Photo © 2009 Stéfan Le Dû CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Springtime is upon us here in New England, and you know what that means: rain, sun, sleet, rain, bitter cold, sweltering heat, wind, snow, rain, green grass, birds chirping, and—most significantly—taxes.
And it is this last that makes me feel like blech. Let’s be clear about this. Taxes are not the price we pay for a civilized society. Taxes are what brought down the mighty Roman Empire—seriously, that’s actually true. And in light of historical evidence and current practice, I think there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on: taxes suck.
Every year around this time, I review all my financial statements and remember how little money I made during the last year, how much bigger a chunk of that pittance Uncle Sam thinks he deserves, and how big of a failure I am. Maybe that explains why I don’t feel funny today. And maybe that also explains why I notice the Grumpy Old Man in everything I see.
For example, I remember when Mythbusters was actually about busting myths. Now, too much of the time, it’s just about blowing stuff up. Just today, I went to the Mythbusters website and discovered, out of the 5 episodes they’ve posted there to view online, 4 of them have the word “explosion” in the title.
But science is not just about blowing stuff up. Someone should teach Kari, Tori, and Grant a little something about the scientific method. (Or maybe their producers.) For example, they finally tested the Gorn cannon, from the Star Trek episode “Arena.” I’ve been wanting the Mythbusters to test the Gorn cannon for almost as long as they’ve been on the air, and now that they finally got around to it… Ugh. When they couldn’t get it to fire with the gunpowder that Captain Kirk had used, they skipped right to using so much modern black powder that the thing exploded. Then they promptly pronounced the Gorn cannon “busted,” without ever demonstrating whether or not there was any amount of black powder that could have made it work as advertised. On top of that, they never bothered to explain why Kari, Tori, and Grant couldn’t make effective gunpowder, when Jamie and Adam had no trouble doing so years earlier, in the “tree cannon” episode in season 1. Make no mistake, this myth has not yet been busted. It has, however, made a big boom. And I guess that’s more important.
Modern radio, as well, disappoints me. Well… Radio has always disappointed me. The same three songs playing over and over again, repeating the same two- or three-chord sequence in a monotonous rhythm. How can people listen to this crap? Fortunately, it’ll all be history within a decade, and no one will even remember these songs. Can you remember a single song recorded by the Spice Girls? Yeah, me neither. Lady Gaga, take note.
I can’t even escape it in church. Today is the best time to be a worship musician, because no one will ask you whether you have any musical skill. Long gone are the days of scales and riffs. You can be a successful church musician today without even knowing your Do-Re-Mi’s. And all you need is as an excuse is that you have a full-time job, and you can’t find the time to practice all that stuff. Yes, I’ve been playing music since I was a teenager, but I only really started developing as a bassist after I was working full-time as a software developer. And then I became a skilled fiction writer, all while I was working in a different career. Time is not the issue. Passion is the issue. And I can always tell which musicians have a passion for their music.
Modern television isn’t much better. I’ve been searching for a current television show that sparks my interest. Unfortunately, most of them seem to have the same problem: lots of activity, no direction. When I sit down to watch a show, I want to immerse myself in a story. But a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Every scene, every shot, every line pushes the story along… if there is a story. But in the modern television experience, there is no story. There’s no beginning, no middle, no ending. Just lots of unfocused drama.
You can’t believe, as a writer, how frustrating that is for me. No wonder I end up watching old episodes of Quincy and Simon and Simon on Netflix.
Or maybe it’s just that when you don’t feel funny, nothing excites you.
Now is probably not the best time to ask me for a book review. Huh?
-TimK