The Gas-Guzzling Carpool Lane
Dear Environmentalists,
If there were ever a movement with its heart in the right place but a slew of half-cocked ideas, it would be yours. I agree that we should protect the earth, but I don’t think burning fossil fuels, throwing up tons of CO2 and creating a toxic sludge to protect a renewable resource and prevent biodegradable waste is all that bright.
But hey, recycle paper if you want to. It’s your right.
No, my question today revolves around yet another one of your mainstays, the HOV lane, AKA: The Carpool lane.
I have to wonder whether or not those of you behind this idea actually thought it all of the way through. Because, thanks to this invention. I am actually using twice the gas, sending up twice the CO2 and generally screwing the environment twice as bad
Don’t believe me, consider the following:
Water… Water… I Need Water.
Dear Sewage & Water Board,
As a long-time New Orleans resident, I’ve become sadly adapted to the results of political and civic incompetence. High crime, pothole-lined roads, malfunctioning stoplights, the usual. I realized some time ago that this city is run by the same 1000 monkey that, supposedly, can hammer out the works of Shakespeare if you leave them alone with typewriters.
But you, S&WB, have always been a particularly foul mark on the city. You’ve always been known for high rates, bad customer service and undrinkable water. It is no wonder that Kentwood bottles its water here, there are so many locals desperate for real water, they can make bank just reminding us what real H20 tastes like.
But today you broke new ground. Today you provided service so bad, so awful, that I actually WISHED I had access to your dirty-tasting water. That’s right, you disconnected my water. Why? Because of a stupid form.
No warning, No call. Not even a knock to let me know they’re turning it off. Just a dishwasher sounding like a cat had crawled in it.
So, if you have a moment, I’d like to tell my story and I hope you will listen to it and learn from it…
I Want the Wii I was Promised
Dear Video Game Developers,
I read in a recent article that many of you have finally woken up to the popularity of the Wii and decided to shift resources to developing for it.
I think that’s great news. Sure, it took you the better part of a year to catch on but, hey, that’s still faster than FEMA right?
But since you’re throwing all of those millions of dollars toward the Wii, I’d like to make a very small, humble request/recommendation on how to spend it: I want the Wii experience I was promised when I bought it.
To prove my point, let me tell you a story.
My Life Without Flash Player
Dear Adobe,
It seems that your Flash Player for Intel-based Macs has a pretty serious problem. Whenever I first start out using it, things start off fine but, as time wears on, my browser moves slower and slower until it eventually hangs altogether, destroying whatever I was working on at the time.
I can confirm definitively that the problem is with your player. How? I tested it on nine, count them nine, different browsers (Safari, Webkit, Firefox, Flock, OmniWeb, Shiira, Opera, Netscape and Camino). For anyone who is counting, that is four Webkit and four Gecko browsers along with Opera.
Every single one of those browsers experienced the exact same problem. They’d run great for a while, slow after visiting a few sites with Flash and then die an undignified death.
The only thing that made the problem go away was uninstalling Flash player or disabling the plugin, two things I had been hesitant to do.
Worse still, your own support section makes me pine for Microsoft support. Your guide on troubleshooting Flash Player on Intel Macs has only one suggestion, running the browser in Rosetta and using Flash 8. Great, rather than you fixing your stupid plugin, I have to slow my entire browser to a painful crawl and use an outdated version of Flash.
No thanks.
Here’s to John Lovitz, My New Hero
Dear John Lovitz,
You are my new hero. If you have a fan club, I want to become a member, scratch that, I want two memberships and I’ll pay for them both.
When I read on Digg yesterday that you used Andy Dick’s head to polish a comedy club bar, my spirits actually lifted. I’m not a violent person, I don’t believe in using force against your fellow man, but this is not a fellow man we’re talking about, it’s Andy Dick.
What you did wasn’t just a matter of standing up for your departed friend Phil Hartman, you stood up for every decent human being in the world that has been tormented by his antics over the years. Between licking Carrie Fisher’s face, peeing in front of a reporter, Groping Ivanka Trump and doing more drink and drugs than I care to think about, Andy has exhibited every deplorable human behavior imaginable (and a few that weren’t imaginable before he did them) and has faced no ill consequences for them.
That is, until you, Mr. Lovitz, stepped in.
