Best to start a fresh year all snarky, believe you me. Once you let off all accumulated steam, even from all the decades previous, and get all the rants out, then it could be downhill the rest of the way. Or so we pray, pray, pray. Wink wink.
So here’s wishing pet peeves ill or be gone by listing them here. Most will ever stay. But putting them on a personal blacklist may be just as good as applying that old reliable hex: Sacra ng draco!
Okay, to dissimulate the curse somewhat, as a tip of the hat to all the good vibes being dished out early this month, maybe I should rely on rhetoric, like that of the old game 21 Questions (that have perennially stumped us).
Why do cable TV companies make it a habit to change the earlier assigned numbers for certain channels? What for, really? I can never understand this.
I’ve subscribed to NBA Premium on Sky for over a year now, at extra cost, so that even in my sleep my fingers can reach out to the remote and press the magic numbers 7 and 2. And I start to hear the play-by-play for my OKC Thunder beating up on the Miami Heat right from tip-off. (Okay, I’m still dreaming, right?)
Then before the old year ends, it’s announced that this invaluable cable channel that rules my mornings is being transferred, from 72 to 84. Sure, easy enough to reprogram the caboodle, or just press 84 and stick it right there. But it will have to be done on the day the shift starts. So half of me wakes one morning and that half is surprised to hear something else transpiring on the channel that’s been left on all night. And the whole of me wakes to see, aghast, that some drama’s on. And it says I’m now watching Jack TV!
So what the hell, my thumb reaches out and ups the channel number till I get it right, 84 for NBA Premium! So my sentient, rational, inquisitive half asks, what the hell for was that, anyway?
Now, I can understand cable providers wanting to lump everything applying to a genre all together, which makes sense. But check out Channel 84 on Sky and it’s close to only one other supposed sports channel, while the rest are still grouped together in the early 30s.
So was that move just designed to gain awareness for Jack TV? Cynical and manipulative, I say, if that were indeed the motive. As it seems.
As when the evil idiot-savants can downgrade a channel’s popularity by assigning it a three-digit number when not all the twin-digit ones have been exhausted, I see the hand that’s too clever by half behind it.
And it results in tawdry consequences, such as when Studio 23 on Channel 23, but natch, got shifted to 17 and yet retained Studio 23 as the channel I.D. Were they just enamored of Michael Jordan’s number?
I say, again and again, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
This principle applies as well, and all the time, to all the sudden changes we see in formats and default modes pertaining to design interface and whatchamacallits having to do with the Internet (which rules our lives 24/7).
Some programmers and design techies just can’t leave well enough alone. Since nba.com redesigned its home page (for the nth time, or on a yearly basis it seems), now one can’t see all the games’ ongoing scores in one row on the topmost bar. Because yesterday’s games are still there, and one has to click on the right arrow to move that bar forward. And strain one’s eyes to determine where yesterday’s games left off and today’s current ones begin. Worse, tomorrow’s scheduled games are now totally out of sight!
All that — for the sake of change? Not a positive one, I say.
And why does it automatically log on to nba.philippines when one goes to nba.com? Nasty, nasty. One still has to click on the Jerry West icon to get to the desired original.
The same kind of needless aggravation appears to inform almost every single conduct of format change in the Net. Remember when FB Timeline was introduced? Well, a lot of us didn’t want it, but it was eventually imposed tyrannically across the global board. And has it really been much of an improvement on the old interface? No. In fact, these days, it’s even dropped the right-side half-column, so that there’s all that white space there where our eyes used to go ping-pong when column-browsing.
I repeat: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Call me an old dawg who can’t learn new tricks, but seriously: If there’s nothing wrong with the status quo, and peeps have been intimate and comfortable with it for some time, any supposed enhancement better be good, to make it better.
Just being a curmudgeon early in the year? Not quite; I have reason. I have valid questions, more questions.
Why do office secretaries have to staple an envelope with a bill or any paper document inside? Why give the recipient the added task of un-stapling it before opening the envelope to release its contents?
Why are some die-hard Catholics so persistent in getting their word out to us, that they’re hell-bent on being busybodies with our lives, especially women’s lives, inclusive but natch of their bodies? Enough na already. Move on to the next foxhole in your perpetual rear-guard defense against the crumbling of an institution that’s been so out-of-step for centuries. Isn’t?
Similarly, why do the Republicans in the USA insist on playing the bad guy, again against the tide of global liberalism? Zealotry seems to be the one common bond with the RCC’s men of the cloth.
Why did you Finance hoods and congressional hypocrites label it as a Sin Tax, was that to apply insult to injury?
Why does the PBA condone so much of a merry-go-round in team composition, so that if one blinks for a season or three, one can’t tell anymore what a former fave player is now wearing for a uniform? A drain on team loyalty both ways, this practice.
Why have our postal rates hit the roof for international mail? So that a fair-sized book that used to cost P200 to airmail to Los Angeles now takes five times as much to get across the Pacific by air?
Why are maids so loud in their chatter when they’re in your neighbor’s dirty kitchen? Can’t they soften their accents, since it’s intimate space anyway?
Why do China’s leaders insist on casting aside traditional sagacity just because they were left behind by the West for a period of time, but have now rebounded economically, so that they’ll risk all that just so they’re seen to be flexing their muscles for their supposed domination of this century? Shouldn’t it occur to them that karmic retribution also seeks out the suddenly arrogant nouveau riche?
Why do security guards ask what your purpose is for entering a gated village? Will they believe it if you answer, “Well that bastard on so-and-so street’s a deadbeat who hasn’t paid me back for a decade, so I’m blowing up his house.� What if a balikbayan wants to surprise his mother — which he can’t do if they insist on calling up the house first? Or a wife or lover; wouldn’t inordinate screening preempt interesting discoveries, such as in flagrante delicto?
Why is the Sta. Ana route still as it’s been for half a century, with monster jeepneys, mostly empty, lording it over every errant inch of space, even using the congested road as a parking lot?
Why has Manila Mayor Fred Lim allowed tricycles to take over much of the Ermita-Malate tourist belt? Are they supposed to serve a distinct cultural purpose, as photo-op subjects for awed Koreans, Japanese and Taiwanese?
Why are the so-called epal politicians still at it, using public funds to glorify themselves via mug shots or initials permanently imposed on local sculpture, er, infrastructure?
Will the era of tacky lampposts started by ex-mayor Lito Atienza in Manila ever give way to aesthetic consideration, let alone efficient lighting and clean accounting, that is, sans speculative kickbacks?
Does the MMFF really have to go on and on ad nauseam to spoil most cineastes’ yearend holidays, for an extended period at that? Why do the rest of us have to wait for a miserable fortnight before we see Les Miserables?
Oops. I’ve exceeded 21 questions. Much as I still have more that constantly cause my sensitive hackles to rise, I’ll spare you the rest for now. You mount and count your own. But hey, then let’s move on, and get that loving feeling on start-up mode, just in time for Valentine’s Day. (But why should over a thousand Pinoy couples kiss in public just to mark a new Guinness Book record?)