Gob Gripes:
Gathered from Various Disgruntled Staffers

1. Gimme a Break
Whatever they're teaching 'em in Sunday School these days, they're not teaching 'em that PIETY is a private matter. When piety becomes public it becomes that variety of instant hypocrisy known as PRIDE. God save us from any more athletes, politicians, lottery winners, etc. who in the heat of victory announce with trembling lip: "In Jesus all things are possible."

2. Big-time Paper Waster.
Robert B. Parker writes entertaining predictable fluff, dozens of mystery novels mostly featuring his private-eye Spenser and his faithful non-Indian companion Hawk. Nice comic book characters in a nice comic book Boston. Harmless enough. Trying to add substance to fluff, Little, Brown, his publisher has taken to padding the ever-thinner stories with white space, lots of white space so what is basically a long novella comes out looking like a 300-page book. This is accomplished by triple- and quadruple-spacing printed lines. Result: There are so few words on a given page (Parker also writes a lot of repartee) that you feel like a refugee from an old Evelyn Woods speed reading class, so fast do you zip through the thing.

3. Measure of Decadence.
When the self-described newspaper of record--ever more colorful--fills the front page of the arts section with a 96-point head reading "Beyond Primary Colors: No More Basic Ice Creams" below which is a huge color photo of ice cream dippers dripping full of various new flavors... Well, what's to say.

4. Measure of Disgruntlement.
http://www.complaints.com. Need we say more?

5. Ten Miles to School,
    Twenty Feet of Snow
If one computer month = one human year, then I bought my first computer almost two centuries ago. A delight, a revelation, etc., etc. All the clichés are right, including its being a terrific pain in the neck, a recalcitrant little beastie prone to crashes, error messages, etc., etc.

At the time, I remarked to my sons, then in their early teens, "One day you'll be telling your children about all these computer problems, just like my father, who was born at the dawn of the automobile age, telling me about having to walk ten miles to school through twenty feet of snow."

I made that remark in 1981. Here we are 20 years later and, guess what? Computer-wise, Mac or PC, Windows or Linux, we're still walking ten miles to school everyday through twenty feet of snow. Sure, maybe it doesn't snow quite as often. But when it does, it's a blizzard.

How long, o Lord, how long?

6. Male Adolescence.

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