudgeonly Professor

October Blues: Comments on a Dreary Day of October 11 2011

October is supposed to be a translucent Indian Summer month along the Wasatch Front across Utah.  But here we are with another dreary, cloudy day.  Congress remains deadlocked between those who want Obama out and those who would like to stimulate job creation.  The NBA remains locked between multimillionaires battling for a larger share of the millions with all the preseason games canceled plus the first two weeks of the regular season.  The U of Utah Utes are struggling for survival after the euphoric days of being admitted to the Pac-10 seem a remnant of a distant past.  BYU Cougars were overhyped at pre-season with Jake Heaps forecast to be another sports icon like Jimmer Fredette.  Now they are struggling with a more promising backup quarterback but showing little progress still on offense.  Most proposals for cutting federal spending will merely exacerbate the economic downturn, resulting in fewer jobs and lower GDP.  The Dow is down 4.01 at 2:19 ET.  Research questions the value and discusses risks of women taking multivitamins.  Hammy is having trouble getting his new jeans on in Baby Blues in the comics.  Serious questions arise about value of screening for prostate and breast cancer.  The GOP presidential candidate "debate" continues tonight amid enormous excitement and anticipation.  Protestors don't like millionaires, Wall Street, bankers, and the police who have harassed them.  NetFlix backtracked on its proposal to separate DVDs from streaming.  Yahoo News says that GOP will kill Senate jobs bill since they don't like stimulus spending and more taxes on millionaires.  So here we are, wondering how we got so messed up and why we can't grow up, behave, and go about our business in a meaningful and constructive fashion.  Happy October 11 2011.

Sources of Misery and Consternation on August 15 2011

Here are the major sources of misery and consternation suffered by the Curmudgeonly Professor on August 15 2011:

1. My Mac computer died after seven years with a blank unforgiving screen, belching just a few flashes of light and the gong that sounds when you turn it off and then.  Nothing.  I am warned that the problem could be the logic board, the mother board, or the screen, or a plethora of other stuff, all of which are inordinately expensive.
2. Grover Norquist, with his little pledges and oaths that have brought legislation to a halt and killed  prospects for having enough money to fix my Mac Comoputer.
3. Facebook.  I've never learned how to use it.
4. Matlock.  Only three or four episodes remain that are worth watching over for the tenth time.
5. Sock lint, placed there by overseas factories so I have to vaccum my carpet three times a day.
6. TV ads, mainly ED ads (those little pills must really be profitable), the Progressive Insurance lady (Please, please, enough is enough, and 200 times a day is more than we need), in SLCity the Southtowne Auto Mall Ads, twice the volume of regular ads and totally obnoxious; in-depth weeknight sports reporting which lasts a max 1 minute 30 seconds.  There are others, but these ads will suffice for now.
7. The rotten summer in Utah, hardly hot enough to ripen tomatoes, and blooming flowers for photographing are scarce and anemic.

But, as Job said in the scriptures, surely things will get better if I can ever get out of the belly of this dang whale and they stop torturing me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snowbird Trials and Tribulations Saga Continued

Ever since we got back to Salt Lake, my internet has kept blinking off and on.  And that was after making arrangements ahead of time to have it up and running, and assurances that it was doing so.  Two long phone calls the first week did not resolve the problem.  Then a two hour phone call Monday morning running through a bunch of idiotic "diagnostics" ordered by the techie on the other end of the line.  Finally he gave up and said a tech repair man would be out the next day between 9:30 a.m. and 1:30.  After sitting around all day, the repair guy showed up at 3:00 p.m.  He twiddled with the phone line outside the house a minute, turned on the modem, and presto my internet is back.

