At work the other day, and the local news had a story on about cheap gas prices in the area. My coworker saw the piece and I heard him exclaim, “Man! Gas for $2.35? Awesome!”

No, it isn’t.

Think back a year. $2.35 a gallon was high. Ridiculously high. People were bitching left and right about this, demanding the government step in and regulate this somehow. The fact that gas has since gone almost a dollar higher doesn’t change this fact. And now that we’ve seen gas selling in excess of three dollars, people see this as some sort of bargain. It’s not. It’s still high, just not as high as it has been.

C’mon, people, try to remember a little more history than “last week.”

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Why are things “old-fashioned” yet “newfangled?” You never hear about “new-fashioned” stuff or “oldfangled” items. What is “fangled,” anyway? “Yeah, we’ve been fangling stuff like this for years, but this is the newfangled way of doing it. Lotta progress in this here fangle procedure, that’s for sure.”

I’m just looking for a little consistency, that’s all.

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Now that October is over, can we please stop with all the Breast Cancer Awareness? Don’t get me wrong, I’m against cancer in all its forms, as it’s rather prevalent in my family and I’ve lost several relatives to The Big C. And as a heterosexual guy, I’m against anything that harms breasts. But I really do not need to be assaulted with the color pink non-stop everywhere I go. Case in point: Went grocery shopping the other day and counted eighty-four items either with the pink ribbon on the label, a pink label, or the item itself was now pink. And that’s not fourteen different flavors of Campbell’s soup, that’s eighty-four separate items from different companies: Soup, yogurt, crackers, cereal, muffins, bread, pasta, ice cream, the list goes on and on. There’s pink Brita pitchers, pink cookware, pink kitchen utensils, hell, there’s even a pink Dyson vacuum cleaner. And you gotta really be against breast cancer to buy a $500 dirt-sucker to show your support.

One of the oddest pink items? Madden 2009 for the Xbox 360. Forgive me for engaging in gender stereotypes, but I think most of the young adult male Madden fans will likely shy away from buying a pink video game, especially one so testosterone-laden to begin with.

Again, great cause, but can we tone it down a little? I’m about as aware as I’m going to be at this point.

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Being something of a horror buff, I used to love Halloween. As a kid, it meant costumes and free candy, which is something of a miracle to a six-year-old. Once I got too old for Trick or Treat, I could always count on loads of horror movies on TV, maybe a classic being shown at a midnight screening at one of the local theaters. Costume shops would spring up, filled with gory masks and makeup. Local organizations would run some haunted houses/jails/forests and the like, full of scares and splatter. Creepy-crawlies, demons, zombies, vampires, serial killers back from the dead… great stuff.

What happened?

You go looking for a costume now and it’s nothing but licensed characters for the guys and slut outfits for the ladies (which I’m actually fine with, but it’s not very Halloween). The best horror you can hope for on TV is the really-reaching-for-it “spooky” haunted house specials on TLC. Kids don’t get to go Trick or Treating anymore, and if they do, it’s regulated during daylight hours and only to houses where you personally know the owners aren’t going to try to slip you a bar of Snickers packed with Dran-O. Instead of haunted houses we have “harvest festivals,” because Halloween is all satanic and evil, you know.

You couldn’t take all the fun out of Groundhog Day or something? You had to ruin my holiday?

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So, I’m surfing around the Web today, and I see one of many ads for Obama, exhorting me to vote for him. Fine as far as it goes, but this one attempts to engage me by asking if I’ve voted yet. Then it has three radio buttons I can click with different answers: Yes, No, I’m Not Sure.

“I’m not sure”?

How exactly would that come about? “I tell ya, I had a lot going on that day. Had to pick up the dry cleaning, get the groceries, drop the kids off at soccer practice… I might have stopped off at a voting center, stood in line, signed in, entered the voting booth, and made a selection for president, but damned if I can remember for sure. Like I said, lot going on.”

Guess we’re going after the former Bush voters.

