Looking Back on Late Nights

Since I was ‘allowed’ to stay up late (past 11pm, which was probably age 16) on weeknights, I’ve watched late night television talk shows. It started, of course, with Johnny Carson, who is probably deserving of the praise that’s been heaped upon him since he stopped doing television. Carson naturally led to watching Letterman - if I was still awake at that point, which was usually only on Fridays - before he jumped to CBS.

The distinction of changing networks for Dave’s show isn’t really the turning point for the quality or relevance of his show, although his days on NBC had a much more independant and low budget feel to them. For its time, Late Night with David Letterman was actually quite subversive and strayed from mainstream humour on a regular basis. It wasn’t until four or five years into his reign on CBS that he started ‘dialing it in’ most nights, and the steady dumbing down of his audience didn’t encourage him to do more than just show up, go through his rehearsed questions, and call it a night. Once sketches involving Mujibur & Sirajul or Rupert Gee disappeared, there really wasn’t much to set Dave’s show apart anymore. I never enjoyed Jay Leno, and in fact he’s a horrible interviewer (even if it is, like 99% of Dave’s shows, totally rehearsed) and his monologue is lowest-common-denominator humour. So today, unless I find a guest on Letterman’s show that I like, the 11:35 time slot is a miss.

The last decade has rightfully belonged to the ‘late late show’ time slot, with Conan really hitting his stride a year or two into his time at Dave’s old post. However I think Conan fizzled out much faster than Dave ever did - oddly, once his sidekick Andy Richter left, things just became very dull and Conan really seems to have run out of anything funny to say during interviews. And, unlike Dave, when political people come to visit, Conan’s really out of his element. There is the rare show when Dave has a veteran newscaster or political guest on, and he turns on at least a little intelligence.

My favourite hosts of the recent past have been in the 12:35 slot on CBS. A few years ago, it was Craig Kilborn hosting The Late Late Show. There’s no question Kilborn thought highly of himself, and his ego sometimes showed, but his show was mostly smart and had a very laid back feel to it - perfect for something post-midnight. I always enjoyed Five Questions and especially Yambo, which was a fun trivia-elimination game played with the night’s guests. Kilborn only lasted 5 years at his post, and judging by other late night hosts, he probably got out before the inevitable slide of creativity that every other host has fallen into.

Today the Late Late Show is hosted by a new Craig: Scottish actor Craig Ferguson now has the reins, and for the most part he does a great job. He’s got tons of energy and genuinely seems to enjoy his job - perhaps even is thankful for it - and his bizarre sketches of Aquaman, Angela Landsbury, Prince Charles and others usually devolve into complete silliness and it’s hard not to laugh just for this reason. Throw in the show’s final bit, “What Did We Learn on the Show Tonight, Craig?”, where the host looks back on the show and just lets his mind wander, are usually priceless. Ferguson has been the host since 2005, which means his run really ought to last three or four more years before it’s time for him to move on. Who knows, maybe Letterman will retire when his eleventy-million dollar contract is up (for the record, I predict Conan’s move into Leno’s spot, coming in the next year or so, to be a complete disaster, so Dave might hang in there just to feel some sort of final triumph over NBC).

Humpin’ and Thumpin’

A couple of times in the past month, late at night, the ladyfriend and I have been awakened from our slumber by a steady thumping noise coming through the walls or floors of our bedroom. An ear to the wall reveals the thumping accompanied by female moaning and other sounds of pleasure. It continues for about five to ten minutes, then silence returns…

Until it starts up again a few hours later. Then quiet, then more humping and thumping. The most recent time this happened, we heard it four or five times in one night, spread out from roughly midnight to (literally) sunrise. What am I to make of this?

First, there’s the angry factor. I like sleep, and I dislike being interrupted during sleep. It doesn’t help that I can be waken from sleep from anything, be it cigarettes being smoked outside four apartments away from us, or a crow screeching from the rooftop on the building on the other side of our complex. Sounds from neighbours are guaranteed to wake me, and when the same thing wakes me up four times a night, I get cranky. Second, I don’t know which nearby unit this is coming from. We never hear other daytime noises from anyone except the people above us, and our actual floor neighbours are old and kinda gross so I doubt marathon-like sexual pounding is coming from them. Third, I’m a bit jealous - some guy is going at it four times in one night, for Christ’s sake! Finally, it makes me wonder how this couple can go at it so many times in such a short span of time. I realize some blue pills can help out a guy, but fatigue has to be a factor for the female. I’ve started to speculate that, whoever this person is, they’re either filming amateur porn or operate a sex webcam service.

When we lived in Pitt Meadows, a couple of times before we left, we heard some sex noises coming from a nearby window - it was much more bearable than hearing a constant WHAM-WHAM-WHAM of a headboard against a wall. I’m more than a bit of a perv, which I’m sure my readers are aware of, but there’s a line that’s crossed when hearing people engage in nighttime humpfests results in loss of sleep. I’m planning to take a walk around our floor, and the floor above us, next time this happens to try and deduce in which apartment the action is taking place. With that knowledge, I’ll either put a note under their door (asking them to either move the bed away from the wall, or give me the website URL where I can watch) or knock on the door and run away giggling.