Which leads to the question:  Am I really better off with the internet?  Does my status and eternal happiness depend on being tagged in facebook?  Should I continue wasting two or three hours a day posting photos to the Curmudgeonly Professor Blog?  Is it really important to read the latest comments by my sisters?  Or should I find a new hobby?  I do not notice any diminished levels of satisfaction from people who swore off computers after retiring and banished them from their homes.  Perhaps I should stop cold turkey, stop my blogs, stop my attacks on the Tea Party on Twitter, discontinue my learned economic analysis on Twitter, discontinue comments on my grandchildren's posts on facebook, and do what?  I can only listen to talk show bloviators for so long and my ears go numb, my brain is fried, and I long for the good old days of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and FDR.  Then I remember unemployment was 25% then and the only entertainment was listening to the radio and the victrola by the light of a kerosene lamp.  Have a nice day and never, never try to transfer your internet, your telephone, your tv provider, and your mail.  Turn off your TV, turn off your computer.  A daughter of a long-time friend came with her parents to see us the other day.  She has eight kids and they are all reading stuff like the Iliad and the Odyssey and books of like manner.  I asked her how that happened.  She said "because we haven't had a TV in the house for 17 years."  Go figure.  I can see class is about over so I will let you out early today.  There will be an hour essay exam next class period on the stuff I was supposed to cover today but never got around to so be sure you read Chapters 18-35 by tomorrow and be prepared.  Nobody ever pays any attention to me in here anyway.

Snowbird Chronicles of Misery Part III

Two weeks after coming back to Salt Lake City, here is a progress report on snowbird miseries:

1. USA Today finally got around to delivering my paper, 10 days after it was supposed to start. I need the crossword puzzle, for heaven's sake.
2. We had a message in our mailbox: "Your mail is circulating back and forth between Salt Lake and St. George.  Please let us know where you want your mail sent."  Well, we had filled out all the forms and even got a confirmation number for the address change before we left St. George.  So I went to the post office and they informed me that my mail was likely in the Salt Lake forwarding station.  Now we are finally getting a few pieces of mail, including credit card adverts, medical bills, fund solicitations, and other valuable items of critical importance.  One line was open at the post office when I went, with a line of people waiting for me to get my problem resolved.  Now the post office wants to close a bunch of "unprofitable" small locations.  Actually, the post office should be considered a public good, which isn't in the business to make money, which it will never do since the only way it knows how to try and solve its financial problems is to charge more for postage, cut down services, and cut out small locations.  And, guess what?  Supply and demand will work once more, and the post office will have even less business.
3. My internet still is going on and off.

Other than those items of misery, things seem to be going reasonably well.  Before we know it, the snow will fly, and we will leave as soon as it does, and we will have to go through all these miseries again. 

The Snowbird Chronicles of Misery Part II: Nobody Ever Does Things Right

Earlier I wrote about the problems and issues of changing residences seasonally and coming back to Salt Lake for awhile.  Here is a progress report:

1. USA Today.  We were assured in St. George that our paper would be started last Monday in Salt Lake.  Today is Friday and still no paper.  I called USA Today and they had no record that we had asked to have our paper switched from St. G. to SLC and the earliest they could start it is next Wednesday.  USA Today has never gotten our subscription changes fixed correctly.  Never.
2. US Mail.  One week after arriving in SLCity, still no US Mail.
3. Internet.  We were assured in St.G. that our internet was up and running and would be ready for us when we arrived in SLCity.  Big joke.  I spent two hours on two successive mornings trying to get it up and running.  The first day, I told the tech person, who kept contradicting his instructions, that he didn't know what he was doing and hung up.  After cooling off for a day, I tried again the next day.  The tech person did know how to retrieve the code I needed to activate, but he kept telling me the wrong place to stick it in.  I figured that out myself, thanked him profusely for his abundantly competent help, and hung up.  My internet still keeps going off and on so I am not home free on that one.
4. TV.  We were assured that our TV was up and running, since we had paid for it for two months previously anyway.  Not so.  I spent a couple of hours getting the TVs in our home activated including one HD and three junkers.  Now we can watch Matlock, which is nap time.

Moral to the story:  Rarely does anyone do what they say they will do, or if they do they get it wrong or don't make sure it's done right.  No wonder the country is so screwed up right now.  About the time we get everything fixed, it will be snowing and we will go back to St. George and go through all of this excruciating pain again.  Have a nice day.

