End of summer rants

With the two college girls gone and the beginning of the work week sparking the annual thought of “another summer shot to hell” echoing in my mind, it’s time to release some built up rants:

• Why I hate Christmas rant: It’s Labor Day weekend — so why in the hell did my wife receive a Christmas catalog in the mail THREE WEEKS AGO. (I kid you not.)
• Road rant 1: In about three minutes and in the space of one block after stopping at the courthouse last week, I saw (1) a guy pulled into the crosswalk on a red light and, after a couple seconds, turning left against the light despite traffic going the direction he was turning and at least half a dozen pedestrians in the crosswalk; (2) three vehicles entering a parking lot via a driveway marked “EXIT ONLY” that I was approaching to leave the parking lot (silly me); and, (3) the guy ahead of me in the “left turn only” lane who had no intention of turning and blithely proceeded straight ahead.
• Road rant 2: If you want to get some hate on, spend about an hour traveling on I-80 with its surfeit of semis. It’s certainly the result of a comparative few semi drivers, but their actions indicate they apparently believe any passenger vehicles that dare try to also use the interstate are merely an impedance that deserve no consideration.
• Media rant 1: What does the Argus have against girls volleyball? Last Thursday, four of the five Sioux Falls high schools had matches against another. That led to a picture on the front of Friday’s sports section (with one of the three girls in it misidentified) and five paragraphs of text in the “Sports Briefs,” including one totaling six words. Meanwhile, there was about 20 column inches on one of the high school football teams and probably one and a half times that on the SDSU football team’s bus trip to Illinois. I don’t even have a daughter playing but I am awfully tired of the way the paper treats the sport.
• Computer rant: I’m far from a computer idiot. Yet why is it I can NEVER get a bittorrent client to actually download? I have tried a handful of different clients over the last couple years. Not one has ever downloaded a file or done more than indicate it would take several days to do so. The most recent one told me it will take 10 days to complete a 1.2 GB download of 30 files. This is despite the fact that, as with other clients, I reconfigured my router and my firewall per the particular client’s instructions.
• Media rant 2: Lately, I noticed a drastic change in the arrival of my New York Times Book Review. For the several years I’ve subscribed, it normally arrived a day or two before its appearance in the Sunday NYT. This summer, though, it started showing up anywhere from four to 13 days after the publication date, with one issue occasionally arriving a week after one with a later publication date. When I went to the NYT website to inquire, I learned that at some point this summer two delivery levels were created. One is “surface mail” at $1.25 a week, which purportedly means the review will arrive “two days after the publication date.” Or, for $2.70 a week, there is “priority mail” which theoretically will get the review to me “1 – 2 days earlier.” I don’t think getting the review delivered on the same schedule I’ve had for years is worth a 116 percent increase in price, especially since my experience this summer is wholly contrary to what is promised. What is much more likely is the subscription will be allowed to lapse when it is up for renewal several weeks from now.

Title of Dennis Miller’s third book