. . .and it increasingly sucks.

While speech by corporations and anti-abortion groups is today somewhat more free; it’s been a bad day for “Bong hits 4 Jesus” or anyone in high school who might say anything that zealous and confused administrators might tendentious construe as insufficiently reverent towards the Law.

Oh, and also: did you think that taxpayers could challenge the use of their money to  Christianize public services?  Think again, heathen.  Did you really believe your Saviour would permit such nonsense?

Do you wish to be propagandized by a rapacious multinational?  McDonald’s UK has a website on which they pledge to answer *every* question they are asked.  You would be disturbed to learn how much time I’ve spent reading the surprisingly interesting answers provided here by the invincibly patient voice of the corporation.

Via Gizmodo

After writing the post below, complaining about people in general, I packed up my laptop and my photocopies of William Perkins and Tertullian, and began the walk back to my home.  As I walked along Church Street, I saw that the whole block along West Side Park had been cordoned off.  As I approached the police tape, I could see what happened.  All around the grey hatchback in which a man has been living for a couple of years, were mercury vapor lamps and plastic yellow shell-casing markers.  Cops were standing eveywhere.  There was an armored vehicle parked in front of the Methodist Church.

News accounts I’ve seen cited on local blogs say that the man in the car shot three policemen before being shot himself.  36 times, according to rumors I heard from bystanders.  The rumor also is that he’s dead, and that one or more of the officers is in serious condition.

Strange.  And right after I was indulging in a little misanthropy.  Strange too that yesterday evening I walked past his car, as he was getting out of it.  “Hi,” I said.  He said, “hey.”  And now, I guess, that’s it.

UPDATE: Reports seem to indicate that both the officers involved and the man in the car are alive and in stable condition.

Well, it’s been a while.  I’m back from Wisconsin, and here in Champaign trying to pull together the last chapter of the dissertation, to defend, I suppose, at the end of the summer.  I’ve been wasting time however fixing up the beginning of the diss, when I should instead be finishing up the last chapter (which isn’t a simple chapter, and which will surely suck up a goodly amount of work).

Anyway, I’m here in the usual coffee shop, wondering what it is about this dimly-lit place that transforms human beings into strange caricatures of the species.  Each person has some distinctive and strange feature, and most of them are here all the time.  The guy who’s always trying to switch chairs with people, the older couple to bring their own light, the dude with huge monitor he likes to bring in and plug into his Mac.  There are an endless stream of ghost-like regulars who seem to populate this space.

Anyhow, this is all preliminary to a complaint about the worst of them all: the strange new dude, who is apparently? from out East somewhere, with short dark hair, big plastic glasses, about 5 pounds worth of rings, bracelets, and watches, and a Long Island accent that I swear to God has to be fake.  He seems to enjoy doing two things in particular: wandering in and sitting down, plugging in his cell phone, plugging in his earpiece, and holding hours-long conversations about basketball and gambling pools of some kind.  Alternately, he sits down next to one, turns on his laptop, and starts playing terrible music on his laptop speakers; which can’t possibly sounds good, even to him.  An endless loop of “Blue Suede Shoes” and other Elvis standbys played on laptop speakers is almost too terrible to contemplate, much less hear.

Anyhow, I just left the coffee shop a bit early last night, rather than tell him to shut the fuck up with his laptop Elvis.  I guess my calculation was that since he’s one of the regulars, I’m probably better off being in the “persons this guy doesn’t speak to,” category rather than risk a conversation and end up in his “talktoable” column.  But one more such encounter with this oddly obnoxious dude, and I’m afraid I’ll have to provide him with a brief but helpful explanation of human manners.