The Curmudgeonly Professor Opines on Life's Daily Irritations

In fulfilling his mission of curmudgeonliness, the Curmudgeonly Professor now expounds on a few of life's recurring irritations, as follows:

• ball point pens.  I buy ball point pens by the dozen.  By six dozen.  And I strew them around everywhere, by the phone, on the night stands, on the end tables, on the counters, in the bathrooms, in the kitchen, in the living room.  So why is it that every time I need a ball point pen to jot down a phone number, take a message, or write a 500 word essay, there is never one available.  All of the ball point pens disappear just as soon as I have distributed them around.  I don't know how this happens.  Ball point pens seem to vaporize, disappear, vanish.  And they rarely show up in the future.  I just bought a couple of dozen more recently.   Plus we pick up ball point pens at all of the doctor's and dentist's offices we frequent.  These pens are really nice ones, but they all disappear quickly.  I blame my wife.  Who else is there around here?
• socks.  I have complained about socks before.  Socks get eaten up in the wash.  No matter whether I do the wash or my wife does the wash, socks disappear.  A month ago, I kept two socks prominently displayed until their mates showed up in a few days.  Weeks later, they missing socks have never appeared.  This dilemma irritates me.  Ball point pens cost ten or 15 cents apiece for the cheapos, but socks cost $3 a pair unless you get the WalMart ones that don't last very long.  Where do socks go?
• TV ads.  Again, a recurring gripe.  I realize TV stations have to sell ads to survive.  But must we see the obnoxious Progressive Insurance lady 250 times per hour, the ambulance chasing attorneys a thousand times a day, and why must the volume be cranked up three times louder when an obnoxious car lot ad comes on?  Bless TiVo, but my thumb is getting weak and I am probably getting carpal tunnel syndrome from pushing the fast forward and the delete button on the remote.
• Wastebasket drift.  Again, a recurring pain.  I would like to get through one day throwing something in the direction of a wastebasket and having it actually go in the wastebasket rather than doing a full earth orbit and an arcing trajectory out into the middle of the floor.
• computer passwords.  I have 3,252 passwords.  I try to use the same one, but have to keep changing them.  I have five single spaced pages, both sides, of computer passwords.
• Scandal mongering cable newspeople who revel in the dirt digging and spreading, ignoring other issues like the global economy and other matters of significant importance, or at least shoving them into obscurity.

I'm sure I'll have a few more irritations at the end of the day.  But in the interests of brevity, I will conclude with this beginning list.  Have a nice day.  And try to smile and not get irritated.

Five Habits of the Perennially Miserable, with Apologies to Steve Covey

For the sake of simplicity, and for analytical neatness, let us divide people into two broad classes:  The perennially happy and cheerful, and the perennially miserable and sour.  Of course, most of us are sour and grouchy once in awhile, and even the most grumpy might see a ray of sunshine once in a decade.  But as an economist, I can assume anything I want to assume, and so I have classified everyone into two classes, miserable and happy.  Neat classification, just like Supply and Demand, or like Marginal cost and Average cost.  So here are five habits of perennially miserable people:

1. Miserable people continually seek new and creative ways to remain chronically miserable.  Not wishing to spoil their reputation, they spend their minutes looking for things to complain and gripe about.
2. Miserable people love to recite long litanies of their woes and catastrophes when asked "How are you?"
3. Miserable people dwell on the past, on all of their past mistakes, on all of the people who have "done them wrong," on all of the injustices of their lives.  They never forgive anyone for anything.
4. Miserable people never smile (why would they?), never say thank you, never say please, and go around like the dark little man in the old L'il Abner comics named Joe Blptsk something or other who carried a dark, dark cloud over his head everywhere he went.  Miserable people, thus, are chronic pessimists
5. Miserable people always criticize, find fault, belittle, run down, humiliate others as a crutch to their own inferiority and miserable selves.

If you find yourself on this list anywhere, maybe it's time to do something about it!

