The List: Things That Pissed Me Off This Week at 8:19 PM

This won't be one of your traditional lists, as you may have noticed. Here we go.

NBC: So I stopped watching the news for many reasons (see "I Should Get the Paper"); one of which being that they run stories solely to cause people to worry. Case in point was NBC this week, which covered the subject of autism on every news show on the network (local included). I wouldn't know this, except my wife came to me and told me. I told her "you'd better not watch any of it". When I came home from work Monday night and she was in tears, I knew that she hadn't listened. Now, before everyone goes calling me a jerk, I know that autism is a serious subject and an underfunded condition. But: Do we need to hear about it every day for a week? Do we have to have a theme about the condition that serves no purpose other than to say over and over again that it's a serious and underfunded condition? And if it's going to just be on the news, fine. Keep it on the news. But keep it away from the funniest show on television. That's right, those of you who watched Scrubs this week know what I'm talking about. They let it infiltrate the shows. That's why I don't watch the news, for Pete's sake! Leave me alone! Quit making my wife worry that our 2-month old infant son will be autistic if we give him too many immunizations at once! (And if that's a cause, then we'll just spread out the immunizations. Is there much else you can do?)

American Idol: Okay, fine. Mock if you will, but I enjoy the show. I enjoy the auditions, I enjoy critiquing the performances, and I enjoy most of everything else except for Ryan Seacrest and the constant flow of commercials and thinly disguised commercials set up as music videos (thank you TiVo). With that out of the way, I'll touch on this week's shows. Yes, it was on thrice this week, and I watched all of them. TiVo comes in especially handy when it comes to the results shows. I watch the last 10 minutes. Anyway, what pissed me off was the following: as much as I enjoy the show, the contestants constantly make awful, terrible decisions on which songs they will perform. For example, two contestants (TWO!) chose to sing "How am I Supposed to Live Without You" by Michael Bolton. Neither of them were eliminated from the show. Two girls and two guys were eliminated this week. One of the guys sang a song that I don't even remember, but it bored me to tears. So it was okay when he was gone. The other guy, however, sang "Traveling Band", by CCR, and he sang it well. This was the same guy that sang "Mustang Sally" in the auditions, and tore it up. This just goes to prove my theory that the country is run by horny teenage boys and goofy teenage girls--neither of whom have any taste in music. You might be wondering why I still watch the show if it pisses me off like this. Well, I probably can't give you a satisfactory answer. I still enjoy it.

Work: If you don't believe me, ask Dylan: We spent three and a half hours training this week on how to use a motorized freaking pallet jack. This is not brain surgery. But because some idiot took a forklift down a gravelly road a couple of years ago and ended up winning a Darwin award (not really, but you get the idea), I have to use three hours of my life that I'll never get back learning about forklifts that we don't even use at our facility. I don't know of any facility of our kind that does use them. They said that once we had this training, we'd be certified in using any kind of lifting equipment at any facility we visited, company-wide. But first we'd have to get trained on that specific piece of equipment. She told us this about 5 seconds before my head exploded. On another work-related note, I found out today that I'll be traveling to the magical land of Athens, OH next week in order to help out another facility that will be short-handed. I found out about 4 hours ago, and I'll be leaving Monday. I'm not overly pissed off about this, as I have no problem giving back to this company. They've treated me very well, other than wasting three hours the other day on something that could have been covered in about 10 minutes. I just wanted to make this section a bit longer. What does piss me off about it is that I was planning on doing many things next week which I will now not be able to do. This will make for a busy Saturday.

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In other news, since I'll be going to Athens next week, I'll be publishing The Athens Diaries. This will be a memoir of the goings on in that city of wonder. I know I've made promises about posts before which went unfulfilled, but this time I won't really have anything to do other than work, eat alone in my hotel room, and play XBOX (what, you think I'd miss live night*?).

I need to get pictures up in my office. It's pretty depressing that Dylan already has pictures up and he's been there two weeks versus my 10 months. Oh well. I need a photo printer, because I haven't bought enough things over the past week. Yeah, we bought a washer and dryer today. And it's not going to be the last thing we buy for this house. I know that the first week we're there, we'll end up spending lots of bread on stuff that will annoy me. Oh well.

*Live night: A Wednesday night on which, Dylan, Joel, Johnny and myself commence killing each other in Halo 2. It is much fun.

Song of the Day: "Freedom", by Richie Havens. You don't hear a lot about this guy very much these days, which is why I stumbled on to his material just relatively recently. But everything I've heard has been awesome. Also, he looks nothing like I pictured him.