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Is there some sort of award in television broadcasting for coming up with the most “clever” male-centric sound-alike terminology? In the last two weeks on the CBS News, I’ve seen stories about how manorexia is on the rise, how to decipher a man’s brocabulary, and how to tell, if you’re a woman, if your significant other is subjecting you to maleienation. What’s next? Encouraging men to go get manograms? An in-depth look at underwear and men who like to wear manties? Talking about how men hide their true selves behind maskulinity?

I’m a shoe-in for an Emmy at this rate.

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I got thinking about pierced ears the other day. I know, it’s a weird thing to consider, they’re so ubiquitous. Women have them. Men have them. Hell, I’ve seen newborn infants with them. Very commonplace. But, realize, at some point in history, someone had to say, “Hey, I know what let’s do. Why don’t you get something really sharp and jab a hole in this soft, tender part of my ear? Then we’ll cram something in there—metal hoop, boar tusk, monkey bone, something—and see what happens.” And someone else agreed to help with this. Alcohol had to have been involved.

Not only that, but other people saw it and thought, damn, that’s a pretty neat idea! I want holes punched in my flesh, too! Of course, some brave soul saw this happening and decided, that’s fine and all, but why stop with squishy ear parts? Drill a hole in my nose! And my lips. Tongue, cheek, eyebrow, wang… go nuts. Swiss cheese me. And then one enterprising individual realized, against all logic, that people would actually pay good money to have someone hammer a sharp object through their body and then fill it with something. So he could not only get a hammering fee, but then could also sell them the trinkets to put in the hole he just made. And that’s pretty much where we are today.

I’m just saying, it seems like one of those things that if you stop to really think about it, you find yourself asking, “Yeah, what’d I do that for?”

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Apparently having not read any reviews, heard any criticism, or watched the actual film, George Lucas is, according to Harrison Ford in a recent Los Angeles Times interview, in “think mode” for a fifth Indiana Jones movie, based on the financial success of the last one.

And the destruction of all my childhood film nostalgia marches forward another step…

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Just a helpful little tip to companies: If you’re going to hire someone to work in a customer service capacity, either phone support or cash register jockey or restaurant waitstaff or anything requiring actual communication with the customer, could you please make sure that they speak the language fluently? Call me a racist if you must, but I am growing exceedingly weary of calling customer service and having to spend an extra twenty minutes either repeating myself because they can’t translate what I’m saying fast enough, or asking them to repeat themselves because I have no idea what they just said.

I know times are hard and language-challenged folks are going to be cheaper to hire than public speakers. I know shipping off your call centers to some dirtball country with huge populations and no labor laws really increases your bottom line. I know that taking care of your shareholders (and your own personal portfolios) is far more important to you than taking care of your actual customers. And yes, I’ll even admit that, usually, eventually, despite the increased difficulty, hassle, and frustration, the transaction ends more or less with the customer getting something close to what they want. But still, it should not take me ten minutes and seven attempts to order a freakin’ cheeseburger!

So here’s what I’m going to do. Next time I get on the phone with the credit card company and the phone is answered by Apu, I’m going to hand the phone over to the SBM and let her handle the transaction. In French. Or Dutch, her choice. They’re going to offer up someone who doesn’t speak English, so will I. Probably won’t get anything accomplished, but I wasn’t before, either.

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I can’t be the only one who’s thought of this. The whole economic bailout plan they’re debating in Washington right now? The one that’s going to require taxpayers to save the banking industry as we know it? Why don’t they just shelve it for the time being, and get money from a different source? Specifically, I’m thinking the CEOs, CFOs, COOs (and whatever other alphabet-soup titles they have), the presidents, the vice presidents, board members, and all the higher-ups of these failing companies. Take away their salaries for the past year or two, sell their multiple houses, auction off their cars, liquidate their stocks and bonds, cash in their IRAs and 401(k)s, have a garage sale with all their expensive clothes and jewelry, ebay their yachts, and turn their polo ponies into hot lunches for the school kids. Now, I’m guessing even that won’t be enough, so I’m also suggesting that each of them also be required to remove and sell at least three organs. Kidney, lung, pancreas, their choice. Carve ‘em out and offer ‘em up to the highest bidder. I’m betting there’s some oil sheik someplace who could use a new gall bladder.

Come on, if this happened in Japan, there’d be executives over there killing themselves right now.

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