"Beep Beep, Beep Beep, Yeah"

I have come to hate driving on the East Coast, and by extension, every single person who lives here.

It took us an hour to get home from work last night. It's a drive that, even with traffic, shouldn't take more than 30 to 35 minutes. On top of that, I had some asshole pass me on a windy, hilly two-lane road. And all it got him was just ahead of me. That's it. Not like he got miles and miles of distance on me from that asinine, that cockslap.

But I've noticed this about East Coast drivers: every single one of them acts as though they were the only person on the road. When there are thousands of cars around you all the time, you can't act like that. It's one thing to act like you're the only one on the road in Oklahoma, where there's at least a 50% chance you are the only car on the road, but it's absurd to do that here.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: The Beatles, "Drive My Car"

"Happiness Is A Warm Gun"

Virginia is officially off it's damn nut.

The thing started when New York City started prosecuting several gun shops (six of which are in Virginia) over illegal and shady sales of guns later used in crimes in New York City. A sting operation in Virginia revealed that there's are plenty of ways to get around gun restrictions, and that Virginia's lax laws are especially easy to circumvent.

So the City of New York decides to prosecute a few of these gun shops for this, and now this gun-rights organization, the Virginia Citizens Defense League (whom the Washington Post referred to as a group that thinks the NRA is spineless and soft on gun laws) decides to hold a raffle to give away guns to help pay for the legal fees for the prosecuted gun shops.

Seriously, what the fuck?

What gets me is that this is still happening despite the tragedy at Virginia Tech last month. Even worse, the gun who heads up this collection of nuts thinks that if there'd been someone with a gun at Virginia Tech that day, they could've stopped Cho.

Again, what the fuck? How is arming college students while they are in class a good idea? How will that not lead to more tragedy?

I get awful sick of how these people hide behind supposed 2nd Amendment rights and use it to justify giving access to weapons to convicted felons and unstable personalities. A little history lesson, people: the emphasis of the Second Amendment is not on the right to bare arms, but on the right to form and maintain a militia for the "security of a free state." That means we can form volunteer armies, not that we can carry a high-powered assault rifle to class or down the street. The Founding Fathers didn't wear guns on their hips at all times. There was a time for war and for weapons; when that time passed, the weapons were hung back over the mantle and left to gather dust.

I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I hear about a gun-rights group advocating for their "Second Amendment right" to protect themselves. Bullshit. You have a right to form a volunteer army if we're invaded, not to sell guns to people who turn around and commit crimes with them. I swear, I thought I left this idiot mentality when I left Oklahoma.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Ryan Adams, "Easy Plateau"

What The Hell, Pitchfork?

I am, as I'll be the first to admit, a pretentious, elitist ass. Mostly it's that I think my taste or choice is superior to someone else's: music, movies, books, comics...I'm under the impression that my choices have more weight or validity than another person's.

But even I balk at Pitchfork.

Their recent review of the new Wilco album (out tomorrow!) is the perfect example of what I'm talking about. They basically take the band to task for making mellow, content, straight-forward music. The reviewer is savage and seems to take glee in hammering at Jeff Tweedy and Co. for creating an album that isn't as self-consciously arty or experimental as either Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or A Ghost is Born.

Since when did experimentalism for the sake of experimentalism become something to value in and of itself? It's really part of my whole complaint against indie music as a genre and an aesthetic. Sure, a lot of mainstream music is crap. But the whole "anything that anyone else might possibly like is automatically crap" hipster shtick is tired and ridiculous. It's apparently cool to hate things, or so you'd think from reading Pitchfork.

What's ironic, though, is that Pitchfork tends to perpetrate the same sort of sins of conformity that their non-indie rock-crit kin commit. There's this notion of hating things that everyone else likes, yes, but there's also an element of "this band is the Next Big Thing," said in such a way that you can hear the capital letters. They're just as guilty of being bandwagoners as anyone else, it's just that they pride themselves on loving the obscure and the weird. And they love it not because they actually genuinely like the music, but because it's obscure and weird and experimental and no one else not in the little indie club has ever heard it. There's this aesthetic that prizes non-listenability over music that's actually enjoyable.

I think that's where my main gripe is: the indie aesthetic is focused on out-pretensing the next guy rather than on music that they actually like. You get the sense that the indie kids listen to stuff not because they like the way it sounds, but because they feel they're supposed to. It's really just as bad as liking flavor of the week mainstream band, and it drives me freakin' nuts.

I guess it's stuff like this that's the reason I can never really stand most of the other people who listen to the music I ever listen to.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "One Dime Blues"

"What Planet Is This?"

Well, I'm starting to finally get in a better mood, though I'm still not entirely sure why I was so depressed/moody all of last week. Perhaps it was the change in the weather, or the fact that I was only able to run like twice (legs were killing me, and weather was not permitting), or maybe just a bunch of crap happened right at the beginning of the week that colored the rest of the week in shades of gray, black, and other murky neutral tones.

Anyway, in the finest tradition of my rants, I'm gonna make fun of stupid people, because they're so damn plentiful and make it too damn easy.

The first person I want to attack/berate/make fun of is this guy who writes for the school paper. I won't mention his name, because it's not really pertinent, but suffice to say he's got high ideas of himself and a low opinion of anyone who disagrees with him. He's also an English major, so I think that might have something to do with his basic pompous nature.

Well, on Friday last, this guy wrote an article for the paper advocating paying the student athletes for all the hard work they do. Because the full scholarships, room and board, and special perks (like having someone like me available to proofread their papers for them) aren't enough. Because having their books provided, laptops loaned to them by the school, and receiving a free education isn't enough compensation. No, since this guy maintains that student athletes have to work twice as hard as regular students to maintain decent grades, and since he believes most student athletes think they'll go on to play professionally (even though [1] he admits that only about 1% of them will and [2] most of them don't actually think that, except for a lot of the football players), we ought to give them monetary compensation. Basically, he wants to pay them for having delusions of grandeur.

If the school's gonna do that, I want them to start paying me because I think I might be able to become a syndicated cartoonist someday, or at least be able to live off my comic (and hey, if I can convince them to pay me, I will be able to, just as the student athletes would be professional ones if they were paid. That's sorta how "professional" is defined: you get paid to do it). The idea is actually rather perverse, I thought, and I was offended down to my very soul by the idea.

Hell, here's an idea--why don't we get rid of all the student athletes and just hire professional athletes? We wouldn't have to give them room and board, or provide them with the academic center, or pretend we're interested in educating them like we do the student athletes (because I'm fairly certain most of the coaches and administration at this school are only paying lip service to the idea of "they're here for education." They're really here to bring the university lots of money). It's the perfect set up; all it lacks is common sense and a healthy dose of reality.

That was rather therapeutic.

~chaos cricket

Song of the Moment: Yoko Kanno & the Seatbelts, "Space Lion"