a review of citizen's bank

on the radio

has the following ever happened to you?

You're driving down the street in your car, listenign to the radio, when you hear a siren. Your heart jumps and you start veering off the road, looking around for hte flashing lights, and you are cursing the drivers around you who are not reacting to the siren. Then you realize DUH it was sound effect on the ad playing on the radio.

Sometimes I hear a beep tone on radio ads that sounds just like my cell phone text message alert.

Since a huge number of radio listeners are listening in their cars, has anyone ever considered that context, and the potential dangers (well agravation anyway) when putting sirens in a radio ad? i doubt it.

unintended consequences

i suppose like most people you have seen previews of the coming technology in hydrogen cars. I am all for it, i think it will be great to get rid of all that carbon monoxide and other nasty stuff. All the programs on PBS gleefully say that all that comes out of the exhaust will be fresh clean water.

Well hmmm . . . wait a minute. For any of you who live north of the Mason Dixon Line, I would like you to consider for a moment what your commute to work will be like on some 20 degree morning in january when every car on the road is collectively creating freezing rain on the road surface. With millions of hydrogen cars on the road, there will be no such thing as "dry pavement" on a major road any more, even in warm weather. considering how people drive even in mild drizzles, this is going to be a major pain.

I suppose this could be easily remedied with fill tanks installed in the cars to take up the "exhaust water." But again, wherever that water has collected, on a cold day or night it has to get drained out before it freezes and bursts whatever is holding it. I do hope the engineers have foreseen this problem.

yes i am a germophobe

and i try very to avoid getting other people's nasty viruses on me. i wash my hands a lot, and i run when i see a pack of school children, they are walking biological weaponry in my book.

So whenever i use a public restroom, well, i try to wash my hands without getting them dirty in the process. my big complaint about public restrooms: the most obvious way of getting germs on your hands is on the door handle. so all public restrooms should have doors with no latches that swing out, that way, even if you touched the knob on the way in, you don't have to touch it on the way out with freshly washed hands, you can just push it with an elbow etc.

just a suggestion . . .

low technology

like many people I have a little portable stereo. It's nice to have, I use it mostly at the gym, makes running on a treadmill seem less dull than it is.

Here is my problem: I have a wide range of a lack of taste, and my music sources are from CD's all over-- classical, oldies, bossa nova, whatever. And every one of these songs had a different engineer determining the audio level of the song. This means the agnus dei from a recording of the faure requiem needs to be turned up all the way, but unfortunately, the next song in the queue of the player (a sansa 250 which I can't control all that well in terms of order of songs) is the motwon shoop shoop song, and blasts my eardrums into dust unless i remember to quickly grab it and turn it way down.

In this digital age, would it be so hard to look at all those 1's and zeros of each song's files and allow me to set a preferred volume level on my player that would be applied to all songs no matter what the original engineer did to muck it up?

morning bigots

all of my life I have been a night person. There have been days where I have never been awake when the sun was up. I like working at night-- it's quiet, there's nothing to distract you, nothing on TV to draw you away from working, and I get my primary creative energy bursts after 9 pm.

Now being a night person, I am aware that there are people who are not. After 10 or 11 pm, even though I am often full of energy, I know there are day people who have gone to bed and I make a sincere effort to not disturb them. I walk tippy toe and I don't slam doors. It takes a tenth of an ounce of effort to do this.

So yes, I do sleep later than most, but it's not because I am lazy, it's because I was UP LATE WORKING. So why I can't I get the same courtesy from the day people? Why is their circadian rhythm deserving of courtesy and mine are not? Every morning they wake me up.
They are up, so in their limited rem-fascista world view, everyone else must be up too. They bang doors and rattle dishes.

It must be nice to be so oblivious to other people. maybe that's why they sleep so well.

USB blues

Well like a lot of other folks must do, I deal with USB plugs a awful lot. I plug in my mp3 player, printers, thumb drives, etc etc etc. And one thing that endlessly bugs me is I end up putting the USB plug in upside down 50% of the time, since the top of the plug is virtually identical in appearance to the bottom, if indeed there is a top and bottom-- it will only go in one way tho, and since the 2 sides of the plug are so similar i screw it up half the time. too late to fix it now, but gee whiz, what were they thinking? not.

things are getting worser

i don't why this bothers me so much, but laely i am noticing a lot of people on radio and television who don't understand some basic rules of grammar.

specifically, i hear this a lot on the history channel-- the narrator will say "a squadron of planes were" . . . "a pair of jets were" . . . those are just little examples. Please tell me dear reader, that you know the subject of those sentences are singular . . . i heard a reporter on public radiomake the same mistake the other day. I can sort of forgive an extemporaneous reporter making a flub like that but not in someone reading a written text/narration. it's not an isolated problem either, it's almost like they never do it right.

I suspect it is a function of ever descreasing writing communications that we fall into this trap of picking plurality/ singularity of a verb by the noun closest to it. But it bugs me. --jl