Christine the Curmudgeon

Christine the Curmudgeon thinks that the Coors beer people consider us to be pretty damned stupid.

During the Red Sox games, I’ve been seeing a lot of commercials for Coors Light beer.  Their latest gimmick is something they call a “cold activated can”.  The little picture of the Rocky Mountains on the can turns from white to blue when the beer is “certifiably cold”.

Seriously…have people gotten so stupid that they don’t know when their damned beer is cold enough?  What’s next?  Color-changing ink on water faucets to let you know when the water is hot enough to wash with, or cold enough to drink?

Christine the Curmudgeon’s method for determining beer coldness – listen very carefully, now!

Open fridge.  Remove a beer.  As you hold said beer in your hand, ask yourself *does this beer feel cold?*  If yes, pop open and enjoy.  If not, put it back in and reach for one that is further in the back of the fridge, it’s usually colder back there.  Now, how hard is that?

Coors Light is swill beer anyway.  That’s why they have to come up with stupid gimmicks like this one.  Beer that actually tastes good will talk about stuff like the quality of the barley and hops they use in it.

A lot of advertising during sporting events is aimed at the lowest common denominator.  As a sports fan, it’s kind of insulting.  But I just try to ignore it as much as I can.

Christine the Curmudgeon has just come upon this little tidbit…a guy who is just 29 years old, and has 21 kids, by at least 11 different mothers.

What the hell is wrong with these people?  Yes, this guy is an irresponsible loser, but so are the women who continue to procreate with him.  Some of these women have more than one kid by this guy, even knowing about all his other children and their mothers.  What did they expect?  Did they REALLY expect this guy, who works at a minimum wage job, to be able to support all of these kids?  The state can only take half his paycheck, and, once divided up amongst 21 kids, there’s barely enough for each to feed a goldfish.

If there were ever a case for forced sterilization, this would be it.  This guy is a total skeeveball who should have wrapped the sausage a long time ago.  A minimum wage job isn’t even enough to support ONE child, never mind 21.

And are these women, the ones who sleep with and breed with this guy, so desperate for a man that they will do it with anyone who comes along?  Especially the mothers of his younger kids…they need a serious beating with the cluebat to see that this guy is NOT good husband/father material.  The mothers of the first couple of kids get a pass, because he didn’t have all these kids then, and so they may not have known at the time what a skeeve he really is.  But any woman after that, especially anyone who slept with him after he left for some other woman, and then came back…a beating with the cluebat is in order here.

I find it hard to believe that this guy could ever be a good father, and I also can’t believe that he remembers all of his kids’ names and birthdays.  He’s too busy going out for yet another unprotected booty call.  If he wanted to be a responsible father, he’d have wrapped the sausage a long time ago, when he had much fewer kids, so that he could concentrate on them, to give them the best life he could.  Instead, he was too busy spreading his seed all over the place.

This whole situation is disgusting.  DO NOT HAVE MORE CHILDREN IF YOU CAN’T/WON’T TAKE CARE OF THE ONES THAT ARE ALREADY HERE!

Christine the Curmudgeon has noticed that in some cases, official rules are enforced for some people, but not others.  And sometimes, this can be very good.

For example, the hospital the Mr. C is in does have established visiting hours.  I was never aware of this, because I’ve been able to come and go as I please, and no one has ever asked me to leave.  But yes, they do sometimes make an announcement as to when visiting hours are about to be over, time to go, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

At first you’d wonder…why have this rule if they are only going to enforce it for some and not for others.  Then today, it occurred to me why this is so.

It’s the weekend, people have off from work, and therefore have time to bundle up the whole fam damily and go and visit Grandma/Grandpa in the hospital.  So it was rather loud on good old 6 West this afternoon, so many big family groups, complete with little kids who were bored and did not want to be there.

We don’t have a problem with this so much in the afternoon.  As long as these little kids stay with their parents and out of our room, it’s cool.  We had our TV on pretty loud this afternoon anyway, because the Red Sox game was on.  Most of 6 West had the game on.