The Costco Urban Legend

There’s always been second-hand stories from friends of mine that Costco’s return policy is accommodating like no other. The hearsay tales of items being taken back long after purchase is legendary, and this weekend, after thinking about it for at least the last couple of months, I decided to test this return policy by taking back my HDTV.

Was there anything seriously wrong with the TV? Not exactly. It was starting to show some problems, like ghosting or the occasional blotchy areas, but nothing so terrible that I had reason to believe my TV was a lemon. So, last week I made a preemptive visit to Costco and talked to someone at the return counter. He assured me that, with original packaging and a receipt, it was very likely that I could return my TV without much of a hassle. I’d bought my TV before Costco limited their technology returns to 90 days, which would be another factor that should have helped me.

Today I went to Costco, with my TV boxed up and receipt in hand. Within a few minutes I was talking to the store manager, who outright refused to accept it as a return. Instead he put me on the phone with Costco Canada’s customer service hotline, who then passed me on to the manufacturer’s tech support line. The person on the other end, through broken english, instructed me in their policy: undergo some telephone troubleshooting (as though I was calling from home, with TV hooked up), and if such troubleshooting did not cure the problems, I’d have to ship my TV to them to have it repaired - a minimum of two weeks time.

I hung up and talked to a different woman at the returns counter, and explained that I felt waiting three weeks to have a TV repaired was unacceptable. While she basically told me she was “on my side”, she contacted her manager. This person tried to explain to me that the problems I was having with my set were “normal” and “expected”, as though a TV should naturally start to show poorer performance after 18 months. He explained that he too owned an LCD TV and had similar problems, and he found it totally acceptable, and that I should too.

This made me more upset. Here I have someone telling me that, for $1000, my TV should be expected to degrade in quality after less than two years. With my ladyfriend joining in, I wouldn’t take this reasoning, and the guy went away to talk to the store manager. After ten minutes or so, the store manager returned with Mr. Low Expectations in tow and offered the following: they would take back my TV but I wouldn’t get a full refund. Instead, I would have to pick a similar TV from what they had in stock, and I would receive a gift card for the value of that TV, which I could use to buy a new set. Essentially I would be getting a new TV, but I’d have to get one that whose retail price was less than what I’d originally paid. Not exactly the outcome I wanted, but it was clear that this was as good as it was going to get.

So Mr. Expect Crappy Products accompanies me to the TV section of the store and says I can choose from any 37″ TV, to replace mine, as long as the value wasn’t more than the value of the one I was returning. This limited my choice to two TVs. The guy continued to go on about how modern electronics all age quickly and I should get used to that fact. I told him thanks, and finally he left me alone. I returned to the original woman at the returns counter, told her the situation, and she commented that she felt I was entirely justified in wanting a return, and she very nearly let me have a more expensive set purely out of spite. Needless to say, I like that woman.

End of story: I was given a gift card with roughly $860 to spend at Costco. I’m not forced to spend that on any particular TV, and in fact we walked out of the store without getting a new set. We’ll go to a different store tomorrow to pick one up. All told I think this entire process took close to an hour.

The lesson to learn is that Costco’s return policy, at least before they changed it, was just an urban legend. Maybe I went on a bad day, maybe the store manager - with his tan, his hairplugs, and his dress shirt unbuttoned just low enough to show off the tops of his shaven pecs - was a grade A jerk, and maybe I should have just stuck with the TV I’d bought in the first place. But it’s done now. However I caution anyone, unless you enjoy complaining and having to deal with multiple levels of management, to not test the return policy on technology. It is not as easy as it’s made out to be.

Mega-Rant!

I promised to blog before the week was out, and I’ve been saving this one up for a while. It flies in the face of my self-imposed ban on rants, but I’m going to lift that embargo today. The subject of today’s hatred is: oblivious human beings.

You know the type. People who, when surrounded by other people, are completely ignorant of the situation they’re in and conduct themselves as though living in a bubble. This behavior can manifest itself in a number of ways, and what follows are the ignorant, moronic ways people make me boil over with rage.

First and foremost is the shopping environment. At grocery stores, at department stores, anywhere that people congregate among things to buy. Without fail, at least half the shopping population forget that others want to shop, and many times others want to shop without dawdling or stargazing or woolgathering. Traits of these oblivious, aloof jerkwads includes walking and pushing shopping carts at a pace slower than time itself can measure; leaving shopping carts or baskets in the middle of an aisle while inspecting a can of tomato paste/mung beans/dumbass sauce or whatever it is people like this eat; exiting an aisle with a cart, turning half way, then stopping; steering carts willy-nilly and without logic or regard for others; standing in front of a shelf despite others clearly knowing exactly what they want, from that section of shelf that is being blocked; married couples who situate themselves as follows: husband on one side of cart, wife behind “the wheel”, arguing over which one of them didn’t put the cap back on the toothpaste that morning.

