Unprepared People

I think these are somewhere in between a Seinfeld "What's the deal with..." or a Carlin "You ever notice that..".

A year ago I renewed my drivers' licence. I looked up on the internet what was needed to do so and I downloaded the form and filled it in and had it signed before I even got to the registry office. Since my birthday is July 1st, the first long weekend of the summer, and since I falsely assumed that if I got there at a reasonable hour before closing that I could simply waltz in, I was shocked that people were lined up out the door. Other people were filling in forms in line and some even did squat until they were right up to the person at the booth.

People who made a valiant effort to fill in the forms were guided by the office staff. Those who got all the way to the booth having done nothing were told to go fill out their forms and they had to go right back to the back of the line.

When I finally got there the clerk said to me "It's prepared people like you who get screwed by people who put no thought into it".

Other people (a friend pointed this out to me) line up at Starbucks and put no thought into what they might like to order until they hear the words "can I help you?". They may be related to the people at the licence bureau, or one and the same.

I used to see this beautiful young woman on the bus most mornings. In places where I see the same people every day I mentally give them all nicknames like "Janet" (beacause she looks like a "Janet", whatever the fuck that means), "Mary Tyler Moore" , and "The Snow Bunny" (a lovely young redhead I first saw all bundled up in the dead of winter".

One that I used to see that I am thinking of here I called "Boobsie" because they were huge and either fake or in a push-up bra and she wore tight sweaters and made it clear to the universe that she wanted them looked at by as many men as possible. Anyway, Ms. "B" would often miss the bus, I would see her running as the bus pulled away, or if she didn't, she would be totally winded as she would just have made it in time. Ony then would she remember that a fare or pass was required to ride the bus. She would sit down and root through her purse and find either a ticket or the correct change. Then, she would get out her make-up kit and start applying all of her make-up (I guess while us bus folk were important enough to have her breasts on full display for us, her face was another matter). I was amazed at the way she would stick a mascara brush right in her eyelashes, while the bus (and as would have her boobs had they not been fake or pushed-up) bounced up and down. She managed to do it every day!

With some planning in her life, maybe she could have gone places - maybe even a job at the licence bureau or Starbucks!

TF

Euphemisms - The Other Side

I hate eupemisms especially those that are designed to conceal the fact that a nation or an organization is doing some nasty things to a group of people.

I had lost both of my two front by the time I was 10. You can do root canals a few times but at some point after more than 3 decades there is no tooth left. So I have been faced with a new solution. One is an implant for each tooth which is expensive and does not always work. The cheaper solution is to get a "permanent denture". While I liked it being far cheaper, just the word "denture" conjured up images of my grandmother going to bed with her teeth in a glass on her night table. I was just not prepared to admit that a I am well down the path to someday being old.

I think maybe "appliance", a total euphemism for sure, may have sounded nicer. How about "Freedom Crown"?

TF

Hill Street Blues

What with shows like "Green Acres" and "Gilligan's Island" being released on DVD, I wondered for longest time if not just silly 60s shows were ever going to be released but if great shows like "L.A. Law" would get their turn.

Back a few years a cable channel ran "Hill Street Blues" but ony the last 2 years of the series. I had always wondered what it might have been like when it began.

This spring Seasons 1 and 2 were released. I watched them all.

Have you ever seen a movie and you wanted to see it so badly and you built up expectations so high that you were disappointed when you saw it?

Einstein said that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stanger than we can imagine.

Seasons 1 and 2 o f HSB was better than I could have imagined.

It started in 1981 and while the content of the shows is old hat by now, and nothing seems new to us in 2006, it did many things for the first time. I was still going to be in high school for more than a year in January 1981, that's how far back that is.

These days for a drama there is at least one recovering alcoholic. Captain Furillo was the first alcoholic to not only be treated like a real person, he was in fact the star of the show. One of his detectives, LaRue, is following the same path. In the 70s and before, on TV drunks were clowns like Foster Brooks, or in the movies like Dudley Moore. They didn't live next door or work with us.

A few things have changed since 1981. Bobby Hill, a black uniform, is subject to comments by people that may have seemed harmless at the time (nobody is burning crosses on his lawn) but which read as pure racism in 2006. Hill is in a funeral parlour where the director shows him the top of the line casket and says "This is the cadillac of caskets , especially popular among your people".

Your people.

Michael Conrad, Sgt Esterhaus, was one of the main characters but Conrad died in 1983 so I had never seen him before. I still remember him as Meathead's Uncle Stan on "All in the Family".

The cascade of actors that passed through the show, and I am doing this off of the top of my head, not searching IMDB: Dennis Franz, Barbara Babcock, Francis McDormand, Jon Cypher, Michael Tucker, Peter Jurasick, Danny Glover, C C H Pounder, David Caruso...

Like good drama, say Shakespeare, and good TV, say Six Feet Under, even though the drive of the show is serious, it is also FUNNY.

Oh, yeah I like the show.

P.S. In Spanish the show is "Capitiane Furillo" I guess the Enlgish title does not translate very well.


TF