Tag Archives: entertainment

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 34 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. Now, I’m told, the alleged negotiation has gone so far sideways that it’s been sent to binding arbitration. Resolution to that could literally take years. So, we’re going to be grinding along for the foreseeable future with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. It’s truly a delight working for the sick man of the enterprise. I’m sure someone could make the case that there’s enough blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 34 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing to deliver for their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) and for continuing to stand in the way like some bloody great, utterly misguided roadblock. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence. The elected “leaders” of AFGE Local 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.

2. Going vegetarian. My most recent trip to the doctor involved one of his more humorous suggestions. He ended our visit recommending that I consider going vegetarian. Look, I don’t hate vegetables. I eat a lot of them. But thinking I’m going to opt for a lettuce and tomato sandwich sans bacon this summer ranks well into foolish and wrong territory. He obviously saw the twinkle in my eye, because he then hedged his bets a bit, calling for foods with reduced sugar and salt. OK, I’m not so set in my ways that I object to swaps and adds on spec. Most mornings I’m home start out with a cup of Greek yoghurt and a banana or other fruit. This week I opted to try the “zero sugar” option produced by my favorite yoghurt brand. I might as well have spooned wallpaper paste directly into my mouth. Throughout the day I’ve also been known to throw a handful of peanuts or cashews into my gaping maw from time to time. Fine. I’ll get the unsalted version. Yeah. For all the flavor there, I could just have easily saved my money and gone outside to eat a handful of dirt. I’m sorry doc, but when I’m deciding what to eat, taste and flavor is a pretty damned big deal. You’re never going to convince me to join the “food is fuel” crowd when food is so many other things too.

3. Writer’s strike. There’s apparently been a writer’s strike happening in Hollywood for most of this month. I won’t even pretend to be educated on the reasons for or against. As a consumer of content, I might have reasonably expected to have noticed that there was a strike happening by now. It turns out I don’t watch all that much “new” content. When I’ve been intentionally watching the screen, I’ve been doing a slow re-watch of The Sopranos and Mad Men these last few weeks. As for live television piped into my home by old fashioned cable, my set is usually parked on channels that air reruns of shows with season upon season of episodes available or BBC News to put some background noise in the house. Maybe the writers are victims of their past success. At the rate I’m going I could keep going for a decade before I realize no “new” material was hitting the airwaves. I’m probably an outlier, but with my particular givens, I’m not sure a WGA strike is going to have the impact the writers are hoping to see. 

The first thing to go…

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With the arrival of two new members of the household, it’s been a busy two weeks. One thing I noticed across these last 14 days is that when shit gets busy or my stress level cranks up, my time on social media plummets. In fact, it seems like it was the first thing to go as my mindless doom scrolling of Twitter or TikTok shrank to almost nothing. The time spent trying to get a decent photograph of a bad eye in a poorly lit room also rose exponentially, so it’s something of a tradeoff. 

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, in fact it’s probably just the opposite. For all of its entertainment value, there’s no denying that social media is, by its nature and design, a complete time suck… and the fact that I’ve largely avoided it is something I really noticed as I sat down here on Friday evening to start putting the week behind me. 

I don’t necessarily miss the mindless scrolling, but I definitely miss having the unallocated free time with which to do so. In any case, if you’re one of those people who has sent me funny, funny memes or clips in the last few days, just know that I’m not avoiding you personally and I’ll eventually get back to those DMs and laugh along with you… probably. Unless I decide to just “delete unread” and start fresh. Could go either way.

The broken promise of streaming entertainment…

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I read an article this morning that cited a survey reporting that American adults are now getting more of their screen time through streaming services and apps like TikTok than through traditional television. The comments section was filled by people talking about the glory of cord cutting. 

That’s fine. Good on them. My cable TV subscription is still the one stop shop for 85-90% of anything I want to watch. For all my hostility to Xfinity and Comcast before them, the presence of their “set top box” means I don’t have to constantly go hunting for something. The older I get the more willing I am to pay for that kind of convenience.