But if not for *visiting hours*, how many of these groups would NEVER leave?  When it gets to be 10-11PM, these little kids will get even more tired and cranky, and meltdowns will ensue.  When it gets this late, patients want to go to sleep.  So, come 9PM or so, if there are a lot of these loud groups visiting, someone makes an announcement over the P.A., and they have to leave.

However, I’m always told that I can stay.  Why?  Probably because I’m the spouse of the patient, for one thing.  And also because it’s just me, and most people wouldn’t even know I was there unless they came into the room to look.

Also, I suspect it’s also because I don’t go around annoying the crap out of the nurses every five minutes.  If Mr. C wants a glass of water and he doesn’t feel like getting up to get it himself, I’ll get it for him.  No need to bother a nurse or an assistant for something like that.  But I bet some people do.  We’ll only ring for a nurse when it’s something that I can’t take care of myself.

And when a nurse needs to come in and do something, I just try to stay out of the way while s/he is doing it.  But I can only imagine some of the outrageous demands that patients’ family members make of medical staff.
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Another example of selective enforcement takes place in fast food restaurants and the like.  Back when I lived and worked in Washington D.C., there was a HUGE problem with homeless people.  Still is, as far as I know.

I used to eat at places like McDonald’s and Wendy’s back in the day.  Just about every one of these fast food places in downtown D.C. had a *30-minute rule*.  You were only allowed to occupy a table for half an hour, after that, you were out the door.

Then I started to notice that they only enforced this with certain people.  If you were dressed in professional office wear, and you lingered over your coffee and paper for more than 30 minutes, no one ever said anything.  They only seemed to give the boot to people who appeared to be homeless, as in they were dressed in clothes that other people would throw out, and had a very distinct body odor.  Even someone dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt would be left alone, as long as they were clean and well-behaved.

This may sound like discrimination, but really, who wants to eat in a place where the guy at the next table hasn’t bathed in who knows how many weeks? There is no better form of appetite suppression than having to sit next to someone who not only smells bad, but probably has disgusting table manners, as well.

I used to like to go to the Wendy’s on 20-somethingth and M Streets in D.C.  But I stopped going in there when this skeevy bum guy kept coming in, and would go from table to table, demanding money, cigarettes, etc.  In this case, the management would do nothing about this.  Then it got through the bum grapevine that this Wendy’s was a safe haven, that no one would be kicked out, and they could harass customers for  money and smokes.   I suspect that some people gave them stuff just to get rid of them.  So more bums came.  I never gave them anything because one, I don’t smoke, and two, at the time, I needed every dime I made to pay my own bills.  And three, I’m not going to enable this kind of behavior.

I’m sure others stopped going in there, as well.  And I was not surprised to see, a few months later, that the place had closed down.

Now, if only someone would do something about malodorous, unwashed people on the MBTA!

At least Christine the Curmudgeon thinks so!

As you may know, Mr. C is in the hospital.  But he is in a very nice hospital, the Lahey Clinic, in Burlington, MA.  Before he switched all of his medical care to this place, he used to go to a place that I like to call The Hospital From Hell.

The latter truly was a hellhole.  The last time Mr. C was there, he was ignored for days while I went out of town, and was even left to sit in his own waste.  The rooms are drafty, and the heat doesn’t work properly.  The damned TV didn’t even work properly, and that was something we had to pay extra for!

And the food was damned awful, both what they served the patients, and what they had in their cafeteria for everyone else.  The cafeteria food is so bad that not even the people who worked there would eat it.  More often than not, I’d run into the Papa Gino’s delivery guy in the elevator, making yet another delivery of better food for staff members.

I can personally vouch for the bad food.  I got sick from it a couple of times.  I’ve also seen stuff like moldy bread sitting around.  Gross!  So I started getting my meals from Papa Gino’s, too.  Papa Gino’s is not gourmet cuisine, but it is perfectly good pizzas and subs and such.

