Snide Remarks in Sotto Voce

Interpreted as an Invitation

             Yonkers, NY:  State Trooper Chuck Schwartz got a big surprise last Tuesday night when doing a routine speed patrol on the Cross County Parkway.

            “I was waiting in my usual spot, you know, at the bottom of that big hill and after the long curve to the left,” said Schwartz, “when I clocked a guy going 72 miles per hour. It wasn’t ten miles over the speed limit but it was good for a $150 ticket, and it was a slow night so I knew my boss’d be pissed if I didn’t pull him over, so I put on my lights and went after the guy.”

            That’s when things got interesting. An alien spaceship descended rapidly towards the accelerating police car, in what appeared to be amorous advance.

            Scientist Joe Kelly of the Advanced Institute for Somewhat Smart People Who Aren’t Skeptical About Alien Encounters (AISSPWASAAE) said that such occurrences were becoming more and more frequent. “The incredible brightness of the new LED police car warning lights, the color variations and the strobe effect are not only visible in distant galaxies, but apparently they are of a pattern that this particular alien race finds irresistible.”

            “At the Institute we call the lights a ‘summons,’” added Kelly as an aside.

            Attempts of alien spaceships to mate with police cars have been reported throughout the northeast, southeast, Midwest, northwest, and southwest ever since the new high-tech LED warning lights have started to become regular equipment on squad cars. “The aliens must have detected the lights, and, well, we’re assuming that they experienced such a powerful lustful yearning that they sent out spacecraft immediately to meet them,” said Kelly.

            “Our original intent was not to attract amorous aliens,” says State police chief Joseph Plodkintz. “The high-tech super-bright lights and strobe effect were to protect officers in the field, especially at night. The lights are highly visible for several miles, and an arresting officer, busy collecting important revenue for the state by ticketing people who venture even slightly over the speed limit, would be safe from oncoming traffic which would slow when the lights were turned on.”
            State Trooper Schwartz agreed. “I definitely felt safer with the new lights on my squad car,” he said. “Everyone on the road had to slow down because they were practically blinded by the lights. And the strobe effect and the brightness made it look like I was taking up the whole highway, rather than just the shoulder.”

            He chuckled a little. “You know, it was actually sort of enjoyable watching all those assholes have to slow down. They would be backed up for miles! And when I first turned those lights on at night, you know, it was always fun to see the cars swerve. It scared the bejesus out of them, so that always brightened my day. No pun intended.  Ha ha.”

            Schwartz was lucky to be there for this interview. “The spacecraft shot their ray-thingie at me, and the car started to shudder and then rise from the ground,” he said. “I got out just in time.”

            Schwartz suffered some minor abrasions and a bruise on his left buttock when he leapt, screaming like a little girl, from his car.

            The squad car hasn’t been seen since the alien spacecraft beamed it up. But Schwartz says that it has communicated with the station via police radio that it was expecting squadcarlings in about three months, and was hopeful that the police station guys & gals would throw a baby shower.

See it here:

http://thefastertimes.com/financialstress/2010/01/22/“depriving”-my-kids-tv-other-essential-media/

A satire on Xtremetravelstories.com:

http://www.xtremetravelstories.com/index.php/en/latest-stories/60-united-states/68-selling-jfk-long-term-parking-

If you enjoy it, please click the stars to vote for it!  Thanks.

Here’s a link to a list on Spitefulcritic.com

Fashions We Don’t Want to See

Happy New Year!

You can buy Tods loafers at Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman for around $400.

 I had bought a pair a while back and thought they would last me a long time. Imagine my dismay when I went to put them on this fall and they felt mushy inside. I looked closer, they seemed to have some sort of deterioration in the sole.

 I took them to the shoe repairman – they are high-end loafers, after all and worth the cost of repair. But he examined them and then showed me by peeling back the rubber sole, the inside of the shoe support was disintegrating into sand.

 “They can’t be repaired,” he said. “Deficient materials.”

Apparently my $400 shoes had suffered irrepreable trauma from resting in my closet (which is a typical closet). The materials used to manufacture the sole of the shoe were simply falling apart. It was not due to overuse or anything else I had done to the shoe. It was faulty manufacturing.

 After spending so much on a pair of shoes, I expected the company to rectify the situation. (A pair similar to mine is on the Neiman Marcus Web site for $425.) I found a Contact Us email address on the Tods official Web site and emailed them about my problem.

 A customer service specialist emailed me back asking me for the product number and other obscure information and demanding a receipt from a Tods store and digital photos of the shoes.

 I emailed several photos of the shoes. I explained that they weren’t new, and that I didn’t have a receipt, but that I had paid full retail and expected that a premium product like my Tods loafers would be repaired or replaced if they inexplicably fell apart.

 The Tods person responded that unless the shoes were bought at a Tods store, they would not be replaced or repaired.