 

Reasons for Curmudgeonliness on April 8

Here are some reasons that I am especially curmudgeonly today:

1. I have to send my HP HDX back to the factory because the stupid internet icon on the ignorant touch panel keeps flashing from orange to blue and will not remain stable.  Google research confirms others have had this problem and that the touch panel genius had a bad idea.
2. See 1 above.  Due to aforementioned dilemma, my posts may be more infrequent although I could use two other computers if I felt so inspired to do so.
3. Congress is behaving like a playground spat I remember where kids were beating up on each other if their dad didn't have the right tractor on their farm, a Farmall or a John Deere, or if they didn't have the best car, a Ford or a Chevrolet.
4. Stupid computers.
5. Bad weather.

On the other hand, a neighbor lady told me while I was out walking yesterday in the cold wind, "At least you're still upright.  That's something."  She had a point.

Fortunately, the Curmudgeonly Professor Married an Optimist

Yesterday morning I came forth whining that "today is certainly a crummy, cloudy, rainy, awful day."  My wife cheerfully responded, "Yes, but all of the days up until today have been beautiful."  My wife typically answers my complaints with "It will be all right."  How fortunate I am.

Things the Curmudgeonly Professor has Learned Over the Weekend

Here are the tidbits of knowledge the Curmudgeonly Professor has added to his already overcrowded brain cells over the weekend:

• Utah Democrats make up 12% of registered voters in Utah.  Makes for excellent bipartisan relationships.
• It took Amazon.com 10 months to deliver my wife's $50 gift certificate she intended to give me in Christmas 2009.  Amazon just gave me another 30 bucks after I complained.
• Fillmore, in mid-state Utah, has an excellent new Chinese restaurant.
• Reading the Book of Lamentations with lots of woe, woe, woes in anticipation of disastrous election outcome on Tuesday.
• Bret Favre is not immortal after all.
• Max Hall may not deliver the Cards to the Promised Land.
• Utah Utes advance highly in the polls after knocking off another Mountain West team.  Great scheduling skills for maximum gain, Utes.
• Most teams that should have won over weekend lost.  Learning humility a great character trait.
• Jazz came to life against OC Thunder.  Maybe hope after all.  Awesome performance by Millsap.
• Rereading the book titled "Sway" to remind myself why people make stupid and irrational choices, will review in detail later after I cool down from election results and try not to make any irrational choices myself.
• Got to Lin's Market too late Saturday to get a hot dog from Dorthy (spelling is correct) the 93 year old hot dog lady who sells Dorthy's Dogs every weekend.  Pity.
• Many people in our retirement condos have had a worse summer than we have had, with falls, pace makers, surgeries, illnesses, etc.  Ain't the Golden Years great!
• I wish I hadn't taken another 450 photos the last few days.  I'd like to delete the whole batch, but there are a few gems scattered among the likely deletes.  I'm too tired to edit them.
• I've taken about 10,000 photos with my "new" Canon 7d camera.  Since the camera cost $2 thousand, that's about 0.2 per photo.  If I take another 10,000 photos, the camera will essentially be free.  How much would it cost to develop and print 10,000 photos?  Now I need a $1500 new telephoto lens, and if I take another 10,000 photos, the new lens will essentially be free.  As an economist, my logic is impeccable.
• I need to frame another 20-30 flower photos and hang them on the walls in our condo.

As you can see, life is an eternal learning (or unlearning) process, fraught with perils, biased and erroneous information, bloviating gurus, wise economists, knowledge from Spacebook and Twitter and a plethora of forwarded ingenious emails, etc. etc.  Now I'll see what new things I can learn today.  Have a nice, informative, day.