Anyhoo, the hellhole hospital has been having money problems.  Maybe, just, maybe, it has something to do with the fact that this place was a hellhole long before the current recession started, and that people are waking up and realizing that there are better hospitals to go to?  Ya think?

The Lahey Clinic is a palace compared to the hellhole.  It’s not fancy, as in that they have marble vessel sinks and gold-plated faucets in all of the bathrooms. It’s nice in that the place is much better maintained, things all work as they should, and the food is a million times better.

No, seriously.  The cafeteria at this place is so good, that people who work there actually eat there.  That means that they are selling food and making money, or at least breaking even.  They don’t feel they have to serve spoiled tuna salad with moldy bread, because there is enough of a turnover so that very little does go bad.

It takes a bit more effort and expense to have a better cafeteria, but I believe it truly pays off.  Not only is there a higher number of staff who eat there (as opposed to going to one of the restaurants at the nearby shopping mall), but it’s also an inviting place for visitors like me.  And it’s people like me who will come away with a positive feeling about the place, and then talk about it on blogs like this one.

Being in the hospital is stressful enough, not just for patients, but for their families, as well.  Doing little things like making the place attractive, and having good food to eat, go a long way in reducing that stress.

Maybe if the hellhole wasn’t such a hellhole, perhaps their financial problems would not be as bad as they are.

Or DMV, or whatever the place you are forced to go to for drivers license stuff is called where you live.

Seriously…Christine the Curmudgeon has read that four states have now adopted this *no-smiles* policy.  As you can see here, some people think it’s stupid.

But what I want to know is…WHY IS THIS EVEN AN ISSUE?  I mean, who is actually happy enough at the RMV to even WANT to smile?

I had to go last year to get my license renewed.  Here in Massachusetts, we have to renew every five years.  We are allowed to renew online every other time, but every ten years, we have to go to the dreaded RMV to do it, and get a new mug shot taken and all.

I’ll give the Mass RMV the fact that they have improved their service greatly over the years.  But it’s still always hell on earth to have to go there.  First you have to wait in this long-assed line, with your necessary paperwork in hand, in order for someone to enter your info so you know where to wait.  90% of people do NOT have their paperwork ready, which delays this line greatly.

I was in this line for over an hour, and I seriously had to pee by the time there were only ten people in front of me.  But I came this far, I HAD to hold itin, or get back into the line and start all over again.

I finally was processed, told where to go and wait, and given a receipt that said that I had another 35 minutes of waiting.  But the first thing I did was go find the restroom.  The ladies’ room was out of commission.  But when I gotta go, I gotta go, so I went into the men’s room.  Some old lady glared at me as I exited said men’s room.  I didn’t care.

The 35 minute wait was accurate, but the entire time was hell.  I was just sitting there, minding my business and trying to read, but had to put up with screaming, rambunctious brats, people who didn’t bathe, and more old people who were lonely and wanted to talk.  I just wanted to be left alone, wait my turn, do my business, and get the hell out of there.

So, this, my friends, is why my current drivers license looks like this…

I think it looks like a mug shot from jail, and not much like me at all.  It looks like I spent the night before sleeping on a wooden board, and not a nice comfy sleep number bed. It also doesn’t help that Massachusetts now has this dumb rule about making people take their glasses off during the taking of the mug shot.  Even if you have a restriction on said license that corrective lenses are required in order to drive.

I mean, I have to wear my glasses all the time in public.  So why be forced to have an ID with a pic that doesn’t look like me.

I’m getting really tired of explaining this to beer vendors at baseball parks.  They require EVERYBODY to show ID.  A few people look at the mug shot, look at me, and wonder if this is really my ID or not.  This only happens outside of MA, where I assume the laws are much less stupid than they are here.  I am tired of explaining to people that MA has a dumb *no glasses* rule.

The *no smiling* rule that other states have is supposed to help reduce identity theft.  I can sorta see that.  But, the *no-glasses* rule is just stupid.  Many people really do look a LOT different with glasses than without!.

pic of me taken about two months ago

One day, I might be accused to stealing my own identity, that pic looks SO not like the way I usually look!