On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me

1. Driving

I spend my Christmases in Chicago, residing temporarily with the beings who created my future wife. Normally, it is no big deal--they have an airport in Chicago (in fact, I hear, they even have two airports), and so my trip generally involves stepping onto a flying machine, stepping off, shuttling to suburbia, consuming carbohydrates for three days, and returning home on a separate flying machine. However, this year, my home city was enveloped in chaos, thereby forcing the future wife and I to rent a vehicle via O.J. Motors and cover the eastern portion of America over the course of two days. To which I say, A.) Any rest stop with a Hardee's in it should either be named after a prominent antacid or targeted for immediate demolition,* B.) The vast expanse of northern Ohio is as utterly barren as I recall it to be, though C.) my home state's interminable width--it is the Vince Wilfork of I-80--is something I feel obligated to apologize for, and D.) if there is a way to sell off New Jersey while it still has some value remaining, I say we take the deal. Find some wealthy sheik with a Sopranos fetish, play him a copy of Greetings from Asbury Park, sell him on the notion of hired attendants pumping the fuel he sold us a premium, don't mention the endless array of nonsensical cloverleaf off-ramps, the drivers who treat lane markers as an optional exercise, and the very idea of Newark, and we might be able to raise enough money to purchase something Canadian.

2. Buckeyes

You don't need me to tell you that the NCAA is a bungling hypocritical cabal, and we can argue about the relative severity of several athletes selling items that seemingly belonged to them, but what skeeves me out most about Tattoogate is Ohio State's utterly patronizing attempts to act as if it had simply forgotten to mention a statute that Jim Tressel recalled prominently mentioning as recently as 2003. The fundamental problem here is that the adults never really get punished for anything, even though they're the ones making all the money.

3. Weirdos

This story is amazing. I've got to imagine there's a role for Vincent Gallo in the film adaptation.
 
*What makes it worse is that the Hardee's was paired with a third-rate fast-food Mexican chain. Which means, if your Thickburger did not immediately induce dysentery, you could layer it with something resembling a taco. The other rest-stop tandem in Indiana, by the way, was McDonald's with Dairy Queen, which makes me think the Indiana Turnpike must be heavily populated by successful Little League teams.