National Curmudgeon Day is Coming!

Christmas? Thank the Overlords of Conspicuous Consumption, that’s over. Bah Humbug. You want a holiday really worth celebrating? Make it January 29th, National Curmudgeon Day. Celebrate the cranky, grumpy, crotchety, tetchy, moody and difficult. Honor the great institution of Curmudgeonry.

Why? Because curmudgeonry is not simply a matter of being ill-tempered. Curmudgeons are champions of contrarian truth, bucking the mindless euphoria of pop-culture drivel. They will declare what others are too afraid, polite or mentally lazy to say. Yes, we risk the ire of others by not toeing the company line and attacking sacred cows. For instance, most curmudgeons know Kim Kardashian is just a talentless fame-whore, trading on her looks, and will say so. We also figured out the “American Dream” is more of a mind-anesthetizing PR campaign than a political aspiration. And we don’t care if pork is the “other white meat.” Who would anyway?

There is a grain of truth to the old bromide, “Ignorance is bliss,” which make the opposite equally true. Curmudgeons, engaged and enraged, know the BS of life all too well. And we’re not buying it. We will not be conned by the feel-good conventional wisdom of lemming-minded mobs.

Yes, some will condemn us as killjoys. Not true.  Some of our greatest humorists have been curmudgeons. Think of Mark Twain, Andy Rooney, George Carlin and Lewis Black. Comedy and criticism have a sincere ying-yang relationship. (Just as long as you keep your ying away from my yang.)

Celebrate diversity, not just of people, but also of opinion. Yes, we criticize and complain. Why? Because we want something better for ourselves and others, too.

So crank on and celebrate National Curmudgeon Day!

Click on the image to left for Curmudgeon Day products.

If blatant commercialism is good enough for Christmas, why not make some cranky coin ourselves?

Groundhog Humiliation Day

Unfortunately, National Curmudgeon Day is over. What’s the next big holiday? I have to wince when revealing this one: Groundhog Day on February 3rd. Of course, if you like dressing up in top hats and have a fetish for small wildlife, then I guess this is the holiday for you.

Honestly, what is the purpose of this strange observance? A man wearing a top hat holds up a drugged-up groundhog and makes some long-winded declaration about how much longer Winter is going to last. If you want to know how long Winter is going to last, just look at a damn calendar.

The whole enterprise sounds like something akin to voodoo, witchcraft or party politics. Honestly, how would you know if the groundhog saw his shadow? How does he indicate shadow recognition? What if it’s a near-sighted groundhog? Or, maybe it’s simply distracted by all the idiots in top hats staring at him.

What I’d like to know is where are all those animal rights people who go on about the dignity of animals? Really, is there anything dignified about being grabbed by a man in a top hat? Now, being grabbed by a woman in a top hat is something else, but that has nothing to do with dignity.

Crank on.

Today’s Rant: Legalizing Marijuana

Recently, the media made big deal about the President’s comments about Marijuana and Colorado’s legalization of it. I’ll skip all “Rocky Mountain High” jokes. What I can’t believe is the series of sad rationalizations used:

“Oh, it’s no worse than alcohol.” Oh, that’s a relief. Just tell that to someone who lost a loved one to a drunk driver. At least, they have tests to determine blood alcohol levels. No such test exists for Marijuana.

As far as the medical risks, I’ll admit there hasn’t been a lot of testing on marijuana. But what harm could come from sucking untested chemicals into your lungs?

When you think about it, Marijuana is sort of a cross between drinking and smoking. Alcohol impairs your judgment, while tobacco could give you cancer. So let’s just combine these in a single product. Very efficient. You might get cancer, but you’ll be too stoned to care. What a freaking great idea!

“Imagine all the tax revenue it’ll generate.” You can always count on some idiot who earned a C-minus in economics class to perpetuate this one. Listen, if people weren’t buying pot, they’d buy something else that’s being taxed. If it moves, sits or stands, the government will tax it. Don’t worry about the government finding something to tax. I hear there’s a cranky blog tax coming soon.

“By making it legal, we’d lower crime.” Well, if we legalized murder, embezzlement, rape and kidnapping, the crime rate would come down so fast, we’d have to yell, “timber!”

“We’ll put the drug cartels out of business.” When I hear this one, I know somebody’s three acres short of a family farm. Really? You think a bunch of hard-ass drug kingpins are going to roll over, because they’re getting a little competition from the private sector. Putting any violent counter-measures aside for a moment, they’re just going to push their other product lines harder. You know, crack, meth, heroine, and some I’ve probably never heard of.

What I suspect is someone decided we had a shortage of stupid people and wanted to increase the supply. You know, with the munchies, think of the increased sales of snacks. I wonder if the Colorado-Marijuana initiative can be traced back to the snack-food industry? (I’m sure corporate America always has our best interests at heart.)

By all means, let’s encourage people’s worst natures. What this really means is the geographic epicenter of impaired judgement will be moving from Washington, DC to Colorado.