The Curmudgeonly Professor's Whines and Gripes for Monday morning

The Curmudgeonly Professor has been derelict in his duties in grousing, whining, expressing negative thoughts, and other duties attributable to a true curmudgeon.  Here is stuff the Professor is hacked at on Monday morning September 27:

• The pro basketball season will start shortly. That means we have to endure another year of Kobe and the LA Lakers.  Hopefully the new rule will go into effect to penalize people who make stupid gestures and glorifying rants and whine incessantly at officials.  Think certain Lakers.
• Referees in the Nevada-BYU game who were possibly (a) blind, (b) biased, (c)thinking about other things, (d) enjoying 61,000 fans repetitively booing their lungs out at them for missing the obvious, even to elderly ladies with poor eyesight.
• Football teams who scheduled bottom feeders and then blew them up and out just to have a patsy walk in the park type of Saturday and move up in the rankings and pound their chests about how great they are.  How about some fairness, voters, for good teams who actually played a genuine football game but got smashed in the ratings?  Huh?
• My zucchini plant, which resembles the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors.  No zukes all summer, a few coming on, and since I hadn't checked for weeks, one monster baseball bat size zuke big enough to clobber the tar out of an intruder.
• Snails, who ate up my petunias.
• Politicians, and politician wannabes.
• The lack of new Matlock reruns.  Only a half dozen or so worth watching now.

Other than the foregoing, the Professor is only whiny to a modest degree this morning, but I am sure the level will accelerate exponentially as the day goes on.  Have a nice day.  Don't whine.

Should We Read E-Newspapers or Paper Newspapers?

At 4:00 a.m. I opened the door to pick up my newspapers as I was roaming the house waiting for my stuffy nose to clear.  Ordinarily our faithful paper deliverer has them chucked right up by my door by 4:00 a.m. or, at the most, 5 after.  Not taking into account that today is Labor Day, I realized that she might be a tad later this morning, which was fine by me.

During my wait for the papers, I began serious meditation exercises on whether it is best to read e-newspapers or paper newspapers.  Personally, I read both.  When we lived in the east, I always loved Sundays after church when we could pick up the Sunday NYTimes and Washington Post.  The Sunday Times probably weighed about 30 pounds and required 10 trees per issue to produce, and the Post maybe about half that much.  Then I was assured of a full afternoon of going through the papers, section by section without the encumbrance of a computer, an iPad, an iPod, a Blackberry, or a myriad other itty-bitty electronic formats that would digest 30 pounds of NYTimes and display it for me in e-ink.  I tried an e subscription to USA Today and decided I liked paper better.

Then I thought, what if we all quit taking paper papers?  The green folks would be thrilled because we would save all of those trees.  But then consider, during this economic slowdown, so to speak, what would happen to the market value of goods and services produced domestically (GDP)?  First, the loggers would be laid off.  Then the log truckers.  Then the paper and pulp mills would have to cut back.  The paper haulers would be next to starve.  The printing presses would crank to a minimal output of newspapers.  The ink and chemical makers would die.  And how about my faithful paper delivering lady?  My sister Judy delivered the daily O in Olympia WA for over 20 years, wearing out a set of brake linings every two weeks or so as she screeched to a daily halt in front of dozens of rural paper delivery boxes.  What about the gas and car repair folks who keep the paper delivery people going?  And then there are the trash and recycling people.  Granted, we would like to diminish trash and such, but then how many of these people would lose their jobs?  The green folks could all get hired to go out and replant forests since a lot of the wood going to pulp needs cleaned out of the forests anyway.

Now look at the e-newspaper producers.  All they have to worry about is whether readers have a multitude of electronic devices to read their e-paper.  Newspaper companies wouldn't have to pay a penny for any of these electronic marvels.  And since most people who subscribe to e-stuff already have a half dozen e-readers anyway, the net impact on GDP could, horror upon horrors, actually be negative!  So the new e-paper revolution could proceed unabated out of, literally, thin air called e-ink.

So think about it.  If you are serious about stimulating the economy, which choice is economically most critical?  Would you feel right about putting all of those people and companies out of work as you snooze through the e-edition of your newspaper?  And do you think it would be fun to do the NY Times crossword puzzle on your e-reader?  Total incomes could conceivably decline, followed by declines in spending, employment, tax revenue, and increases in the federal deficit.  Congress would have something else to do, and the bloviators could bloviate anew about how X or Y Political party has caused another mess.

