When It's Time To Leave, Go!

There are few things in life worse than witnessing an over stayed welcome. When the presence of someone or something has obviously exceeded its comfort level or usefulness, someone must speak up and take action so that the delicate balance of nature can progress uninterrupted and without blemish. I select all members of the human race and call upon them to unite with me in a crusade to eliminate uselessness. I will, of course, begin this endeavor here and now while encouraging your feedback and your promise to keep the faith.

There are plenty of historical examples of once great inventions completely exercising their course of usefulness and gracefully bowing out allowing for progress and cultural advancement. These are some examples:

Chainmail- during feudalism this was quite the invention. Covering ones self from head to toe with metal, restricted the frequency of bodily puncture due to the lance of a foe. Today, chainmail would make commercial air travel nearly impossible and would drive fasion designers and make over show producers crazy.

Long Bow/Catapult- attacking the enemy became possible from several hundred yards away. A platoon could hide behind a hill and launch an attack exercising a stealth facade while the opposing army scrambled in fear and bewilderment. Now the tables are flipped if the opposing army has tomahawk missiles loaded on a stealth sub in the Mediterranean Sea and is preparing to launch at the platoon by pinpointing their position using GPS data and satellite imaging. Plus, try to attack a nuclear class submarine with a bow and arrow without laughing.

Stage Coach- once upon a time the stage coach was the way to get around. It ran on a schedule, on time I might add, and took people to and from the railroad. Close your eyes and picture a stage coach at the taxi stand at your nearest airport. I bet very few stage coach operators speak Arabic, Hindi, or any of the seven hundred and fifty-nine thousand African dialects. But really all you need to know to drive a taxi (or stage coach) is "snow emergency, double fare!"

Doctors who make house calls- In the days of yester year, if you or a family member took ill, the doctor would visit the patient in his or her very own bed. Its true! If there was not enough money to pay the doctor he would accept something in barter (eggs, a hog, a Mercedes S class sedan, it totally depended on how sick the patient was). Then, with the invention of insurance companies and their mother f#*%&ng HMO's and PPO's, doctors are no longer willing to leave the country club for a pittance of hand me down farm byproducts.

Do you remember; going to the arcade, using pay phones with the local phone book attached to it by a cord, or watching a movie on Betamax? How about, playing Pong or Asteroids on your Atari 2600? Or perhaps you remember, Pet Rocks, the Rubicks Cube, Dean Smiths' Four Corner Offense, or creating surround sound by plugging 6 speakers into the 2 speaker jacks into the back of your RCA home stereo system. All of these things heve been replaced with newer and better products. We traded Arnold Horshak for Skreech, Sidney Poiteir for Denzel Washington, George Bush for George Bush, and the cold war for the desert war.

There are, saddly, some has-beens that will not go away.

I hate it when I am sitting in a Chinese Restaurant and my server, hostess, tea steward or what ever the frick they're called asks me if I want chopsticks. I do not! Do you not have forks? If I want to eat, are my choices restricted to chop sticks or my hands. Just because it took your people thousands of years to learn that stabbing and scooping are the "common sense" approaches to dining, don't go dragging me back into some retrospective Crouching Eating Hidden Flatware bullshit. And cook my English terrier all the way.

Antiques are useless. The actual definition of antique is, something that belongs in a museum not in you home. I hate people who say things like "Don't sit there, its an antique." Hey if it looks like a chair, feels like a chair, and is in any way has proximity to a table or lamp, it's a chair. If you don't want me to sit in it, put it in the closet. "You might break it". Again, put it in the closet. "But, someone famous once sat in that chair" Great! But there are plenty of seats which hold famous people every day, take the airport restroom for an example. You don't see me dragging a commode into my living room just because Oprah used it once.

Please stop making me hear the terms; hand made and made by hand. Nothing is hand made anymore. We have been developing tools and machinery since the Cro-Magnon period just so that we don't have to make anything by hand. Furthermore, things made by hand are in no way better than machine made things, they just take a lot longer to make. The only time I can tolerate the phrase, made by hand, is if the item was made by someone actually named Hand. Like Hand made Gloves, For you hands by the Hands. That's it!

Do not sell me a program so that I can keep score at the ballgame. Yes, it was once part of the lore to sit with you Dad or Uncle and fill in each and every box for every inning and discuss what the manager should do or what pitch should be thrown. The thinking man's game, it was called. Baseball is a little different now. Programs are not 50 cents anymore, (I just spent about 30 sec. Looking for the symbol for cents on my keyboard, that should tell you something) they no longer sell Cracker Jack, and parking is more expensive now than my first car. So stop selling me the program. If you think I am going to pay $12.95 for a program and a pencil when....., hey did you happen to notice the big video scoreboard with stats, scores, and howbout' this one; instant replay. Not to mention the fact that only really rich people can afford to go to games so everyone has a PDA and is hooked up to the web. You can instantly access box scores from all over the country from any game any time. The score book and program are useless.

And while your at it get rid of the pencil. I already took the S.A.T.