So, when I say “get off my grass,” I don’t mean smoke someone else’s.

Crank on.

Bagel with a Schmear

I do love a good bagel. And I don’t mean those mass produced, white-bread, bagged things from the supermarket. I mean a freshly made bagel from a proper bagel shop.
As any connoisseur of bagels knows, the best complement to a quality bagel is cream cheese. Some nova or lox doesn’t hurt either. Salmon-infused cream cheese or “salmon spread” as they would call it, is also acceptable. But, if you’re putting peanut butter and jelly on a bagel, don’t talk to me. Next, you’ll be putting ketchup on ice cream.

Last week at the bagel shop, a young woman ordered vegetable spread. I asked her if she actually liked it. “Well, it’s healthier,” she said. My feeling is if you’re ordering vegetable spread to feel healthier, then just eat a damn salad. Vegetable spread isn’t going to lower your cholesterol or make it “heart healthy.” Cream cheese has one dietary purpose: to clog arteries. It even has the consistency of spackle, just to give you a hint. The mental games people play.

However, being a contrarian, I don’t want to clog my arteries. So, I ask for a “schmear” of cream cheese, which means a thin coating. More cream cheese doesn’t mean more taste. Schmear is the Germanic word, from which we derive “smear,” which is most likely heard in Yiddish.

Unfortunately, the minimum-wage teenagers don’t understand the schmear concept, as they grew up in the “supersize me” generation that always thinks more is better. Things like cholesterol and moderation are beyond their ken. (And yes, they think ken is Barbie’s boyfriend.)

So instead, I now explicitly ask for “a smear of cream cheese only about a millimeter thick.” But given the poor state of our education system, they have no grasp of metric either. So instead, I receive the usual massive glob of cream cheese that oozes out when the slightest pressure is applied to the top and bottom sections of the bagel. So then, I have to ask for a second bagel and a knife, do some redistribution and spackling, and save the extra bagel for later.

Life is so damn complicated. Crank on.

Where Are the Communists When You Need Them?

Recently, 34 United States Air Force officers have been accused of cheating on a monthly exam that tests their knowledge of missile launch systems, the kind of thing you really don’t want to make a mistake on. This is just yet another in a list of embarrassments, which includes safety lapses and binge drinking. Binge drinking? Who do they think they are, Congress?

Frankly, since the Cold War ended, we’ve let our guard down. By winning, we’ve lost our edge. What we really need is a good enemy to keep us on our toes.

True, nobody likes or trusts Vladimir Putin. Yes, he has the old KGB gravitas. But let’s be honest; the modern Russia hasn’t been the bogeyman the old USSR was. We did great things in the name of battling the Evil Empire–not always good things, but great things. We built arsenals and backyard bomb shelters. We ducked and covered. We even collected moon rocks, just to show up those damn commies. Now, we depend on the Russians to taxi us to our own space station! (Yes, I know it’s the international space station, but never let mere facts get in the way of a good rant.)

But I suspect the communists are still with us, just more insidious. They’re using capitalism and market-demand economics against us. They’re getting our children addicted to video games, text messaging and social media, inducing a collective Attention Deficit Disorder, making them care more about Kardashians than the real realities. They’re softening us up, so they can strike back. Yes, The Empire Strikes Back! Who would have thought it? (Okay, George Lucas, but besides him?)

Why should we blame the communists? Well, if we didn’t, we’d have to take a long, hard look in the mirror. And no one wants that.

 

Welcome to the Curmudgeon Files

As you might have guessed from the title, I’m a bit of a curmudgeon. Just ask my wife as she rolls her eyes. You can even ask her when she’s not rolling her eyes. She’s very flexible that way.

I believe curmudgeons are badly maligned and stereotyped as bad-tempered, difficult, cantankerous people. We endure horrible names like grouch, sourpuss, and crankypants. (Although, maybe those folks legitimately have issues with my trousers; I don’t know.)  However, no other minority would tolerate such abuse.

While it’s true we can be cranky, tetchy, or grumpy, it is not the core of our existence. We curmudgeons are social servants whose currency is truth. Now, I don’t claim we have any claim to absolute or eternal truth. The heart of curmudgeonry is contrarian truth, which is often perceived as complaint. Perhaps it is.

However, our purpose is to challenge conventional wisdom, because true wisdom is rarely conventional. The boy who reported the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes was a curmudgeon. Our curmudgeonly truth may pertain to things large or small, from the state of the world to small, self-deluding things people do, like drinking “diet” soda or believing in “clean” coal.

Our opponents are those who go by the moniker “they.” You know what they say. Why are we in an eternal battle with them, the unnamed, ubiquitous, and unsupported purveyors of conventional wisdom whose bandwagon everyone feels quite comfortable riding?

Because they told us the Earth was flat, and a million other dubious things worth questioning. They are vendors of hypocrisy, who try to tamp down criticism by demanding political correctness.

So maybe, there’s more to curmudgeons than you thought, eh?