But such is the price of economic progress.  There are still a few harness makers around, but not many.  Only a precious few buggy makers.  No makers of mechanical calculators, engineering slide rules, and only a few suppliers of coal stoves.  The unemployed and displaced people resulting from this electronic revolution will all have to go back to school, receive unemployment benefits, move in with parents and grandparents, lose their houses, declare bankruptcy, get food stamps, and join the Tea Party, whatever that is.  Meanwhile, some 18 year old kid will invent another electronic marvel that will keep everyone occupied full time Twittering, Tweeting, Texting, Facebooking, Blogging, mini-blogging,MySpacing, while twiddling with their iPads, iPods, Blackberries, Droids, and other electronic marvels.  Truth is, no one will have time to work anyway.  Stay tuned for latest developments.  One would only hope that somewhere everyone would take an e-economics course to cut down the gross levels of economic ignorance that are responsible for much of the economic dilemma we face today.  The end.  For now.

Is The World Getting Smaller Along With Everything in it?

I noticed the other day that the size of the slices of bread in the kind we usually buy are perhaps 2/3 the size or less of the larger slices I seem to remember a short time ago.  Then I remembered:  Everything is getting smaller.  Computers used to be like albatrosses or whales: large, ungainly, and taking up acres of desk space.  Now you can hold one in the palm of your hand.  Camcorders once were ungainly monsters you hauled around on your shoulder. Now you take video with handheld devices.  Ice cream once came in half-gallon containers.  Now, instead of "raising the price" on a half gallon directly, it is done indirectly by shrinking the size of the ice cream carton.  In many cases, cartons of grocery items have stayed the same size, but the contents have continually dwindled.

Newspapers once were large enough to cover vast areas of space.  Now, they are skinny replicas of their progenitors.  Parade Magazine and USA Weekend, Sunday newspaper supplements, are down nearly to Reader's Digest size and continue to shrink.  The U.S. Postal Service keeps raising postage and decreasing services and, big surprise, the laws of supply and demand come true as postal patrons continue to abandon the post office in droves, so the post office keeps shrinking in relevance.  Viewers of network news and local news continue to dwindle.  You can doubtless make your own lists of things you have noticed that are getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller.

Unfortunately, our economy has also been dwindling, but that is an outcome attributable, at least in major part,  to our own faults and inattention in shrinking the rules and turning the hen houses over to the foxes. 

I remember someone posed a question when I was in school to the effect that, if the world and everything in it suddenly shrank to the size of the head of a pin, would we know the difference?  In our current world, going small has some times been a strategy for economic survival, although consumers feel it is a way to gouge and mislead them.  As our world continues to become increasingly digitized and miniaturized, we can only hope that our intelligence, our attention to facts and objective evidence, and our ability to make decisions affecting our futures do not also dwindle and shrink.  It would indeed be sad if, somehow, we cannot use the explosion in available reliable information, as distinguished from hypocrisy and self-serving lies, in ways that make our futures better than our pasts instead of yearning for a return to the oft-troubled times of yesterday.  But what else is a Curmudgeonly Emeritus Professor to do but worry about the future of the world?

The Curmudgeonly Professor's Rant on Disasters, Calamities, Fear and our Loving Attachment to Such Negative Thoughts (You Can Easily Skip This Post).

The 1970s and 1980s were rife with economic catastrophizers (is that a word?).  Popular books selling in large numbers included "Small is Beautiful," "Spaceship Earth," (if my memory is anywhere near correct) and many similar titles.  The idea was rampant once more that Parson Malthus had been resurrected from the grave and was stalking the earth with his basic thesis that population grew geometrically and resources to feed people grew only arithmetically.  Thus, we were doomed.  Billions more people would be reduced to starvation and penury.  While it is true that countless millions do face daily starvation, the general proposition that all of us would soon be eating our shoe leather has not come to pass.  Instead, in countries like the U.S., we have eaten so much pizza, pasta, fast food, and everything else that we have become a nation with a problematic population of fatties.  Not everyone in the U.S. has access to this bounteous food supply.  Nonetheless, we have not run out of food, in the aggregate.  Just as the world of economic soothsayers and philosophizers overlooked the role of technology when Parson Malthus first became famous, so have we underestimated the role of technology in the modern world.