My special ladyfriend can attest to the anger that builds up inside me when we have to suffer these peabrained imbeciles on our grocery trips. I’m certain that someday I will go crazy, and when I do, I will bludgeon these stupid types with a box of Cheerios, douse their unconscious bodies in soy sauce, and bury them alive in bulk iced tea mix.

The second sign of stupid syndrome usually occurs behind the wheel of a car. Symptoms include driving behind someone who is halfway through backing out of a parking stall; entering an intersection on a yellow light, when traffic is backed up, causing their vehicle to block all other traffic or pedestrians; forgetting to look right when turning right onto a busy street; parking on a narrow side street, one car length past an intersection, and putting on their hazard lights despite doing so where there’s clearly a no parking sign or no shoulder or not even using the shoulder to park on; stopping in a bus stop to pick someone up/drop someone off, and again turning on hazard lights as though it excuses them from the rules of the road; anyone does not know how to use a four-way stop; people who drive 40 km/h in a 50 zone but will drive 75 km/h in a 60 zone.

I wonder if there’s any correlation between the first type and the second type of oblivious person. Is the ignorant shopper also the hazard-light enthusiast? Or is it possible that people can develop two independent types of stupidity? I suppose given the fantastic variation in nature, humans can be total moronic asses in one respect while another subsection of humans develop a different type of brain malfunction. Regardless, I hate them all.

Finally, there is the general category. These are just some unrelated examples of assholery that drive me completely crazy, and people who exhibit these traits are still not deserving of a place in this world: answering cellphones during meals; texting on cellphones when in any social situation; daily commuters who use GPS navigators; impatient people who take other people’s food at a take-out restaurant because they refuse to wait for their own; people who board transit without waiting for others to step off the train or bus first; people who refuse to step out of a full elevator to let someone off; people who treat store cashiers like the scum of the earth; those who do not hold a door open behind them despite knowing there’s someone just more than an arm’s length from the door; and finally, anyone who willfully leaves trash behind them under the assumption that someone will pick it up for them later.

If you find yourself displaying any of these traits, I suggest you think long and hard about how much of a jerk you are.

A Sad Lack of Blogging

I have to apologize for not blogging much this past month. There just has not been a lot of things to write about in an interesting or entertaining manner. I’m dying to go into detail on what exactly goes on at work, but since I do work for one of the largest companies on Earth, I need to watch what I say if I enjoy getting a paycheque and buying Disney DVDs on the cheap. By the way, if anyone wants to fill out their library of Ernest movies, or needs the six Air Bud films for Christmas, drop me an email.

One of the less popular news items lately is the impending doom of American car companies. Did you know that one share of Ford stock costs less than a Twix bar? Or that, for the price of a tall latte at Starbucks, you could own two shares of General Motors? I don’t feel sad for these companies, really - they existed on sales of trucks and inefficient SUVs for a decade, ignoring quality control and fuel costs, and now they’re stuck with vehicles no one wants and dealerships that might as well sell hot dogs and balloons for the kids and throw in a free sedan rather than the other way around. What is disappointing is that GM is at least putting all its cards in a revolutionary vehicle (the Volt, which I’ve gushed about before) and this car is only about 18 months from being sold. I hope that whether GM dies or is bailed out by becoming - gasp - government owned, that this technology sees the light of day either through having the Volt hit the dealerships or by one of the Japanese companies buying the patents.

Still on the economy topic: I haven’t received my latest RRSP statements, but judging by Erwin’s results (he has money in the same fund I do, thanks to EA) I’ll probably have lost all the interest it accumulated since inception. While clearly this royally sucks, I’m glad I don’t rely on investments to keep me afloat. I’m still 30+ years away from “retirement” anyway, and I’m not going to panic by pulling out what money I have left. Although to be honest, I was tempted when this whole stock market bullshit started.

I promise to blog again before Saturday. If I don’t, well, it’s because I had better things to do. Like nap.

The Right Thing

I’m willing to bet that today, Barack Obama’s election will be the most commonly addressed blog topic. This one will be no different.

The very definition of a landslide, and some states aren’t even decided yet. It’s really inspiring and fills me with hope that maybe, just maybe, the Western world is going to change for the better over the rest of our lifetimes. Even with all the hyperbole from the media, it really does feel like the United States is going to change in a major way, that good things will actually happen, and the last thirty years of mostly awful leadership could come to an end. It’s a lot to hope for, but at least the first brick has been laid.

That’s all I really have to say. I’m happy that Barack won, and that America made the right choice. I’m excited to see what happens.

A shame that they still have 90 days of the current retard in office.