Of Red Barons and Book Clubs

Curmie can’t speak for everyone, but he’s a little starved for something, anything, other than politics.  Perhaps you are, as well, Gentle Reader.  The thought that anyone would vote for either of the likely contenders for the presidency (as opposed to against the alternative) is chilling.  So Curmie has been casting about, looking for something else to write about.  This may not be much, but at least it’s something.  And Curmie did sort of open the door for this kind of post last Christmas season with an analysis of ads for Monopoly.

Red Baron (the pizza company, not Snoopy’s antagonist, but why pass up an opportunity like this?) has released a trio of new commercials, all connected to the joys of sharing.  They’re not going to convince Curmie and Beloved Spouse to buy their product—we’ve tried it and found the gustatory difference between it and cardboard to be insignificant (your mileage may vary), but that doesn’t mean their commercials are similarly boring.

Indeed, “Baddie Librarians,” in which two stereotypically bespectacled (complete with glasses chains) older women naughtily share a pizza intended for a single person, is trite but at least reasonably cute.  “Hipsters” is even more fun, as sharing a delicious pizza leads to sharing of a different sort: one character “shares” that he’s tired of being hip, another (her name is Willow, of course) admits that she doesn’t even know what her neck tattoo means, the pizza is described as “way better than kale” (I’ll grant that much), and kombucha is called “garbage water.”  It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but at least it brings a smile.

“Book Club” starts down the same road, but it takes a wrong turn.  Sharing the pizza prompts one woman to “share” that she didn’t actually read the book.  Indeed, no one has; the closest anyone can come is the hostess, Linda, who “watched the movie last night.”  So far, so good.  But the ensuing dialogue goes like this:

-- I judged it by its cover.

-- I haven’t read a book since middle school.

-- I’m secretly seeing two other book clubs.  [What?]

-- I can’t even read.  [He’s holding the book upside-down.]

-- I’m not really Gary.  He just paid me to be here.  [Again, what?]

If “Hipsters” showed something like a moment of enlightenment for the characters—they’re questioning their past pretentiousness in the name of hipness—“Book Club” seems to excuse that very pomposity and deception.  If Willow and her friends begin to re-evaluate the illusory benefits of being hip, Linda and her book club giggle about how cute it is to be superficial, anti-intellectual, illiterate, and deceitful.  Eating that tasty pizza brings the hipsters to a realization that “kale sucks”; for the book-clubbers, though, it prompts only the joys of shared ignorance and imbecility.

No, I’m not blaming the purveyors of frozen pizza for the decline of thoughtful analysis that has characterized the last couple of decades in this country.  But that one ad in particular, while not a contagion, is at least a symptom.

One of the first papers Curmie wrote as an undergrad was for a class on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  (I ended up in that class because my first couple of choices for a Freshman Seminar were full when I tried to register, and I’d at least heard of Rousseau.)  We’d just read Émile, in which one of the key points was that what we try to teach and what a child sees in that pedagogical moment do not always coincide.  We were assigned to write a short analysis of a contemporary story or event from the perspective of such a child.

I don’t remember what I wrote about (it was over a half century ago… ouch!), but the assignment itself keeps re-appearing in my consciousness after all this time.  I know what “Book Club” intends its message to be, but what I see is “stupid, incurious, and artificial people like our product.”

Dammit, it seems like Curmie is writing about politics, after all…  

A slightly edited version of this piece appears under the (better) title of “Curse You, Red Baron!” on the Ethics Alarms site.

Things Currently P*ssing Curmie Off

Given the name of this blog, Gentle Reader, you might be justified in thinking the title of this entry would be a little redundant.  You might be right, but we’re going there, anyway.

Retirement Follies I.  Curmie is trying to negotiate the process moving into retirement, or at least enough of retirement that he’s no longer getting employer-paid insurance.  So now it’s time to figure out Medicare Part B.  I had a question… HR should be able to answer the question, but instead tells me to call Social Security.  Curmie does; is on hold for over an hour before giving up.  They’re not available for in-person (COVID is very, very, scary if you’re a US government employee, just not for the rest of us, who are pretty much required to return to something very much like “normal”).  Dear SSA: hire some more people.

Retirement Follies II: Curmie is now four phone calls into the process of actually extracting some of the funds from his retirement account.  Everyone at the financial services provider has been very pleasant, and they’ve all provided useful information… but it’s taken all four calls to find out that I can do most of this online; it’s just that the link is hidden well enough to be a secret passage in a mystery/adventure movie.  The process is not helped by the fact that two former employers (one of which I left over 20 years ago) still listed me as a current employee (and therefore ineligible to withdraw money) and another requires Beloved Spouse’s signature to allow me access to my own retirement funds.

