I’ve Cancelled Netflix

For the simple reason they were increasing fees 60%.

Part of the charm was it was a bargain. I’m sure there are many people who will see it as a bargain even at the new rate. I’m not one of them.

A 10% increase… 20%… I’d be cool with that.

Not to be a grumpy old man about this whole thing (though I am) but at 60% it becomes the principle of the thing.

… or his head is spinning around in whatever frozen cylinder they’ve got it stored in. (It all depends on what you’ve heard about Walt’s post-life activities.)

When I was little The Wonderful World of Disney would come on every Sunday night. My thought is it was broadcast at 7 p.m.

The shows were always child friendly and, as I recall, pretty harmless. They were comprised primarily of cartoons, Disney movies and, once in a while, there was a show that showed a little bit about Disneyland… maybe even Disneyworld (I’m not sure when it went up and am far too lazy to Google.)

Walt, I’m sure, was very proud of his work.

Walt would be proud, too, of Disneyworld and the Disney Cruise Lines. I’ve been to Disneyworld and on one of his cruises and would recommend them to everybody. Nothing is more family friendly and nowhere are the employees nicer.

Having said all of that, there is one Disney item that sucks big time. And that’s the Disney Network. It is show after show of young teenagers trying to meet up with the opposite sex – has if having some sort of relationship with a boyfriend/girlfriend were the most important thing on earth.

I’m not a prude. Believe me, I’m far from it. However there are things I don’t want my kids to see.

The Disney Channel is one of them.

Conservatives are likely to have a different list than the one I’m about to type up and… well, good for them.

In no particular order:

Changing Article Titles: I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve clicked a link to an article only to find it was something I’d already read at least once, when it had a different title. I do a lot of reading from my phone which makes this particularly annoying as it takes several seconds longer than my computer to load. (And when you’re reading on the can, every second counts.)

The Horrible Android App: The Huffington Post Android App used to be rock solid. And then, following an upgrade, it would force close each and every time I used it. I kept waiting for additional upgrades to fix it, but it never came to pass. In the end I uninstalled it.

Annoying Ads: I accept the fact that ads are necessary. I’ll be the first to click on one if it is for something I think is interesting (which is way less than one percent of the time). However, there are two — well, at least two — types of ads I can’t put up with. One type is the flashing ad HuffPo’s Android App started using just about the same time the app started force closing. It was distracting and made it hard to concentrate on the articles I was trying to read.  The other troubling ad-type is the one that, after you start reading an article, expands to fill the screen. I have never, ever, clicked on an ad I find annoying and find it hard to believe anybody else does.

News that is not news: It has gotten very hard for me to mention to my wife anything I read at HP ever since she saw something there about the Pirelli Calendar a year or so ago. I had never noticed stories like that one – or those involving Kardashians or Octamoms or any of your other pseudo-celebrities – prior to my wife pointing out that any site that would publish stories about people like that falls more into the category of tabloid rather than serious journalism.

Perhaps I expect too much of a site that’s more news aggregator than anything else.

In my last entry I mentioned that Rick Santorum made an argument against abortion by saying that had abortion been illegal in the US we’d now have more workers paying into Social Security… which would keep Social Security solvent and provide Unicorns for each and every employee to ride to work.

This past weekend I streamed Freakonomics: The Movie over Netflix. I’d read the book a good while ago and wondered how the material would be presented in documentary format. The movie was very engaging.

One of the things in the movie that I’d not remembered from my read of the book is the bit about the decline in crime in America right around 1995 and the role legalized abortions has played.

If only I were a skilled enough writer to provide a summary of the points made in Freakonomics regarding how legalized abortion has helped reduced the crime rate. Wouldn’t that be great?

Alas, I’m not that skilled.

Luckily, there’s a Wikipedia page that provides a fair summary.

Rick Santorum, who is the presidential hopeful whose last name returns decidedly non-presidential hits in Google, was recently in New Hampshire.

Playing to his conservative base he took a moment to speak out against abortion:

The social security system in my opinion is a flawed design, period. But, having said that, the design would work a lot better if we had stable demographic trends. … The reason social security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.

It’s the last two sentences that caught my eye. Santorum is making the claim that if we had fewer abortions we’d have more workers to pay into Social Security.

In February the unemployment rate was 9%.

Where would all of these new potential employees be working? The potential employees we currently have can’t find jobs.

I stumbled across this from a Q & A section at The Mercury News today:

Q Has the word not gotten out that using a handheld cellphone and texting while driving is dangerous and illegal? There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t see at least a dozen drivers weaving, slowing for no reason and just generally being bone-headed idiots because they’re using a cellphone. Get a clue! If you’re the world’s smartest driver you may be smart enough to figure out how to set up Bluetooth and voice activation. So, here are my questions. If a cellphone-distracted driver causes an accident, can police subpoena their call or text history? Can the victims insist on it? What happens then? Shouldn’t it be treated the same as a DUI, since distracted drivers are as bad as drunks?