I get it. I’m a contrarian… but needing to jump between from Netflix, to Hulu, to Amazon, to Disney+, to Peacock, to HBO Go, in order to watch one show on each of them, in my opinion, tends to be a marvelous pain in the ass that inevitably means stopping to log in to one app or another when all I want to do is push a power button and go to the right channel. Layer on the joy of finding that half the seasons of a particular show are on App A while the rest are on Streaming Service B and forget about it. Whatever percentage of a dollar I’m saving for making my life more complicated just isn’t worth it.

Frankly, we’ve reached a point in this evolution where I’m more apt to cut streaming services rather than cable television. The promise of streaming was that I’d be able to select just the channels and content I wanted instead of buying the whole universe of programs that included bundles of things I couldn’t care less about. That future never materialized and instead streaming became ordering up bundles of bundles instead of one big one with everything included.

Increasingly, if there’s a series I want to watch and I can’t find it free through my cable service, I’ll just wait until I can buy the damned thing on iTunes or Amazon – one and done, commercial free, for a fixed price. I imagine my days of being subscribed to multiple streaming services is just about over. They’re quickly approaching the point of being more bother than they’re worth.

It’s all been done…

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The Emmys were handed out last night. My relationship with awards shows is indifferent a best, so the only reason I happen to know this is because the fact is nearly impossible to miss online this morning.

All the shows that won have precisely one thing in common – I’ve never watched any of them. In fact, of all the shows nominated across every category, I’ve seen at least one episode of two of them; Better Call Saul in its first season and Saturday Night Live sometime in excess of two decades ago. 

I can’t exactly put my finger on when I stopped being interested in current pop culture, but here we are. I can’t remember what the last fresh new show I sat down to watch is. I discount House of the Dragon, since it’s set in a universe I’ve already been in for 10 years. For the most part, I’m happy enough re-watching any of 20 or 30 favorite shows or leaving the television parked on Sky News or BBC and a combination of the History Channel, Discovery, National Geographic, and Animal Planet. I don’t expect I’ll get exposure to any of the cool new dramas or comedies there. I’m ok with that.

Aside from an occasional obsession with new technology, I’ve never been the guy who was all that interested in keeping up. Give me the tried and comfortable any day. Besides, from what little I’ve seen of smart new television, we’ve run out of new stories to tell because it’s all been done before. 

On the importance of knowing your audience…

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I didn’t watch any of last night’s Super Bowl. The looks of confusion and disbelief when I tell people that is delicious. My up front admission of this saved me today from some, but not all of the conversations I didn’t want to have today. So vague is my understanding of the the state of modern football, even if I had watched, my only contribution was smiling and nodding at what felt like appropriate moments.

I don’t think my choice to be bowl-free makes me morally superior, but I can’t see any sense in watching something that doesn’t interest me when I have 300 channels of cable, 5 streaming services, and 1000 books stored away just waiting to be read. We live in a world where there are too many options to be troubled to stare at something that would bore me to tears.

I might flip on the occasional yacht race or tune in for women’s beach volleyball, but otherwise, there’s just nothing in the sporting world I consider a “must watch” event. There’s only so much free time on any given weekend and I’m determined to spend as much of it as possible doing things I want to do rather than things that might improve the next day’s water cooler conversation.

I mean I don’t drag disinterested people down into conversations about the details of Buffy episodes or the Royal Navy in the age of fighting sail. No matter how much those things interest me, I’m well aware they’re not for everyone. Now if I could just convince people to acknowledge that two groups of millionaires beating the hell out of each other for fun and profit need not be the central point of conversation we’d be all square.

Maybe I’ll just started responding to every football reference with “It’s just like when Rodney captured four ships of the line and prevented the French invasion of Jamaica during the Battle of the Saintes” or “I mean it’s not as bad as those couple of times when Buffy had to die to beat her big opponent.” All I’m saying is maybe you should know your audience a little before launching into a detailed discussion of your particular fandom. I promise you, the recounting of stats and plays sounds as nerdy to me as anything I could say about my fandoms does to you.

Lunch date…

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For all my ranting and raving, I have a loose policy of not really talking too much here about my personal life. Often enough that’s because I’m not sure it would make for particularly dynamic reading. Plus, there’s the bit about the internet not needing to know absolutely everything I’m up to. Occasionally, though, there’s a little bit of a story that just too good not to share.