 I emailed back offering to send them the shoes if they had any doubt about their authenticity, and she emailed back saying that they had no doubt, they recognized the shoes in the photo, but Too Bad, since I didn’t have a receipt and hadn’t bought them at a Tods store but at a distributor (like Neiman Marcus), I was out of luck.

 I wrote saying this was a very bad policy and saying I had spent a Lot Of Money on the shoes, and the customer service person responded that lots of companies had that policy.

 I said that just because other companies had the policy didn’t mean it didn’t suck. I was pissed!

 Meanwhile, one wet and rainy day while in New York City, a friend of mine rhapsodized about her (then soggy) Born shoes, which retail around $100 or less. She said that she had had a problem where the sole of a shoe split down the middle. She sent it to Born and they replaced it immediately. They didn’t ask her for obscure product numbers and digital photos and receipts from a Born store.

 In this economy, when you’re charging premium prices, does it make sense to treat your customers badly? I don’t think so.

 No more Tods shoes for me.

This is one of my favorite writings ever, click on the title to read it:

Apocalypse Toy Company, Inc.

Real Toys for Real Boys

. . . my holiday present to you!

I wrote this for Spitefulcritic.com — a bit of humor for you:

Headlines for Stories I Actually Will Read

I had been looking forward to seeing Doubt, written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams.  And there it was last week, on the Library’s overnight DVD shelf.

This is a film for mature audiences, not just because of the subject matter, which concerns the possible sexual abuse of a boy by a priest, but also because of the pace of the movie, which is mostly dialog and little action. The movie was adapted from a play by the same author.

But if you do happen to be a mature movie viewer, this movie is pretty Wow. It’s not edge-of-the-seat wow, but it’s wow nonetheless.

Doubt has two of my favorite actors, Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, acting at their best. And that’s saying a lot. I am always skeptical that Meryl Street will be able to transform herself into someone else again, and yet she keeps doing it. Amy Adams and Viola Davis also deliver the goods with their performances.

I’m not sure if the plot of this movie would work if we didn’t know so much now about Catholic priests’ misdoings. The point of the movie is doubt, and we as the audience aren’t really ever told the Truth about what happened. It’s fortunate that the cast is so good, because the plot of this movie is character driven, and, while the dialog is terrific, there are moments when everything is conveyed by a facial expression. Hoffman’s facial expressions in particular are so fraught with . . .what exactly? Guilt? Outrage? That’s for you to decide.

 These actors are right on. This movie is definitely a Pick.

I’ve become a big fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman (Do you remember him playing the chubby immoral kid in Scent of a Woman? — Look how far he’s come!), and Charlie Wilson’s War, directed by Mike Nichols, is another movie where his performance is so good that he steals the show (from Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, among others). Hoffman plays a scruffy, geeky, outspoken CIA operative and his dialog is smart and funny. This picture is a must-see if only for Hoffman’s performance. Amy Adams is also in this picture, and it’s fun to see Adams and Hoffman in two such different roles from those in Doubt.

Charlie Wilson’s War is, again, not a children’s picture. It deals with a lecherous yet likeable congressman (played by Hanks) who undertakes financing covert military operations against the Soviet Union when it invades Afghanistan. It’s entertaining while being politically prophetic.

So, in a Philip Seymour Hoffman mood, I watched The Savages, an underappreciated 2008 tragi-comedy written and directed by Tamara Jenkins. Laura Linney (also underappreciated) stars as Hoffman’s sister – they’ve drifted apart over the years but must regroup in order to help their aging, homeless, somewhat demented father. It’s a sad situation, and they each, in midlife, have disappointments and personal struggles. How could such a seemingly depressing topic – two losers going to take care of their loser dad, be so compelling and amusing?

It’s the little moments in life, like bringing balloons to comfort people grieving for their dead mother, and then awkwardly holding the balloons while they tell you your father has to get the hell out of the house, are the funniest and most character-revealing. These two actors are a joy to watch and their characters are interesting and even fun.

Pans

And of course I couldn’t resist Synecdoche, New York, another Hoffman movie, this one written and directed by Charlie Kaufman (his directorial debut).  I spotted it on the library shelf – hadn’t ever heard of it. I was really looking forward to seeing Hoffman enter the realm of the surreal, as the plot concerns a director who begins to re-create his life in an enormous (life-size, actually) theater set, all the while suffering from a degenerative disease. Unfortunately for me, this movie plodded into the realm of the overly strange and yet somehow mundane (and I mean plodded) and, although I was able to sit through the whole thing, being such a rabid Hoffman fan, I really wouldn’t recommend it. It was sort of boring.

Maybe if I watched it over with a bunch of psychologists and artists and then discussed it over a big round table while drinking espresso and laudanum I would appreciate it more. But, for now, I’m not quite up to the task.