Russ C.

San Jose

A Police and victims can absolutely subpoena phone and text records. Chris-the-San-Jose-Cop says during routine accidents, an officer may just ask the involved parties for permission to look at their phones, especially if there was some indication that it was in use at the time of the accident. And he says drivers usually cooperate with these requests. But victims must file a lawsuit and get a subpoena to obtain any phone or texting records. This can be a lengthy process because of privacy issues and can become very litigious. But getting the records is definitely an option.

And it reminded me of something I saw a month or so ago. I was heading north on I-270, outside of Columbus and near the Sawmill Road exit, when I passed a Muetzel Heating and Plumbing truck. While this really doesn’t matter to our story, I’m not talking a pick-up truck here… it was something a good deal larger. Why does the story from Mercury News remind me of this? Because the driver was driving with his knees as he texted. While I appreciate his ability to multi-task – he was smoking too – I’d admire more his desire to keep the roads safe.

I should have had my wife snap his photo and mailed it to Muetzel.

And Tiger Blood in his veins.

But most of all – he has the luck and invincibility that comes with being a 17-year-old boy.

I’m talking about the high school kid that jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and suffered only a wedgie.

A California high school student visiting the Golden Gate Bridge on a Thursday morning field trip climbed over a railing, jumped – possibly on a dare by fellow classmates – and somehow survived the 220-foot plunge into San Francisco Bay that kills dozens of people each year.

Most jumpers die a grisly death, with massive internal injuries, broken bones and skull fractures. Some die from internal bleeding, while others drown.

I know it’s an old story by now, but the more I thought about it the more it reminded me of a Malcolm in the Middle episode. I didn’t see a lot of Malcolm in the Middle  – I don’t know why, the ones I saw were always pretty funny… maybe it was because they were on Fox…

Anyway, in the episode, dad and the boys are trying to clean up a mess before the mom gets home. At some point dad tells the boys to be careful which leads Malcolm’s older brother to ask what the dad is worried about.  “I don’t want you to get killed,” says dad, to which the kid replies, “Dad. I’m 17. Nothing bad’s going to happen to be.” The tone was, at 17 he was indestructible.

I remember feeling like that up to the point I was in my mid 20s.

I’d close by saying “Let’s see Charlie Sheen jump off the Golden Gate and get just a wedgie" but I’m not certain he won’t find this blog entry and feel inspired.

As we keep this theme alive…

Way back in high school I had a female friend who wanted to go to school to become a doctor.

She kept her grades up in high school and enrolled in pre-med classes in college.

She did very well for three years. That third year she started dating a guy I knew. A guy, who while a friend of mine and a great guy, had plans that weren’t going to have him going to medical school. She couldn’t bear to be away from him and changed her major.

They had a stormy dating relationship which eventually turned into a stormy marriage and then, ten years later, a somewhat stormy divorce.

It’s impossible to know if she’d have ever gone to med school had she not met a guy, but she was on track.

I once had a niece who, at 14, was cute, personable, full of life, and who had dreams of becoming a Marine Biologist. The fact she wanted to be a Marine Biologist matters less to this story than the fact she had dreams of going to college and getting out of the little town she lived in.

Not that there was anything wrong with living in a little town. I love small towns. Heck, I love small dreams.

What I’m not a big fan of is people pissing their dreams away at a young age because they’ve fallen in love.

At 15 she met a boy. They fell in love. She decided to skip college, marry him – seemingly so they could argue all the time – and become what you could only call white trash. 

I’d typed up a bunch of other stuff about her life, but it all started to sound judgmental when that’s not what I was going for.

So why do I mention any of this? Because that was almost 20 years ago.

Had she not met the boy perhaps her life would have turned out the same. I don’t think so. I think that some decisions you make at a very early age can affect the choices you have later in life. Going to college out of high school, or out of the military, has got to be a lot easier than after you become a single mom.

Why bring this up now?

I have teenagers. None of them have met anybody who is likely to get them to veer away from their dreams, but it’s still a worry I have.

I’ve seen it too many times.

It would appear that despite my sincerest hopes… Charlie Sheen is not healed. I’ve no doubt he doesn’t give a shit about my opinion – after all I’m not a gnarls gnarlington – but, man. He needs a dose of reality to hit him upside the head. The last thing he needs is more money to blow.

He wants three million dollars an episode? Two and a Half Men is clever because the show has good writers. Sheen plays his character well, but the same exact show, with the same exact cast aside from him would likely have done just as well. Replacing him now might kill the show, but if we’d never seen him we’d never have missed him.

The show with the same exact cast, the one with him as Charlie, with shitty writing would have never gotten off the ground.

Well, the formula may be a little more complicated than that, but he needs to accept the fact that he lucked out when he got that role.

Not to mention, if his dad wasn’t Martin Sheen, he wouldn’t be where he is today. His dad paid part of his dues for him.

Shape the fuck up Chuck.