Be The Pigeon

It's been a month and if I'm really honest I haven't had many useful ideas to share with the entire Internet recently. Alas, spending the last few weeks among the masses of America has solved that problem. Let me start by stating clearly that I like dogs. I really do. I had dogs growing up and I loved them dearly. I just don't like YOUR DOG IN PUBLIC. Now let me explain. Over the last couple weeks I've witnessed people doing some really strange things with their dogs in public. It's been so weird that it's time I spoke up (you know, as part of that whole be-a-good-citizen-thing.) First, last week a guy brought his two HUGE mastiffs (think Turner and Hooch) into the small office at the local Jiffy Lube while I was waiting to get my oil changed. To begin with, this was socially unacceptable. These dogs were huge and they drool like it's totally in style. The guy (a twenty something frat-boy looking type) kinda smiles at me with a "yeah-I'...

Today while driving down the street, I found the perfect blogging topic.  Small towns tend to do things their own way, and though I really enjoy the town I live in, it has its quirks, too. First, a few years ago the town was growing very quickly.  Growth was so malignant that you'd have to camp out (literally) the night before a builder released new lots for sale in order to get a chance at a good one.  (We had our realtor do that for us since we were still living out of state in 2001.)  At that time, when all the streets were first plotted, some genius figured it would be a great idea to use only a handful of street names.  Where streets ended in cul-de-sacs and such, and then continued at approximately the same position further down, they decided to use the same names.  Thus, there are about 4-5 different neighborhoods in our town where the same street name can be found.   Hello, people!  Who came up with that one?!   So if you don't know which neighborhood you should be look...

Here's a rant for ya.  Today I'm mad at the automated greetings on the voicemail systems of cell phones.  You know, the part that comes on after your  message and says 'press 1 to hear things you don't care about, press 5 to repeat these options, press 7 to order a pizza, press 9 to learn Tongan' and so on.  THEY DRIVE ME CRAZY.  Worse yet, you can "do nothing" and lose 30 seconds of your life that you'll never get back while this prerecorded lady drones on and on about nothing.  The least they could do is give her some super-sexy voice or something. On some systems, they've had the good sense to make #1 skip all the junk and just go to the message-leaving part.  But apparently there's no consistency in the industry on this, and on other systems #1 does nothing but anger the prerecorded lady and make her repeat everything from scratch, all in an effort to simply tick me off further.  It's working. Can we not have some consistency here?! My ...

Those of you who know me well knew this one must be coming. I just filed my taxes. This year we used TurboTax instead of the TaxCut product we'd used in previous years. (In my opinion, the cheapest one is the best one.) Every year around this time I marvel at how oligopolies work so well. First, a not-so-fake analogy. Why, when you try to buy tickets online at places like Ticketmaster, do you have to pay a "convenience" fee that ultimately increases the price of your tickets up to 20%? This so-called convenience fee is presumably for the privilege of buying stuff online in my underwear and not having to go to the grocery store to wait in line and buy tickets (where you'd then pay a service fee instead). However, the real convenience, we all know, is for our good friends at Ticketmaster, since they can fire 25% of their people now that we all use the Internet. Therefore, I'm paying them extra to do something that's more efficient for them, and thus ...