CHOOSE RANT

Title:   Choice of Topics Day:    October 4, 1999 Author:  Ruiner				So I'm sitting here trying to find a topic that appeals to me. I don't have a real driving subject to throw out there. I called the section Rants and I know that people expect those of me. Admittedly, there are plenty of things I could go off about. Driving. There's a topic I could handle. Back in the early days of my ranting I did one for a friend named Arawn about Road Rage. And I'm all about road rage sometimes, because it just shows the stupidity of people without having to hear them talk. What about when people pull out in front of you quickly and then drive under the posted speed limit? How about the death hazards we have to endure, such as the mobile home moving trucks that choose morning rush-hour traffic to take up two lanes? How about those irritating people who ride ultra-close to your back bumper and then change lanes with you when you're trying to let them by to their ultra-important destination? I'm sure it will come up again, but not right now. Not after Swervedriver. Fast Food. Nah, I've done that one too much. The places still manage to give me reasons to rail against them. Like the probability that the shake and/or ice cream machine will be 'broken' any time you want some (even though I've learned it's because they're too lazy to put the mix inside of the machine). Or just the obvious apathy and attitude of the workers there, in an attempt to make you feel guilty for heaping more onto their workload? Nah, I'll leave them alone for a while. Work. Hey, the office life or whatever kind of employment you're under. I could go on about the same monotonous tasks day in and day out that eat away at your soul. I could speak on a trapped situation where you feel overqualified for the job you're in but you don't have the qualifications for jobs that you know you could do. I could ponder the tempting, attractive coworkers who are either happily married or work closely with you so that you really shouldn't try anything with them, lest it interfere with work. I could write an essay on living paycheck to paycheck while your coworkers are setting up stocks and bonds and building their own house for their family of three. I would hate to let jealousy overtake me on something like this. Friends. The one thing many of us live for. Of course, sometimes it's just so we can have so much fun talking about them behind their back. And there's always the intricate politics in dealing with friends who can't stand each other, watching to make sure you spend equal time lest you be called a 'favoritist'. There's the friends whom you abuse, treating them like crap when they come around to eke out quality time with you. And there are the friends you let slip away as they move on, making new strides in their life and certainly replacing petty little you. Wow, that sounds way bitter! I kind of like that. Television. Oh yeah, my favorite useless piece of equipment in the house. I should explain how thrilled I was to find a hurricane relief telathon on ten of my major channels this weekend, an afternoon gift by the cable company. And yes, the cable companies who seek to program your brains to wage war against their enemies and secret bed partners, the satellite companies. But who's to blame? The networks, who refuse to show good programming except when the other networks are showing good programs, in order to compete for which channel dominates your television. And really, there are so many better things people could be doing with their time than watching TV. Like… surfing the internet without a clue of destination. Hmm, the Internet. Should I go off on the medium in which I shout out my views? Of course! As my friend at Suffer Bastard says, 'Nothing is Sacred'. A medium originally designed to provide a wealth of information for learning purposes. A medium that has become a plethora of pornography everywhere you turn. And then there are the millions ('and millions') of useless homepages that provide absolutely nothing of worth. I'm dangerously close to the edge on this one, as this site only provides some humor and a vent for my aggressions. Thanks to free servers like Geocities and Tripod, the web is becoming a wasteland of poorly-designed sites that haven't been updated in aeons. There are some shining diamonds in the midst of all this clutter, but how do you find them? You can't surf a webring without hitting a dead link, a site that has been moved, deleted, or is just too confusing to navigate. You could try a search engine, but they still catalogue all of the dead sites and are usually filled with dead links. You could just type in a title in hopes that someone useful has bought the rights to that URL, but that's a loaded gun. Ask my coworker who left out the last 'S' in Backstreet Boys. Yep, you got it - a pornography site. I wouldn't mind a job as an internet streetsweeper. A person who goes through on their digital boogie-board with a Delete-O-Matic gun and just takes out sites. Dead links. Incorrect links. Sites that are actually acruing cyberdust (yeah, I have one or two of those). I could post those orange warning stickers like the highway patrol does on abandoned vehicles. If you don't update your site within X amount of days, it's gone. I would be a hero, like in Tron, except with more of a Judge Dredd attitude. There might even be jobs out there where you find bad links like this, minus the gun of course. I've heard of groups that actually pay you to surf the web. Honestly they sound like marketing scams to me, but who knows? Of course, I'm probably not qualified… B.Mooney