start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

That's true.

FYI Jesse gave me that poster for my birthday (I think) some years back, because he is the best.

Stevolende, when you posted about the Walkman before I thought it was actually a Walkman cassette player. I thought it was interesting that you were using one regularly.

I have a Walkman that still works. I have used it a few times in the past few years. Best use was as a part of my outfit for an 80s party.

No not cassette. I used those for ages until I picked up an ATRAC model in 2008 I think. Those at least had switch out normal batteries.
This one is the 20gb ATRAC walkman pretty much full of music. But battery has died. Somebody somewhere said they had a finite amount of recharges then battery is kaput. You can replace battery but it's tricky.

That list of houses that look like GoT characters that's circulating.
Since there does seem to be some internal logic. Or the images are not 100% randomly matched. So something or somebody has gone through a load of choices to get to the list of whatever 12? Is there an image recognition/comparison program that will do that? Or did somebody sort through a load of character images with various expressions and poses til they got there? Somebody got way too much time on their hands?

Took a parcel to the post office aiming for the 12 o'clock post, got to the front of the queue at 11:50 and was told my parcel couldn't go in the 12 o'clock post because it had already been loaded onto the van

the postman was just sitting in his van chewing gum for 10 minutes and waiting for it to be the time on the pillarbox so he could drive off but not accepting any more post

I mean it is a p. small deal and maybe the argument is "oh well if we stopped for your package at 11:50 there'd be someone else and then some more people and then it would be 12:01 and he'd be late to the next collection oh no!" but, annoying

Related to the movie poster thing, but it gets on my nerves seeing a group picture of the Rolling Stones with Brian Jones while "Angie" is playing on the Comcast music channel.

my local grocery store made a big amount of fanfare a year or two ago about banning plastic bags (part of the citywide ban) and just selling paper bags for ten cents, but they very quietly have just added back plastic bags as a thing you can also buy for ten cents, and they're even thicker than the ones they banned before. i think they might be compostable, which is useless for people who don't have a way to compost such things.

something called the "american progressive bag alliance" has gotten the ban put on hold until it can be voted out by referendum. thanks, plastic bag industry.

http://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-pc-california-plastic-bag-ban-20150223-story.html

They made plastic bags 22c here a few years back. It meant that they would be a conscious purchase so less likely to just be dumped and litter streets etc. You do still see them discarded with drink cans etc around the park here. But less evidence hanging in trees everywhere as you did before the ban/charge.
Extra thickness possibly translates to longer term usability. Do they suggest reuse? I tend to buy several reusable bags and keep them in my shoulder bag for excess shopping.

but they very quietly have just added back plastic bags as a thing you can also buy for ten cents, and they're even thicker than the ones they banned before. i think they might be compostable, which is useless for people who don't have a way to compost such things.

Chicago's plastic bag ban will go into effect in August and IDK if it's a coincidence but my local big chain grocery store switched to incredibly thick bags. They're thick and tough like tarpaulins. Still free though.

Regardless I continue to hoard plastic bags for cat litter purposes.

There was an article about that on the tribune. Places ditching plastic bags and moving to... nicer "reusable" plastic bags.

Regardless I continue to hoard plastic bags for cat litter purposes.

― Je55e, Sunday, June 21, 2015 12:04 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This will surely be the greatest loss when plastic grocery bags disappear

It will be the greatest loss in our house. Although not as great a loss as it would have been when we had three cats as opposed to one small cat who only poops every two or three days.

I bought one of those "I am a consumer and will buy stupid unnecessary pet items" Litter Genie things. Not bad! You end up with all your cat poops in a nice sealed bag.

the phrase "just sayin'"

Such a great get out of jail free card. "I'm just sayin': your face looks like a pile of trash. But I'm just sayin', man. I'm just sayin'."

