Day 2, A.K. – On this, the second day After KKD opened, I find representatives of two of the few companies making me money in the stock market, while in the local coffee house. Cosmic? Not really – just good timing is all. The guy with KKD had come up to help open the new Milford store; even though it is a franchised place, they have “helpers” that do this for a living, just like most chain companies. While talking to the guy, I learned that the store, while packed yesterday, wasn’t as busy today… only a few people in line at a time.
Continue reading HOT Doughnuts NOW
Category Archives: Rant
It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!
Christmas season? When isn’t it Christmas season is the better question: the stores start putting their decorations up in September (true story! they started in the end of September this year!) and have their projections made long before Halloween. This means that The Season is now Halloween to New Year’s Day – people will bitch and moan about “how things were different when!” and fight it in their own homes, but it’s already a fact. Besides, who can withstand the marketing machines of American retailers? I know can’t. And I know for a fact that everyone of you out there has at least one Ronco “As Seen On TV” product somewhere in your house right now! I’m even willing to give you 100 to 1 odds that it has got something to do with exercise. We’re all victims of the Marketing Machines – besides, Ronco products make a shit load of sense on the TV shopping channels at 3:30am.
Continue reading It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!
World Series Wrap-up (or The Need to Kick in Fox Sports’ Pickles)
I guess you could tip your hats to the Angels. I mean, I won’t be tipping – I’m a Yankees fan and Percival sucks! – but if you’re a fan of the game, it was a neat World Series to watch. First time the Angels have won; they finished 45 games behind the first place Mariner’s last season. Giants made the Angels work for it the whole time; it was their first shot at the title since they moved from Manhattan in the 50’s. Both teams came into the playoffs as the Wild Card team, and they both beat the teams that “shouldn’t have” been beaten. So, in my opinion, they did a hell of a job at their game. Personally, I was hoping that the new random ‘roid testing would have kicked in, disqualifying both teams, and allowing the Yankees to win, by default. Guess it was not to be.
Continue reading World Series Wrap-up (or The Need to Kick in Fox Sports’ Pickles)
26 Days ’til Krispy Kreme of Milford
Connecticut has recently taken its first casualty of Krispy Kreme chaos and quite frankly, I’m tired of hearing about it already. Not the hype, per se – we’ve got another 26 days for the Milford store to open – but about the whining about the hype. See, here’s the deal. KK is one of those home-grown, American phenomenon. There’s no other way to describe it. I’ve known about KK for a long while now – at least the five years or more. It helps having friends in the South, where they seem to know the difference between fast, good food and fast food – if not KK as an example, look at Chick-fil-A – great chicken. Hell, they even get some form of service from their fast food employees down there and, more importantly, their customers are serviceable. What do I mean? There’s a few different things in this Rant already so lets take’m, one at a time.
Continue reading 26 Days ’til Krispy Kreme of Milford
Hope for Retail Service in the Form of a Mermaid
No secret, my dependency on The Bean, but I actually believe that it’s getting worse… much worse over time. How do I figure that? Every morning, on the way to my train station, I stop for coffee. Well, at first, I didn’t even do that. Then I started to go a little out of my way so I could pop into one of the local Dunkin’ Donuts every morning. Now, and for the past five or six months, I’ve been going even more out of my way to pay homage at Starbucks. They keep changing their menu, at least once a quarter, so it’s hard not to stop by often, and the every day thing just sorta happen.
Continue reading Hope for Retail Service in the Form of a Mermaid
Back-to-Back Episodes
I was planning on starting my adventure of reading A Clockwork Orange today – thought I’d take a couple days off from Ranting and this book has got some bizarre vocabulary, so it should be fun – and it seems that cannot be the case. You see this morning, I’ve been handed back to back reasons to have an episode and it’s not even 8 AM yet. Never mind the fact that while I was trying to put on a glove, and holding a latte, that I spoodged it all over my leather jacket – oh and yes, gloves; it would seem that 30-degree weather and a soft top, bare-bones Jeep does not easily offer warm hands on its own, so gloves are required in the colder months. And no, the latte was just a side bar of the day and no cause for an episode – it was just a funny glimpse into my starting day.
Continue reading Back-to-Back Episodes
Parade? Fuggettaboutit!
Event 1: On a recent episode of the Soprano’s, there was a sub plot that saw the Italian Mafia family getting pissed off that Native Americans were protesting the celebration of Christopher Columbus on Columbus Day, based on the fact that Columbus abused the natives of America during the exploration and settlement of North and South America. Italians typically don’t like it when people screw with Columbus Day. Event 2: New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg, decided to invite two of the stars (Braco and Chianese) from the Soprano’s, to walk in the Columbus Day parade this year. Event 3: Every Italian-American group in the city has got their wooden spoons out for a flogging because they are very, very Anti-Mafia. These three things together have made for a number of news stories in the Tri-State area, and this is what will cause today’s Mocking.
Continue reading Parade? Fuggettaboutit!
