Tag Archives: Washington

The injustice of the month club…

Posted on by

Oh good. As expected, we just couldn’t let the truck protest have it’s time to shine in Canada. According to The Hill, there’s a plot afoot to bring traffic on the Washington beltway to a halt. 

As someone who spent a portion of his career commuting into and out of DC on a daily basis, let me just say fuck directly off with that asshattery. The only people you’ll be screwing with are the working schmucks who just want to get home and get on with their lives – exactly the kind of people I’d think you would want to support your little protest, no?

Of course they are, but deep thinking never seems to be among the traits displayed by people who plan this kind of goofy ass protest. Thinking in broader strategic terms is a game for grown adults rather than those whose notion of how to go about doing things was stunted around the time they were 17-year-old. Truly they’re almost always driven and supported by the kind of people I don’t even bother arguing with – or engaging with at all if I can avoid it. I just don’t have the patience anymore to suffer fools with anything less than complete disdain.

Look, I know I’ll never be mistaken for any kind of man of the people. That’s fine. It’s good that I’m not king, though, because given my preferences, I’d pull back and nuke this shit from orbit. But we live in world where even the village idiot is allowed to have a voice and we’re legally obligated to allow him or her to use it. So do what you want to the beltway and tens of thousands if commuters, I guess. I can only hope you turn every single one of them into opponents of whatever grave-injustice-of-the-month it is you think you’re trying to highlight. 

The trouble with Washington’s Birthday…

Posted on by

Look, I’m as big a fan of federal holidays as anyone in the country. There’s a problem with Washington’s Birthday, though. Well, technically it’s not a problem with the day itself. It’s more of a problem with what comes after it… which is a long, monotonous, fifteen week slog through spring to the next officially recognized holiday.

Fifteen five day work weeks in a row. Hell might be other people, but that long stretch between holidays gives it a yearly run for its money as far as I’m concerned.

There’s nothing to be done about it, of course, except remember that I have a small mountain of annual leave I have to burn off before the end of the year that I can tap into if things get dire. I’ll do it if I have to, but those days never feel quite as good as the freebies.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Running out of time. Even as I grudgingly accept the fact that it’s necessary to work in exchange for money which I can then exchange for goods and services, I cannot quite shake off the feeling that I’d rather be safely tucked into Fortress Jeff with an endless supply of hot coffee and a mountain of books to read. Mentally preparing myself to go out and rejoin the world is, in a word, traumatic. It’s times like this I can see how one might just get suckered into the fool’s gold appeal of something like a “universal basic income” scheme.

2. January finances. As a professional adult head of household, January has always been a budget buster of a month for me. It’s the month when my biggest bills come due for the year – car insurance, home owner’s association dues, paying off Christmas gifts and travel expenses, the start of the winter heating season, and a few others. No matter how well the year is budgeted, January always comes around like a swift kick in the teeth and throw in one more large dollar item than I was projecting. It’s like the new year giving you a rabbit punch just to remind you that just because it’s a new year doesn’t mean it’s anything more than business as usual.

3. Congress and the president. If you thought having the executive and legislative branches run by the same party put the “fun” in dysfunctional, just wait until you see the magnificent shitshow that Washington devolves into this afternoon when Democrats assume power in the House of Representatives. To all those who scream “false equivalency” or who want to blame one side or the other, I’ll simply say go fuck yourself. A pox on both their houses. No one sitting in our hallowed halls of power is an innocent.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Boxes. I’ve moved five times in the last 15 years and I always, always grossly underestimate the number of boxes it’s going to take to get the job done. Sure, the planned upcoming move clocks in at just three miles on the nose, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend three weeks shuffling crap back and forth 20 boxes at a time. This is the operative definition of wanting to work out a one-and-done situation. I’d settle for two or three, but the heavy lifting is going to get done in one shot. In the meantime I guess I’ll have to live with the every growing mountain of cardboard that’s slowly taking root in each room.

2. ISIS. I think I’ve made it clear that I harbor no love for ISIS and those who adhere to it. I guess you can chalk the fact that they’re currently busy grinding historic artifacts that have survived thousands of years into powder because they’re “heretical” and go against the teachings of Islam as just another reason. Since these artifacts were created a few thousand years before anyone bothered to come up with the tenets of the Islamic faith, I guess they’d pretty much have to be. If setting people on fire and cutting off heads wasn’t enough of an indicator that we’re dealing with savages, the fact that they want to ignore every part of the vast sweep of human history that doesn’t agree with their crackpot view of the world is a pretty good sign that they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the modern world.