You see, I had a lunch date Sunday afternoon. Low pressure, low key, and the first time I’ve sat down in a restaurant since December 2019, when the rumors of plague started rumbling out of China. 

No, I obviously won’t name names, but she’s a lovely girl – charming, articulate, and a keeper of cats with at least a polite interest in books. I’d be hard pressed to remember when two hours in the presence of other people passed quite so pleasantly.

There’s a catch, of course – and not, probably, an obvious one. You see, in what I can only assume is typical of her fellow Millennials, there was a bit of a rant about capitalism, “the system,” and a Bernie-esq flavor of wishing to bring about a brave new socialist world. 

Look, I’m all for people being engaged, involved, and having informed opinions. I’m even up for the discussion should anyone want to have it. But it was hard not to chuckle a bit at the mental gymnastics it takes to talk about burning down the system while drinking $15 sangrias paid for by someone who earns their living by actively working to advance the system and prop up the military-industrial complex. Unless your plan is to dismantle the system one drink at a time, in which case then I suppose the revolution is now.

I’m not sure there will be a second date, but the first one was worth having if only for the pure entertainment value. 

What Annoys Jeff This Week?

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1. Tucker Carlson. Tucker staked out a patently absurd position on his Fox evening entertainment program last week. I know, I know. I should be more specific because most of his positions come across somewhere on the absurdity spectrum. I know it was absurd because some of the most serious thinkers in DoD responded more or less instantly to rebut Tucker’s asshattery. They’re not generally people who feel compelled to stake out public positions, except in this case, ol’ Tuck decided to opine about things that are, by definition, these particular leader’s area of expertise. No one “attacked” Tucker. They simply had the audacity to tell him that he’s a moron and explain why that’s the case. No one violated the damned Hatch Act. Having a professional opinion doesn’t undermine civilian control of the military. Differing opinions are only dangerous when you’re so thin skinned or your position is so badly placed that you can’t defend it rationally. In this case, it seems Tuck and his supporters fall into both categories. As usual, the “leading lights” of right wing kook media have left me embarrassed to be an actual, practicing conservative.

2. Higher taxes. They say Joe is working on a new tax bill and it’s likely to be the largest tax increase since 1993. I see lots of people saying they don’t mind paying more taxes. Good on them. With or without a higher tax rate imposed by the government, they’re free to send as big a check as they want over to the treasury. They can do that. No one would stop them. But it seems what people mean when they say they don’t mind paying more tax is they don’t mind so you should pay more too. “But,” they’ll argue, “it only applies to people who make more than $400,000 a year – the ‘absurdly rich.’” Right, I think, because every tax that ever was started out as a tax on “just the wealthy” until our political machine needed a few more dollars over time and the “absurdly wealthy” became most every working sucker in the country. So, please, write as big a check to Uncle as you’d like. Feel free to give of your own income until it hurts. That’s your right and privilege. I’ll be over here fighting tooth and nail to keep every penny I’ve earned and distribute it how I see fit.

3. I spent today doing exactly the same things that I did yesterday. I answered emails, entered information in a fancy database, and generally moved electrons around from Point A to Point B as needed. The only difference between today and yesterday was where I was physically sitting when I did those things. Yesterday I was parked in the sun room with two dogs snoring in the background and today I was in my designated cube with seven or eight conversations humming in the background. Plus, today added an extra 80 minutes to the day since I had to drive to my cube and back to do exactly the same things I did yesterday from the comfort of my home office. “But we need to have a presence in the building,” is the most patently farcical reason I can think of to justify the construction, maintenance, and daily running cost associated with a modern office building. The argument against remote working forever is effectively that we need to have people in a special geographic spot because we happen to have a special geographic spot. As far as I can tell it has absolutely nothing to do with productivity or whether the work in any way depends on unique geographic positioning.

Record setting…

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Sometime around 10:00 last Thursday night, jeffreytharp.com set 2020 as its best year for views yet. That’s not a bad place to be at the tail end of October and the numbers, of course, keep ticking up every day. Say what you want about the suffering of life in a plague year, but having people home, bored, and dinking around on the internet has done great things for my numbers.