This is irrational because I doubt anyone does it on purpose but: people who can't/won't eat certain things in their diets and then 'don't like' the normal substitutes.
E.g. if you're vegetarian and don't like cheese, or eat dairy-free but don't like avocados or coconut milk or almond milk etc etc

Lately I've been irrationally angry - or maybe just angry - at people who ride around on their bikes with no hands. They've either got their hands in their pockets, or they are on the phone or playing with music and stuff. And they always look so smug, but all I can think of is what happens if they suddenly need to squeeze on the brakes? Do they just fall or fly off their bike? No hands, and especially no hands while listening to music puts a stressful burden on drivers (me) not to hit them. Which of course I am concerned about anyways, but it's like they're temping fate.

Just hit one. You'll feel better, and he might learn a lesson.

No-hands biking is acceptable for kids riding down a traffic-free street in their neighborhood and for pretty much no one else ever.

Cyclists in general, though (specifically in Chicago, more specifically in the Loop). Ugh. Talk about people you couldn't support more in the abstract but who are the worst possible advocates for their own cause.

I certainly don't mean all cyclists, but most of the time that I see someone on a city street with a bike, I think, "welp, here's someone who's about to do something incredibly stupid". And they rarely disappoint.

Ha, Josh, Jeff and I were at Halsted and Randolph on Monday and saw a woman riding her bike handsfree through that intersection and Jeff definitely got IA about it.

I'm also confounded whenever I see a dude no-handin' it at the urinal, often in a Superman pose. I have to fight the urge to give the back of their shirt a yank as an object lesson in why we exert manual control of what's going on down there.

I see men at urinals no-handing it while checking their phone. Like ... it can't wait? No wonder phones are covered with germs. I want to slap them on their back so they both drop their phones in the toilet and pee on themselves. Because god knows they're already peeing on the floor.

Ha, Josh, Jeff and I were at Halsted and Randolph on Monday and saw a woman riding her bike handsfree through that intersection and Jeff definitely got IA about it.

And Halsted was crazy busy at the time. It was insane. Like what if someone opens a door? I keep my hand on the break every time I'm riding beside parked cars, there's no way you can avoid it if you're not even holding on to the handle bars. It's just astoundingly stupid.

I see a dude no-handin' it at the urinal, often in a Superman pose.

At first, thought you meant with his arms stretched straight up, like he was flying.

we share office space & communal restrooms with another firm, a mortgage company that seems to require most of their staff to conduct loud phonecalls in hallways or stairwells.

according to the men in our office, the guys from the other firm never turn off their phones in the restroom. like, not just continue loudtalking (like, almost all the time) but there have been dudes in stalls clearly watching videos or movies, and esp lolsy, apparently one guy was doing 'pew pew' noises while playing some kind of game on his phone .

the women are at least p civilized, our restroom is a haven of no talking, no phones (or silent phones if they use them at all)

There's a dude I work with whose bathroom trips are weirdly specifically long enough that we're fairly convinced at this point that he's watching entire episodes of TV shows on the toilet. But, yeah, in general dudes are gross in bathrooms and their phone etiquette in bathrooms is no less gross.

lots of image hosts are accessible from my workplace's network, but not tinypic. and ilxors keep posting cute animal pictures on tinypic, leading me to forget, click on them, and get a huge "ACCESS DENIED" page that threatens to turn me over to the IT police

I just discovered today that my already infantilizing workplace, which prevents employees from accessing NSFW sites such as Gmail or the Wikipedia entry for wine, has now similarly locked down the wifi so that we can't even access those site via mobile device. And I can't get a phone signal because we work in a concrete tomb. Happily, though, I also discovered today that I can access sites such as indeed.com and monster.com. Silver linings.

people who talk on the phone in work bathrooms = kind of enraging but mostly baffling

gonna sound like a cranky old here but am i wrong that people are just less aware than they used to be of the people around them? like i remember there was a time i could go a whole week (month?) without someone walking right into me, having to tell someone to step out of a shop's entryway so i can get by, etc.

definitely!!

that is why i grocery shop at 8 am on saturdays. can't stand people's lack of body consciousness in the grocery store.

but it's also on the sidewalk, on the subway platform, at a concert venue, anywhere people gather. everyone's so self-absorbed and there's no spatial awareness! i'm also finding an increase in vehicles that *almost* run me over -- stopping for pedestrians is kind of an afterthought.

