Anger Burger

Presented to you as a series of bullet points.

• This is maybe the worst book I’ve tried to read in recent years:

  

  I cannot believe what a poorly written, poorly conceived book this was.  I guess I thought I expected better from Del Toro, and I don’t know Chuck Hogan from a hole in the ground, but now I am going to avoid both like the plague this book wishes it portrayed.  Ostensibly: vampirism takes over Manhattan.  Entertaining, right?   No.  It would take too long to explain why it was so bad, but rest assured that every single literary mistake was made: angelic Protagonists, cartoonishly evil Antagonists, every single character has way too much psychic instinct, diseases/parasites that don’t follow rules of biology or evolution, vampires that are basically zombies, kids that are mature beyond their years, “geniuses” that are morons, I COULD GO ON FOREVER.  And it’s going to be a trilogy!  God have mercy.

• In the past six months, the following things have totally broken and then were replaced by the manufacturers: a Sigg bottle (the paint started to peel off), a whole mail-ordered case of compostable dog poo bags (unsealed on one of the three sides), my purse (made by a not-cheap indy bag-maker), and an expensive water filter.  I started to think I was cursed, but then I realized each thing had been replaced promptly, and without personal cost.  This truly is a great era of consumerism.

• I was watching Wrath of Khan while puttering around the house and thought this would be the time that Spock dying didn’t make me cry, but no.  I cried.

• Speaking of Leonard Nemoy, my previous hate for the show Fringe has mutated into grudging enjoyment. It took them two seasons, but I feel like the writers were finally allowed to quit trying to be The X-Files. I still don’t feel anything for any of the characters, but the plot has started doing some impressive backflips.

• After years of pay-as-you-go phone use, Mike invested in a fancy unlocked phone and signed up with Simple Mobile, a flat-rate mobile plan company with very competitive rates and no contracts.  You buy a sim card from them ($13) and install it in your (unlocked) phone and then complete some basic activation steps¹.  Even with buying an expensive phone, we did the math and determined that after two years of use, Mike will have saved about $600 just from not paying T-Mobile’s monthly data plan (more if he was using Verizon or AT&T).  It’s only been a few weeks, but so far I’m already planning on ditching my T-Mobile account when in expires in a few months.  Fuck that noise.  T-Mobile couldn’t even figure out how to activate  international calling on my phone when I left the country and ended up breaking my account on their end so badly that a supervisor had to reboot their system.  True story!

• For some time now I’ve been a reader of Dr. Kate Davies’ blog  Needled (I don’t know why I never put it in my links, an oversight that has been corrected).  She’s a knitting intellectual, rhapsodizing on the histories of textiles and yarns while whipping out incredible patterns in such a fashion that makes it all look so damn easy.  Perhaps more interesting to me, she and her husband take epic hikes around the Scottish countryside, all the while dressing in the most outstanding wool ensembles and pretty much living a lifestyle I’ve always fantasized about.  In February of this year, Kate had a stroke that left her unable to walk and move her left arm, a shocking unfairness on such a profound level that it took my breath away; Kate is young and physically fit, a master craftswoman and a happy internet presence.  In the months since her stroke she’s documented her struggle to regain the use of her body and while I hate having feelings (particularly those about the grace and beauty of the human condition), I can’t stop reading.  She’s made me cry more than once, and for that I’ll never forgive her.

¹ Well, maybe not “basic” exactly – telling the phone to find the Simple Mobile 3G network was a little bit of a pain that took Mike and a customer service rep about a half an hour to slog through. We all agreed that written email instructions would have been easier than someone verbally telling someone a super-confusing long-ass URL to type into their phone, so maybe Simple Mobile will do that in the future.