Peeve Time
I’m back from a relaxing chunk of time off during Christmas. Lots of good gifts given and received, lots of good time with family, and lots of snow here in Kansas City, our first white Christmas in a few years. Being from Boston originally, I’m a traditional white Christmas kind of guy. Seeing a lot of brown grass out there Christmas morning always strikes me as wrong, so this year had a special vibe going for it.
Anyway, I hope everyone out there had as good a holiday as I did. I know it’s the season of giving and all, but I’ve got a few peeves to get off my chest that have piled up during the break.
- Please, if you’re going to put old cartoon characters in a new series or commercial, get a reasonable imitation of the original voice. I recall a Flintstones Christmas special where the Fred voice was so far off as to make a mockery of the original. They just showed a new AFLAC commercial with the claymation characters from “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer“, and almost every voice was way off. The worst was whatever dude they hired to be Yukon Cornelius. It was pitiful. Don’t ruin my childhood memories with this stuff. It feels sacrilegious.
- Tip to drivers in Kansas City: I know you don’t drive in snow all that much, but when we do get a few flakes, please have the common courtesy to clear the snow off your back window before driving off down the road. Not only are you making it patently obvious that you never look out your back window, and therefore don’t really know much about driving, but you’re also creating a hazard for everyone who follows you, as the snow blows off your car and blinds them. Try driving 35 or 40 miles per hour on a ridiculously bright day with the sun reflecting off the snow on the ground, only do it with zero visibility because some fool in front of you is streaming a mini-blizzard behind him. If you don’t have an ice scraper/snow brush in your car and you live in a part of the country that gets snow, all you’re doing is advertising that you’re either an inconsiderate prick or an idiot.
- I can’t stand it when I remember things from my childhood that no one else does. A few years ago, while eating lunch with some co-workers, I mentioned a Christmas special from when I was a kid that wasn’t shown anymore. It was called “Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey“. I explained to them that it was the story of the little donkey that Mary rode on her way to Bethlehem to give birth to Jesus. Nestor, the donkey, had enormously long ears that he wrapped around Mary to keep her warm on a frigidly cold night. My co-workers looked at me like I had rhubarb growing out of my nose. Every one of them thought I was lying, and I had to find a VHS tape of that old special on eBay, buy it and bring it to work to prove that I was serious. (And win a couple of bets. Ha!) This year’s candidate is from “The Six Million Dollar Man“. My wife and I were telling our kids about that show and I said I thought the show jumped the shark when they introduced the bionic sasquatch. Knowing me for as long as she has, my wife was pretty sure I hadn’t made up the bionic sasquatch from scratch, but she had no recollection of it at all. I had to look up this website to refresh her memory. Geez that’s irritating. How can something that was such a distinctive part of my childhood be forgotten by so many people? I mean, there was an action figure and everything!
- Um, is it just me, or does it seem that Corbin Bernsen thinks that he really is a lawyer? He’s got these ads running where he’s the celebrity spokesperson for some outfit called Advantage Tax Resolution, and he seems to be channeling his old “L.A. Law” character. It’s disconcerting, so much so that it made me wonder if he really was a tax lawyer before he became an actor. I had to look up his IMDB profile to find out that he’s just delusional. Or maybe he’s just desperate for money to support his snow globe fetish. Talk about disconcerting.
Filed under: Aging, Christmas, Family, Kids, Parenting, People, Television | Tagged: bionic sasquatch, Corbin Bernsen, driving in snow, Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey, Pet peeves, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Six Million Dollar Man, snow globes, voice overs, Yukon Cornelius
In the Philadelphia area, it’s almost a given when it snows one of the hazards will include those morons who don’t make any effort at all towards trying to clear their cars after having sat out in a snow and/or ice storm. Dodging chunks of frozen white stuff at 65-75 mph is quite an art form, but most of us who do properly prepare our vehicles prior to setting out on these occasions have gotten the hang of dealing with “the others.” There is the occasional accident here and there which gets the region’s attention for a moment or two, but they fail to leave a lasting impression and change the behavior pattern of the “blizzard makers.”