Permit Me a Moment of Logical Fantasy
Unbridled freedom is something that I believe the human society can never handle. We’re too unstable psychologically and we have the unique knack, more than any of Earth’s other species, of fucking up a wet dream. We’re the only breed of mammals, when faced with a new environment, that will attempt to change the environment instead of adapting to what’s presented. I’m not sure if that makes us resilient or just stupid – regardless of how we look at it, we tend to be better at destroying than creating. And no, this isn’t a plea for Greenpeace or any tree-hugging group… like I said, this is an exercise in logic.
Continue reading Permit Me a Moment of Logical Fantasy
“No Honky fo’ President – Vote fo’ Me!”
I heard this today on the news and I’m mostly hoping it was a hyped up “news byte” or a comment taken out of context. I have to say that I wish I could have hung around to see it for sure, but I had to leave the room, so I missed the rest of the broadcast… according to the lead-in this morning, Al Sharpton wants to be our next President. This is something I can neither believe nor stomach. The man has got to be the most visible and obnoxious racist I know of. Yes, I said the word: racist, because he is one. I’ve never seen a public figure take more scandalous situations under his own wing, solely to exploit them for press exposure and somehow use race to blow it totally out of proportion.
Continue reading “No Honky fo’ President – Vote fo’ Me!”
Rant: Stolen!
I keep a running list of “Rant” ideas. Right now it’s about half filled with GeekStuff ideas, if only because I haven’t the time to write all the much these days… I find that if I don’t have anything acting like a stone in my shoe on the mornings that I do get a chance to type up some stuff, I just go to the list and that usually gets me going on a topic for a while. Well, last night, one of my Rantings made prime-time HBO, before I had a change to publish it! See, about two weeks ago, I was walking into a local Shop Rite and something poked my brain that got me started thinking about the Slave Trade Retribution thing… and I had a pseudo-epiphany. And then I forgot it! My ChiChi can tell ya that much – she’s often a sounding board for Rant ideas – but what I never told her that a few days later I remembered what it was, and I flung it into the To Do list. Suffice to say that my tirade on non-engineers making software took precedence, and now my idea has been out’d. Tony Soprano did it.
Continue reading Rant: Stolen!
Step Away from the Cart!
I’ve always said a clich becomes a clich for a reason. It’s not that there’s a single, solitary group of people that are constantly churning out biased statements or witty sound bites to piss people off. There’s no Clich Board that decided these things. People can formulate their own clichs and the general public seems to be able to strengthen, prove, and endorse them all on their own. If you’ve been reading this site from the beginning, you’ve heard this before, and I’m certain to say it many times over before this site ever dies. Need an example? Cart Jacking.
Continue reading Step Away from the Cart!
*bong*
So, last night I get out of class at about 9 and decide that, as I skipped dinner again, that I wanted some foodstuffs. By the time I get home to my town it’s about 9:15 and most of anything that is still open is mostly ready to close… long lines, skeleton crew, etc. since they close their doors in about 45 minutes. Now I’m thinking, hey… Taco Bell is open late – I was just there last week and they said their Drive Thru is open until midnight on a weeknight. Since I was looking for foodstuffs, as opposed to something defined simply as “food” and requiring silverware (Taco Bell offers sporks!), Taco Bell would do nicely – the quesadillas are mostly real food! In the attempt at dinner last week, I spent about 15 minutes the Drive Thru line – they were that crowded. As I waited, I’m seeing people pick up their food, and since TB has that external “Pay this Amount” thing going on, I see the people in front ordering $10 to $20 worth of food. Now, if you’re unfamiliar with TB, $20 worth of food from their menu is nearly impossible.
Continue reading *bong*
Warning: New Weather is A-Comin’
This past year, the weather has finally gotten to me. This comes as a surprise to myself because one of the reasons why I like New England is the varied seasons. For those of you not from the area, we typically get all four, with winter and summer sometimes bleeding into spring and fall respectively. I personally like spring and fall the most, which is why I have an attraction to San Diego – perpetual Spring. Anyway, the last decade or so seem to have shortened springs and falls, but not too bad. The fact is that in addition to the “nice” weather of sun and clouds, at any given time, we can have any of the following weather snafus…
Continue reading Warning: New Weather is A-Comin’
Patriot’s Day
Well, it’s one year later. How could you miss it, actually. The media, as usual, has over done an obvious point… All of the channels around here are pulling a full 24 hours of remembrance and memorials and services. What I can’t tell is whether or not it’s because I live so close to New York or not. I mean I haven’t heard much more than a blurb or two on the PA crash and I think the government wants to let us forget that the Pentagon was ever damaged. What I hear most of is NYC – obviously the hardest hit, but it’s also about 80 or 90 miles away from where I work, so I do wonder if our closeness to the city is what’s making it so “in our faces”; we could see the smoke and dust clouds rising from one of our neighboring buildings… So what was Sept 11, 2001 for a programmer working so near, yet so far, from NYC?
Continue reading Patriot’s Day
Last In, First Out?
Heard a good little news bite on the radio today… one that derailed what I had originally planned to write about this morning (by the way, I’m back to work, so once I forget that I ever took a vacation (which should be by 9am this morning) things should return to normal) and this is probably more a rave than Rant, because I’m pretty impressed.
Continue reading Last In, First Out?