3. Legalization. If the people of the District of Columbia want to legalize, regulate, and tax, marijuana I say God bless. Yes, I know, it’s a federal district granted limited home rule by the Congress, but just for the sake of argument I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the US Congress has more important things to do than legislate whether John Q. Pothead is entitled to smoke up. As long as we’re a nation that likes its cigarettes, beer, whisky, and prescription meds (and we’re ok making enormous amounts of money taxing those things), I’m not buying the argument that mary jane is a gateway to anything more dangerous than a late night snack.

Blood pressure…

Posted on by

The president will deliver the State of the Union address tomorrow night. Thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, we mostly know the broad strokes of what’s going to be in it – I’m sure it’s not nearly as suspenseful as waiting for a president to send his hand written evaluation up the Hill once a year, but asking the cable news channels to adhere to an endearing 18th century standard of practice is surely too much to ask.

That means tomorrow evening I have two choices. First, I could watch the speech live and make myself crazy ranting and raving at the television in real time and ensure I’m too aggravated to get anything close to a good night’s sleep. Option two involves ignoring the live broadcast and catching the meat of it in dribs and drabs over the next few days, which would lengthen the duration of annoyance but likely reduce the intensity of my expected opposition to nearly everything I expect to hear.

In any case, it’s a safe bet that my blood pressure will be off the rails for the next couple of days. Under the current circumstances it seems the best I can hope for is avoiding a heart attack, ulcer, or throwing the remote through the screen. That doesn’t say much for my evaluation of the current state of our Union.

Not a fan…

Posted on by

It was hard to miss the “breaking news” today that the US Patent Office vacated multiple trademarks owned by the historic Washington football franchise. I’m not a fan of the Washington Redskins. In fact I can’t remember the last time I watched a football game from Washington-Redskins-Logostart to finish. It was probably sometime in the 90s. Fortunately, this post is only tangentially related to football because it provides the backdrop for the point I really want to make tonight.

There are a lot of appeals between now and anything that might resemble a name change for the team, but if I were Dan Snyder, I’m pretty sure my plan of attack might go something like this: 1) Halt the sale of all items bearing the Redskins team logo; 2) Discontinue all team related activities – shuttering their training facility, FedEx Field, and offices; 3) Inform the NFL of my intention to sit out the 2014 season rather than being forced by the mob to do business as “Generic Washington, DC Football Franchise.” But then again, I’m the kind of guy who will cheerfully slice off my nose to spite my face.

Look, if you’re offended by the use of the name Redskins, then by all means avail yourself of the opportunity to not purchase a ticket. Show up at the stadium on game day with your protest sign. Send a letter. Do whatever it is you feel you need to do to make your voice heard… but in my final analysis, I get a cold chill every time some random agency of government is allowed to tell us what words are offensive, unacceptable, or otherwise “not nice.” I don’t want government within a country mile of making decisions about what words any one of us can or can’t use, from team owners to town drunks. Words are just words. They’re not imbued with any magical meaning or significance until we chose to give them that meaning.

I have a hunch that if Redskins was really an “offensive” term, we wouldn’t need government to save us from it. It would be reflected by the thousands of empty seats at every home game when when fans were too mortified to show up. I’m not sure when we came up with this idea that we should be able to get through life without ever being offended or having our little feelings hurt, but for my money it’s done us more harm than good.

For the first (and probably last) time in my life, I say this without a hint of sarcasm: Hail to the Redskins!

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Warning the USSR… errr… Russia. I’ve lost count of the number of times in the last six months that the US has “warned” Russia that its bad behavior will have really bad consequences. As far as I can tell, our national warning is roughly equivalent to an exasperated mother warning the child who’s trying to set the curtains on fire that they’ll “be in trouble when dad gets home.” Except dad isn’t coming home. Ever. We warn and nothing happens. We warn and the UN tries to just talk it out. We warn and the world ignores us. Historically speaking the only influence we’ve ever had on that part of the world, is when we spoke out from a position of military and economic strength and with the voice of a leader who demonstrated his willingness to back up his words with deeds. Now that we as a country seem to be resolved to back up our words with only more words, well, maybe we should just keep our national mouth shut instead of repeatedly sounding like the neighborhood wimp begging “come on guys, stop it.” Better to stay silent than to make a display our current flaccidity on the international stage.

2. Peeing in Portland. Having spent some time in Portland and having enjoyed many, many of their fine micro brews while I was there, I can understand the overwhelming need to pee at inopportune moments. Apparently yesterday someone else had the same experience, but instead of finding the nearest available tree they followed the altogether more dramatic option of taking a leak in one of the city’s reservoirs. And while that’s bad, I think maybe the city overreacted in their response of dumping 38 million gallons of water literally down the drain. I know the vast majority of us don’t want urine spiked drinking water, but it seems to me that anyone who’s ever used a swimming pool are probably exposed to a much higher concentration of the stuff than the good people of Portland were as a result of this incident. And that doesn’t even take into account the number of non-human critters who have used Portland’s open air reservoirs as an all access restroom. All I’m saying is that sometimes overkill really isn’t the answer… except when something is caught on film and a local water authority wants to show that it’s going the extra mile. My guess, if it hadn’t happened within range of a security camera, no one would have a clue it even happened. Sometimes, we’re all better off that way.