Ha holy shit I was going to post the same thing. People just not looking where they're going, standing in the middle of the sidewalk, gah.

Certainly gets worse in this town as the tourist season comes into play.
Plus you get annoying buskers causing bottlenecks on the main street which tends to be a pain. I don't mind non annoying buskers but christ when you can't get down a major street without having to negotiate your way around already not very attentive people being distracted by the spectacle that they're walking past the crowd standing around it just becomes tortuous . & then you get the busker themselves giving out if you walk across the empty space they see as their stage.

But it happens every year around this time so all these threads have something about it around this time. Not really avoidable.
Actually noticed taht one possible detour around the thing seems to have been stopped. There's a branch of a national department shop that's part of the local shopping centre and it now has a big sign up on one set of windows saying please se other entrance. & that route taht now seems to have been stopped was the easiest way around the blockage. I noticed taht there seemed to be s growing maze between the doors there and the other entrance which I was wondering might have been a reaction to shop lifters being able to get through easily.

I've been getting more and more grumpy that you can't go anywhere without an assault on your hearing. Walking through town - accordian busking in underpass, some teenage combo doing open mic stuff in the centre between all the shops, department store having some 'promo event' over the PA playing Blurred Lines, etc etc
This may be related to wheeling a sleeping baby around town and/or having to give up on conversation with my partially deaf husband but ffs can we just not have some peace and quiet somewhere?

ia: i read something today that basically said "i love how pretty and dainty feminine handwriting is; men write so sloppily." i have shitty handwriting, so thanks for calling me "unfeminine"! but i'm not just calling this one guy out -- every time you go "men are like this, women are like that," you're essentially calling women who aren't "like that" not-women, making them feel invisible or deformed in some way.

to illustrate gb's point in the extreme

car stopped in the middle of parking lot throughway, young woman with 3 small children (1 in a stroller) standing at driver's window literally doing a haul (ie showing what she bought) to whoever was driving

i waited, and when it got ridiculous i tapped the horn

she blanked me and kept right on doing what she was doing! like i was being rude or annoying WHUT EVEN

someone else walked over to her, grabbed the kids & basically told her they had to go, and she went back to her car...and then the car that she had been talking to pulled in next to her. COULDNT YOU HAVE DONE THAT FIRST

jfc

it's like when i read an article saying "here's what women writers/musicians bring to the table that men don't" and it's not just about women's own experiences but asserting that the compositional structure or playing style of women is fundamentally *different* from what men do -- it's reaffirming stereotypes and erasing women who don't conform to the writer's assumptions. sometimes the response to that will be "well, you're just trying to be a MAN and that's not very feminist, is it?" oy, gender politics.

xp

there is a pedestrian walkway in my city, with flashing lights on either side of the street and a brightly painted crosswalk, that drivers apparently pay no attention to as it has no stop sign

very tempted to take the afternoon off work some day and wait for cars to approach, walk directly in front, and then shake my fist and stab my finger toward the blinking signs if they give me any shit

where i live, any intersection is a potential crosswalk whether it's marked or not. this is not an obscure law. it's on the exam you take to get your license. you are not a jaywalker if you deign to cross the street at an intersection; that is your legal right. but drivers do not give a shit and will not stop for you if they see you waiting to cross.

very tempted to take the afternoon off work some day and wait for cars to approach, walk directly in front, and then shake my fist and stab my finger toward the blinking signs if they give me any shit

Me irl every weekday trying to cross from the bus stop to my house except without the flashing lights, despite my numerous communications with our alderperson requesting some more robust signage.

Actually I haven't emailed him in awhile. I should drop him a line.

apologies for the corporate newspaper link, but there's a video here: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/local/des-moines/2015/06/19/east-village-business-owners-raygun-crosswalk-des-moines-changes/28980605/

very tempted to take the afternoon off work some day and wait for cars to approach, walk directly in front, and then shake my fist and stab my finger toward the blinking signs if they give me any shit

As carl mentioned, our lives.

oddly enough, there's a walkway with *stop light* that is triggered by a pedestrian button near my own home. its between a strip of businesses and school grounds across the street, so sometime in the past someone must have lobbied for it.