In the World of COVID.  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia’s Regents refuse to require masks on state university campuses, but do so in their own companies.  It’s even worse in Texas, where mask mandates are not merely not required but forbidden. 

Such is the inevitable result of having Regents or Trustees or Councilors or WhateverThey’reCalled be hypocritical political appointees, beholden to especially cretinous governors (Kemp, Abbott…)  BTW, don’t get Curmie started on Regents in general, given what has recently happened at Curmie’s university.  Only the time-honored dictum of “don’t shit where you eat” prevents a lengthy screed about their abrogation of responsibility.

More on Moron Government Agencies I: Curmie’s department has a long-standing exchange with a British conservatory.  We had two students scheduled to come last fall, but COVID intervened.  Then they were set for spring, but that got delayed, too.  So their arrival was pushed off again until this fall.  We worked out their class schedules in March, and they started the process of getting the appropriate visas in April.  We let them know when we wanted them to arrive.  Sometime in the middle of the summer, Curmie got an e-mail that there were delays getting a visa.  We finally heard from them: they couldn’t even get a visa appointment until the day after we needed them here; they finally arrived over two weeks into the semester.  These are student visas.  Curiously enough, academic calendars are a thing.  Dear State Department: do your damned job.

Moron Government Agencies II.  The students unsurprisingly looked for the best rate for their airfare; although there are direct flights, they found a better deal changing planes in Newark.  Then they got held up by the idiots of HSA (apologies for redundancy), without explanation… for just long enough to make them miss their connection.  Luckily, they were able to get a flight later that evening… to a different airport, a half-hour further away from here.  So instead of being able to move them into their apartment about 9:00 p.m., it was after 1:00 a.m.  Luckily, they’re quite lovely and patient people.

Unsurprisingly, Curmie had a flashback to another long night of waiting for HSA to take their thumb out of their ass.  You can read about that one here.

Obviously False Claims.  There’s a commercial that Curmie hears fairly often on the car radio.  It’s for an app called GetUpside.  It claims users can get “up to 25 cents off every gallon” of gas, and that you can “make up to $200-300 a month.”  How can they get away with this crap?  Let’s be conservative and say the user gets the full 25¢ a gallon and gets reimbursed “only” $200 a month.  So that’s 800 gallons of gas in a month.  At a conservative 20 mpg, that’s 16,000 miles in a month.  Let’s say someone can average an unlikely 65 mph.  That means driving over 246 hours in a month.  A full time job, Monday through Friday: a maximum of 184 hours in a month.  So… uh…

Just Stupid Ads.  There’s an ad for one of the ubiquitous foreign-language programs (Curmie can’t remember which one, having done everything possible to forget).  You know the kind, Gentle Reader.  This one talks about an upcoming vacation to Paris, so learning French becomes particularly attractive.  At the end, the “student” cheerfully proclaims that after a mere few weeks he can say “Je suis les États-Unis.” 

Everyone immediately rushes out to buy the product… except that what he says translates to “I am the United States.”  We’ve had a couple of Presidents who might think they follow in the footsteps of France’s Louis XIV, of “L’étât, c’est moi” (“The state is me”) fame.  Any democratically inclined American begs to differ.  Note: the lower-case “d” in “democratically” in the previous sentence is important.

Cable Companies.  No one has anything good to say about any of them.  Ours, Suddenlink, seems particularly inept.  Talking to anyone at the local office is reminiscent of a koi pond, as know-nothing minions exhibit the latest fashion in carp-like gawping.  But at least they’re pleasant, unlike literally anyone I’ve ever talked to in their (ahem) “customer service” department.  A more rude and condescending collection of self-important jackasses has seldom been assembled… and Curmie has seen political conventions.

The internet signal is shaky: rare is the day Curmie doesn’t get a pop-up on the laptop that internet has been “restored”; streaming from PBS, BritBox, Acorn, and Netflix generally involves at least a half dozen pauses while the system buffers, and we get to watch the swirly wheel. 

“It must be raining in Tyler” (an hour or so away, where Suddenlink’s local headquarters is) is code in my family for “the internet is out again.”  This happens maybe once a month.  We’re not talking here about actual severe weather—hurricanes or the nasty cold spell this February—but simply unexplained (and probably unexplainable) outages occurring with grim regularity.

Usually, we’re talking about an hour or so, but Chez Curmie was recently without cable, internet, or wifi for well over 24 hours for no discernible reason.  But you knew that, Gentle Reader.  It’s a cable company.

Apparently Suddenlink is trying to expand into the cell phone business.  Curmie has been less than thrilled with AT&T, but Suddenlink?  In the words of several of Beloved Spouse’s colleagues: Oh. Hell. No.

Final comment: don’t ask about the formatting of this post.  It's blogspot.com being blogspot.com.