Idle Rants
07/05/11 07:30
What's going down, dudes and dudettes? Mothers wait up for sons and fathers wait up for daughters. That is an immutable law of nature. Since we have no daughters, I get to sleep in like a father should. I get to go to bed while mom waits up for her son. Sometimes he comes home on time and sometimes he doesn't. Last night, for example, he did not. He didn't bother to text or otherwise contact his mom and for that there are consequences. What consequences, we're not sure. We haven't decided because he is usually not late or, if he is, he lets his mother know like a good son should. Maybe we'll take the car away for a while. Give him time to think about his transgressions and maybe the next time he'll think twice before breaking the rules. He may well weigh the trade-off's. Maybe he is willing to pay a small stipend for the error of his ways if it means getting to spend more time with his friends. God only knows where he is when he does what he does and that is another concern. And, who is he spending these wayward hours with anyway? He may tell you one thing and do another so we may not be able to rely on what he tells us. He has always been uber personal when it comes to talking about his friends and is not inclined to tell us anything. I think he actually makes things up sometimes just to placate us. He simply tells us what he thinks we want to hear. Not sure if he considers that to be a lie or not. It worries me that he does it as well as he does.
Not sure what I want to tackle this weekend. I keep thinking about the fact that I have an audiobook or two that I want to listen to and it seems like every time I go to listen to one I end up falling asleep. Same thing happens when I sit down to read a book. The book that I'm interested in is "Stalingrad". I'll get to it even if I have to listen to it while cleaning out the garage. The Red Sox are playing today and I'd like to see them lose a couple more to the Minnesota Twins before the Twins leave town. I like the Sox but am getting a little fed up with the antics of that asshole Pedroia and his sidekick Youkillis. They are a couple of blowhards who think they are god's gift to the world of baseball. I take pleasure in seeing Pedroia throw his temper tantrums in the dugout after striking out, getting thrown out at first, or otherwise getting his ass handed to him by the opposing team. He just wants to take his ball and go home. I wouldn't wish him any harm because it is too much fun watching him act like a child without a friend in the world when things don't go his way. I can't imagine what his teammates think when he goes off the deep end. Man-up, you asshole! Man-up before I jinx you with a torn ACL. I may just decide that I don't want you on the field anymore and that will be that. The fun will be over and the Team will be better off without you. I'll have to find another way to amuse myself. Maybe I'll listen to a good audiobook.
One of the more overlooked features of the iPad is the ability to listen to internet radio. You never hear that feature touted or at least not in the usual circles. But I like it and I like it a lot. It appeals to my mercurial tastes in music where I'm listening to talk radio out of San Francisco one minute and dancing around the kitchen the next while listening to Cuban salsa. Given my more recent interest and immersion into World War 2, and the thrust of the German juggernaut, I find that listening to radio stations out of Berlin, Germany, offers up a dialect that brings me closer to the language and people that I have been reading about. That is one harsh language. That isn't to say that I wouldn't like to spend an afternoon in Munich and that I wouldn't otherwise enjoy it just because I didn't like the inflections offered up by the locals.
Spending the infernal summers of my youth living next to a German U-boat commander and his petunia-planting wife, I have to say I found their accents different in an interesting sort of way. It never occurred to me to question the edge to their Germanic lilts. I also was not aware of the animosity between my grandfather and the German neighbor. Not sure I remember them ever speaking to one another. Now, I understand why. Since they never spoken anything but broken English I never found myself reading between the lines when listening to them. Listening to scratchy rants of Adolph and his henchman on recordings today, on the other hand, has left me less enthused about both the language and the people. It does make me wonder how a people, a country, and a culture got hijacked on the way to greatness and descended into the depths of hell under the spell of one man. To think that the people were willing participants to the very end. Did I tell you that she made one hell of a good chocolate chop cookie?
Not sure what I want to tackle this weekend. I keep thinking about the fact that I have an audiobook or two that I want to listen to and it seems like every time I go to listen to one I end up falling asleep. Same thing happens when I sit down to read a book. The book that I'm interested in is "Stalingrad". I'll get to it even if I have to listen to it while cleaning out the garage. The Red Sox are playing today and I'd like to see them lose a couple more to the Minnesota Twins before the Twins leave town. I like the Sox but am getting a little fed up with the antics of that asshole Pedroia and his sidekick Youkillis. They are a couple of blowhards who think they are god's gift to the world of baseball. I take pleasure in seeing Pedroia throw his temper tantrums in the dugout after striking out, getting thrown out at first, or otherwise getting his ass handed to him by the opposing team. He just wants to take his ball and go home. I wouldn't wish him any harm because it is too much fun watching him act like a child without a friend in the world when things don't go his way. I can't imagine what his teammates think when he goes off the deep end. Man-up, you asshole! Man-up before I jinx you with a torn ACL. I may just decide that I don't want you on the field anymore and that will be that. The fun will be over and the Team will be better off without you. I'll have to find another way to amuse myself. Maybe I'll listen to a good audiobook.
One of the more overlooked features of the iPad is the ability to listen to internet radio. You never hear that feature touted or at least not in the usual circles. But I like it and I like it a lot. It appeals to my mercurial tastes in music where I'm listening to talk radio out of San Francisco one minute and dancing around the kitchen the next while listening to Cuban salsa. Given my more recent interest and immersion into World War 2, and the thrust of the German juggernaut, I find that listening to radio stations out of Berlin, Germany, offers up a dialect that brings me closer to the language and people that I have been reading about. That is one harsh language. That isn't to say that I wouldn't like to spend an afternoon in Munich and that I wouldn't otherwise enjoy it just because I didn't like the inflections offered up by the locals.
Spending the infernal summers of my youth living next to a German U-boat commander and his petunia-planting wife, I have to say I found their accents different in an interesting sort of way. It never occurred to me to question the edge to their Germanic lilts. I also was not aware of the animosity between my grandfather and the German neighbor. Not sure I remember them ever speaking to one another. Now, I understand why. Since they never spoken anything but broken English I never found myself reading between the lines when listening to them. Listening to scratchy rants of Adolph and his henchman on recordings today, on the other hand, has left me less enthused about both the language and the people. It does make me wonder how a people, a country, and a culture got hijacked on the way to greatness and descended into the depths of hell under the spell of one man. To think that the people were willing participants to the very end. Did I tell you that she made one hell of a good chocolate chop cookie?