May 2006
Posted Sunday, 5-28-6
I'm watching the news last week in Homestead, Florida where, according to the hot Latino newscaster, the police are "Targeting illegal meth labs". So, I just have to ask; "illegal" meth labs, as opposed to "legal" meth labs? I'm so glad they are only targeting the illegal ones. I mean really, when you go through all the permits and zoning regulations to open up a legal meth lab, they really should let you run it as long as you stay within the state's guidelines for running drug labs.
Silly for me to go off on this as it is really just one extra word but it is everywhere now. I'm sure I'm guilty of it as well but it just drives me nuts. No one listens to the language they use anymore.
Like people that go to the ATM machine or pre-heat an oven. The M in ATM stands for machine. ATM machine is redundant.
An oven is either heated or unheated. Pre-heated is unnecessary. If the recipe calls for you to place the food into a 350 pre-heated oven, it is really telling you to place the food into a 350 oven. If you didn't know enough to turn the oven on earlier, you'll just have to wait. Pre-heated is a useless term that too many people just accept as though it were a real state. "Pre-heated" takes time and heat into account. It was hot before our current place in time.
So what's the difference from "heated"? It is hot at our current place in time. Well, unless you are cooking in some blast furnace in the basement of some industrial complex warehouse, ovens take time (some more than others) to heat. No oven that I know of, residential or commercial goes from "off" to "fully heated and ready to cook" in a split second. Even if you invented one, it still takes the time for you to push the button or turn the dial so at one point in time it is off, the other point in time, it will become heated. Pre-heated is STILL a useless term.
Unheated, heating and heated. Those should be the only options within normal operating parameters.
So now we have the official mandate that foreigners should learn to speak English. That's cool. I'd really like that but I don't think it should be an executable offence. I hate those people that run around and yell for anyone who can't speak English to get out of the country. That's a little too extreme. What about, "Make the attempt to become a meaningful member of society and learn to speak English or get out of the country." I think that makes a little more sense. Hell, most people I know don't speak proper English and most of the time that includes me. If I went to Italy, It would be stupid of me to not pick up enough Italian to get by. If I went to live there, it would be downright rude of me to not learn the language and expect them to know English. The reverse should also be true. If you are visiting here, try to get by in as much English as you can. If you are living here, learn (and use) English. Some people learn English but then they speak Spanish to each other. That's also rude. I want to hit these people with a 2x4 when they do it in front of me but that's just mostly the paranoia of me thinking they are talking in Spanish about ME.
I've been through Miami, Homestead and Florida City a lot in the last few months and I've been looking for the infamous Spanish street signs. For years I've heard that street signs in some areas of Miami are in Spanish. I was looking for them because I was going to run the stop sign and hope to get pulled over so I could tell the officer I'm not fluent in Spanish and had the sign read "STOP" instead of "ALTO" I may have understood what it meant.
I may have been accused of being a belligerent asshole once or twice in my life.
Anyway, I am happy to report that I drove through every type of area and saw no such animal. Everything (other than some businesses and a lot of billboards) was in English. The streets and roads may have had Hispanic names but the official signage was in English. I know it was silly of me to believe otherwise, but I was just told one too many times and thought that it could be true.
However, some of these horror stories may be true. My sister-in-law is a very talented medical professional but couldn't get a job in El Paso, Texas because she doesn't speak fluent Spanish. And it wasn't just the hospitals; she says she couldn't find ANY job out there that doesn't require Spanish. That sucks.
Monday, 5-22-6
I've finally tried to sit down and figure out the possibilities of how many times you can use the same street name without repeating. Every once in a while I'll see some strange street name and I'll begin to think about it and by the time I'm done driving, I've stopped thinking about it. So, the designations I can come up with so far are;
Avenue, Boulevard, Circle, Court, Drive, Highway, Lane, Park, Parkway, Path, Place, Plaza, Road, Square, Terrace, Trail, View and Way.
Figuring you can use N, E,
S, W, NE, NW, SE, SW for pre, post AND in combination (example; NE Peachtree St.
N), we should have 81 possibilities per designation; With 19 names so far, that
totals to 1539 possible names for each street. To help look some of these
up, I pulled up my map program and typed in Peachtree, Atlanta. Surprisingly
few entries were in there. Only 25 or so compared to the millions it feels like
while driving around up there. Everywhere you look is a Peachtree Street or
Peachtree Avenue. Kind of like Jacksonville, everyone you meet is named or
related to someone named Van Zandt. Some actually are, most are just looking
for attention. It's amazing how many people try to claim association with a
mediocre country-rock band. OK, I guess I should just
shut up now. So much for this week's rant. Signing off, I'm Chris Hendrix. Oh, I didn't tell you about
that did I? Yeah, my cousin's babysitter's best friend's brother-in-law's uncle
knew a guy that was the back-up roadie-in-training's little sister's boyfriend
and somehow in the middle of all that, I'm now related to Jimi Hendrix. Doesn't
that make me cool somehow? No. No it doesn't and claiming a distant relation
to Lynyrd Skynyrd is even weaker than that. Why can't these people be someone
on their own and not have to lay claim to something someone else did to make
themselves feel better? To my knowledge, I'm not related to anyone famous. I
have a great-grandfather named Benjamin Franklin, but he's not the famous one. I went to school with a
girl that was the daughter of Lynyrd Skynyrd's piano player. I never even knew
it until years later when I met her younger brother in a tech class. It only
came up then because we were talking about music and how at every live show,
some drunken redneck holds up a lighter and yells, "Play Freebird!!!" From
there I went on my oh-so-predictable rant about how much I hate Southern Rock
because of the sub-humans that are associated with it. This guy just smiled
while his friend informed me of my faux pas. But, up to that point, neither one
of them made a big deal of being related so why do these "distant relative
wannabe's" make sure it's one of the first things I know about them?
Thursday, 5-18-6 Here we go again. It's time to get the website
rolling again. Am I that vain to think that anyone really wants to read
this? No. I just like putting my thoughts to print and recently (3
years now) it has become increasingly less often that I find the time to do so
on paper. Those of you reading this say that you like to see regular
updates, and I like having a place to vent. Even if it's to the endless
web of the internet, my screams, laughter and tears are going out there and are
no longer bottled up inside me (much). I'm not candy coating this site anymore. I got to
the point that I was careful in choosing my words because I was afraid, "What if
(insert various people here) reads this?" I had forgotten why I started
putting my thought to press; to expel the uglies out of my head. The pages
ahead may include ugly thoughts, ugly words and/or ugly ideas. They are
there so that they don't live in my head anymore. So as my
first post goes out you, dear reader, are warned: I can be VERY bitter,
offensive and mean-spirited at times. But then, you already knew that...
So where I may offend and alienate from time to time, I mean nothing personal by
it. I am plagued by the fact that my tongue (and pen) is more of a shotgun
than a sniper rifle. Rather than think it out and choose my words
carefully, I blast out the entire mess and only then do I choose my words
by picking them back out of the pile. It may be messy, but it's how my
puny brain works.
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