Complaint Dept.

Dean Wormer said, "The time has come for someone to put his foot down. And that foot is me."

So, loath though I be to spend my whole blog bellyachin', when these things come in threes, it's time to vent.

#1 - what happened yesterday was the summer solstice, not the summer poultice. And in March, we enjoyed the vernal equinox, not the verbal equinox.

#2 - now that summer is here and the Orioles are approaching the 1/2way mark through their season, would it be too much to have their flagship station get some new versions of the same commercials that they run night after night, three or four times per game? I know it seemed very witty in November to have the Geico non-gecko say that his favorite response was "easy squeezy lemon peasy," but it ain't funny any more, if it ever was.

#3 I didn't bother kvetching when Tom Hanks went on the Oprah Show and said that the byzantine workings of the religious hierarchy depicted in his new movie were "obtuse," which means "lacking sharpness" in the geometric sense and "stupid" in the mundane. After all, Tom Hanks is an American treasure, being the Everyman great guy that he is and all, and one criticizes him at great risk. But I came across this writing on a blog, in an essay about the undisputedly great Arthur Lee of the band we call LOVE:
“The first Love record I actually owned was a Rhino ‘Best Of’ that came out in 1980. Though that record contained the song that would become my favorite – ‘Your Mind and We Belong Together’ – the tune that blew my mind wide open from the first listen was ‘7 and 7 Is’.
Though Love had (and has) been unfairly lumped in with the Nuggets crowd, due to the ‘one hit wonder’-ism of ‘My Little Red Book’, their punkiest record met, and transcended the greasy teenage swagger of 6T’s punk in a way that even today is hard to comprehend.
Packing more energy into its two minutes and nineteen seconds than some bands are able to produce in entire careers, ‘7 and 7 Is’ is as raw and savage a statement (if perhaps lyrically obtuse in a way not at all atypical for its time) as rock music has ever seen, and ending it with a sound-effects record explosion – a notion that might have damned a lesser record to an oblivion of novelty – seems today not only acceptable, but an absolutely necessary bit of punctuation.”

Fellas, you both meant "abstruse" (recondite), and Mr Fellow Blogger, cute as it might be to use the term "6T's" for "60's," kindly don't do so in writing about the late great Mr. Lee.

Now my venting is over; thanks for lending me eyes and ears.