3. Rush Hour. Calling it rush hour might be a little extreme, especially for a guy who use to grind it out on the DC beltway and 95 every morning and afternoon, but lately the flight away from the office here has started taking on that flavor. They’re doing some kind of seemingly random construction outside the fence and the Jersey barriers are apparently just enough to make every driver trying to leave a 4PM forget everything they ever knew about operating a motor vehicle. Where I use to be to the car, out the gate, and pointed the right direction on the highway in under 10 minutes, now 20-25 is the norm. Sure, in the grand scheme, and extra ten or fifteen minutes doesn’t make that much difference, but it’s happening at the end of the day, when I want to be anywhere other than where I am. Really, at that point, anything standing between me and the house is considered a hostile target to be put down, gone around, over, or through. I doubt I’m alone in this feeling, but it’s one of those unnecessarily annoying things that could be alleviated by, oh, I don’t know, opening another gate and a few additional outbound lanes of traffic. Or we can just let departing personnel build themselves into a mile long backup in their daily effort to get away. Apparently that’s fine too.

First line of defense…

Posted on by

There’s no good or diplomatic way to talk about what happened in Washington this morning. Good men and women, faithful servants of the republic, and their families are hurting tonight because of the brazen acts of cowardly few. The discussion will be made political soon enough, but that part of the discussion won’t start here. Not tonight.

Tonight’s post is my simple reminder that no matter how secure we think we are, there’s no substitute for vigilance when it comes to keeping yourself and those around you safe.

– Be aware of your surroundings and remember if something doesn’t look right, it’s not right. Trust your self-preservation instincts.

– Whether you’re in a restaurant, your office, or a driving down a street in your neighborhood, know more than one way out of wherever you are. You never know when Plan B will need to become Plan A.

– Find concealment or cover when it’s called for; Run when it’s called for; Stand and fight when it’s called for. You should know which situation you’re facing and act accordingly.

The world is the world and bad things happen to good people every day. That means it’s up to each one if us to be aware of our surroundings, learn to recognize and react to what looks or feels out of place, and acknowledge that we’re all our own first line of defense when it comes to our health, welfare, and safety.

Not cool…

Posted on by

One of the last things I did before leaving Memphis was add an earthquake rider to my insurance policy. Memphis is prone to periodic rumbles after all and only being on the hook for 10% of replacement cost seemed like a good idea at the time. In Memphis, the next “big one” on the New Madrid fault system is one of those things you pretty much just accept as a possibility but don’t spend much time thinking about. Moving back east, the idea of an earthquake was even further from my mind. I know they happen here too, but only small ones that stay well below the threshold that most of us are able to feel.

Look, I know that everyone is playing this down, but the earth friggin’ moved and not in that nice calming way that it does all the time. The firmament became something less than firm. I’m not ok with that. It’s like rocky road ice cream suddenly tasting like liver and onions and everyone just deciding that it was no big deal. Not cool at all.

I remember feeling the chair move under me and then standing up at my desk watching the lights sway above me. I remember the overwhelming feeling that my equilibrium was just a touch off as the world lurched. I’m not embarrassed to admit that was the point where I bolted for the door. I think you’d all be surprised at the speed with which this fat man can move when he has the proper motivation. It’s for the best that there were no women or children between me and the outside, because I learned this afternoon that when faced with imminent peril, I have no intention of slowing down until there was blue sky and not five floors of concrete above my head. Realistically was anyone expecting me to be the selfless hero directing others to safety? In this case, I think the infantry motto, “follow me,” is the more appropriate course of action… even if I did pause long enough at my desk to pick up my iPad, phone, and building ID card. Just because I’m running for my life doesn’t mean I’m willing to drop off the grid or be stuck in an endless line of people with no ID cards in the morning.

Big old jet airliner…

Posted on by

Other than the obvious work-related foolishness, there really hasn’t been all that much going on this week. I’ve done a little photography in the evenings, but the light wasn’t terribly conducive to getting the long shots that I prefer. I do have a couple from down around the World War II and Lincoln Memorials that turned out much better than expected, though. Hopefully I’ll get them posted when I get back to Memphis and after I’ve had a chance to tweak the color settings a bit. All in all, it’s been a quiet couple of days here in the District. Good hotel, good food, good work. At the moment, I’m at a loss for things to bitch about… and you know how that drives me crazy. Even with that said, I’m ready to hop on that big old jet airliner and get back to the house.