Similarly, disaster books about economics sell well.  Books that promise how you can safely survive the next stupendous, inevitable, soon-to-arrive, world of market and economy total collapse, sell extremely well.  Books that detail economic progress and continued development and policy-solving analysis get a ho-hum buyers' market.

Why do we like to go around scared all of the time?  We're a nation of fraidy cats.  We're afraid of Democrats.  We're afraid of Republicans.  We use fear as a major political tactic because it works, and works with a vengeance.  Just think up the worst that might, but may not actually even be likely to happen, and you can stir up votes by the ziillions.  We've also become a political environment of unbridled prevarication as the boogey-men and image makers have become skilled in knowing how to frighten the electorate into an Elm Street Halloween Night frenzy of fear.  Facts have often taken a back seat.  I learned when I studied economic forecasting that what people think is going to happen will typically outweigh what can logically be expected to happen.  Even in retrospect, we overlook objective evidence on what has actually happened and paint dark and dreary pictures of failure that wither in the light of facts and rational analysis.

The moral to the story is that if we want to write a book and make money, write about a disaster.  Many topics abound.  The coming crash, always a winner.  The political failure of (fill in the blank).  The disastrous impact of (fill in the blank for any proposed or new piece of legislation).  By spending so much time criticizing, dissembling, and avoiding the facts, we escape from the hard work and reality of focusing on making the world in which we live a better place.

Things the Curmudgeonly Professor is Ticked Off About Today June 29 2010

Some people never get ticked off, apparently.  They smile sweetly and never argue or disagree.  Or so I've heard, but never actually experienced.  To keep you up to date, here are the Curmudgeonly Professor's Gripes of the Day:

• The Los Angeles Lakers necktie my son gave me for Father's Day, knowing full well that I am an old man and that this gift would emotionally scar me.
• The Utah Utes going to the Pac-however many.  Glorious.
• The fact that I have a nasty cold in mid-summer and spend all my time coughing, sneezing, blowing, hacking, trying to breathe minimal oxygen for life sustenance through a stuffy nose, cussing and whining.  Courtesy of my wife.
• The dearth of sports on TV and in the newspapers.  I know, there's golf, whoopee.  Also baseball, which I usually don't get interested in until the pennant race gets serious since I don't want to spend time watching all the losers.
• I am getting sick to death of wasting an hour a day watching Matlock, since I can recite all of the lines to all of the episodes, and can actually predict with 100% certainty that the client will get off, unscathed, for a mere $100 grand.  Actually, old Ben raised the fee to $150 grand the other day.  Then why does he shine his own shoes and live like a pauper?  And have you ever seen a hot-dog stand right outside the courtroom in your own court house?  Bring back Leave it to Beaver and Three's Company and Happy Days.
• The stock market.  Come on consumers, belly up here and quit acting like deadbeats.  Get yourselves to Costco, WalMart, the junk food emporiums, and show a little spunk here.  It's the American thing to do.
• Bloviators.  Just take your millions and go away and shut up.
• Rex Morgan, M.D. in the comics.  Please remove.  Along with Cathy and Prince Valiant.  Help us out here.
• The toxic political process.  But probably hasn't changed a whole lot since the days of John Adams.  New nasty people born every year.  We just have to put up with them more in the era of cable TV.
• The blue carpet at Boise State, now a member of the Mountain West.  Boise State guy twittered me to explain they just had a new blue carpet and were ready to crush all comers.  Nice.

I assume there are some nice things I could say but that would detract from the overall aura of gloom, doom, pessimism, negative thought, depression, and other manifestations of this blog post.  Have a nice, nice day.