I’m sure there are people out there who are making an actual living at this. God knows I get enough emails about “monetizing your platform.” That’s never been my goal here, though. The only reason jeffreytharp.com exists at all is as a venue for exorcising some of life’s daily bile without my brain exploding… and maybe offering up a bit of entertainment along the way.

Sure, making a few coins from it would be nice, but I value my position as an amateur bitcher and complainer. Maybe I could take the whole thing pro, but surely it would lose some of its charm when in the back of my head I’m always conscious of what drives views and spend time worried about who might be offended. That’s just a risk not worth taking, so we’ll keep on as we are… because I feel like there’s going to be a lot of things that need saying over the next few months.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Interesting times. People always say they want an adventure, or value new experience. They throw it all over social media, on their dating profiles, or bring it up any time they have introduce themselves. Now all you seem to hear is gnashing of teeth because someone isn’t getting an “authentic” high school experience or their long-awaited vacation was cancelled or their favorite holiday will look a little less Currier and Ives. They’ve landed smack in the middle of a once in a century pandemic and an election cycle like no one currently living has ever experienced… but that’s apparently not the “interesting times” they had in mind. It turns out what people really mean is they wanted entertainment and the illusion of adventure because the real thing is much harder to wrap your head around.

2. The Midwest. Talking heads keep yammering on about midwestern states “like Pennsylvania.” Buy a goddamned map. I know you’re using midwest as shorthand to mean “post-industrial” rust belt states, but you sound like an idiot somehow implying that Pennsylvania isn’t right here on the east coast. I suppose expecting nuance and detailed analysis from the professional media is far too much of an ask in this era of short attention span theater.

3. Election month. Back in my day, elections were held in on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. If you couldn’t make it to the polls on that day you could send in an absentee ballot. It seems to work well enough. I don’t know when exactly we started moving to having first an “election week” and now something more like an “election month,” but I’m not sure we’ve done much more than make what should be a simple proposition far more complicated than it needs to be.  And for the love of God don’t get me started on the people who are stomping around wanting to count mail in votes that arrive six and a half weeks after “Election Day.” If it’s really important to you, you wouldn’t have dawdled and would have had your shit in order well before the deadline. Personal responsibility matters.

In which I oppose mandatory fun…

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Mandatory fun is bad. I don’t mean it’s badly intentioned. I’m sure whatever powers that be inflict mandatory fun on the rest of us probably think they’re doing something positive, if not exactly something wonderful. It just seems to me that the forced joviality of people who work together pretending to be the best of friends feels awful in just about every possible way. Consider, if you will, when was the last time you had an unadulterated good time at the office Christmas party or the company picnic? For the record, I don’t consider going because you need to “make an appearance” or because it’s slightly better than spending those hours at your desk to qualify as fun in this instance.

Most people make at least some small effort to have a firewall between what they do for fun and what they do to make a living. Maybe there was a time long ago, before everyone was an easily offended, uptight stick in the mud, when these official organizational celebrations were good times. Today they mostly feel like a formality – just a small nod to that bygone era. Most people will go along with it, of course, because making waves is rarely the best tactic to endear yourself to whatever bosses you serve. Go along. Get along. It’s one of the oldest stories in the working world. 

If you insist on mandatory fun, my recommendation is to keep it simple. Make sure there’s lots of food, back up a beer truck, and maybe hire a band. Let people self-select with what and who they choose to engage. That’s probably about as good a situation as you’re likely to manufacture. There are ways to screw that up, though. You could overlay the lukewarm pay as you go food with several mandatory training events and dispense with the beer truck, thus ensuring that even the illusion of a “fun day away from the office” is shattered completely. 

It’s easy in cases like this to blame the planners… but I can reasonably assure you that they want to deliver a better product than the specified and implied guidance allows. Experience tells me that the real fault in these cases lies in the realm of leadership and the good idea fairies that dwell with them. I mean if someone really was all that interested in boosting my morale, all they’d have to do was give me a couple of hours off and point me towards the closest used book shop. I don’t expect there would be a line for that, but then again I don’t subscribe to the idea that a good time necessarily has to be a team activity.