Bob's Angry Rants

Frequently, I find that I am much more willing to take a conversation to its bitter end than most people are. This has resulted in the following phrases being taken up by some of my friends: "We're not having this conversation," and "This conversation is over." Nobody likes talking to me. And they never let me finish my thoughts, either. It's one of the reasons that I started writing this site, so that I could get these things out of my system.

Here are some of the conversations that I don't feel are finished but am not allowed to bring up anymore:

The variable time sand-timer
Big 5 sports: What are the 5 big sports? Or was 5 stores that conglomerated into 1?
Beverages, and more: What's with the comma?
People are stupid
Who put the bop in the bop-sha-bop-sha-bop? (not really. Still a good question, though)
Why "My Boyfriend's Back" is a good movie.
That waiter said "semen" instead of "salmon," I swear.
How can you not know "Dream Weaver?"
What the hell is wrong with people? (Some might confuse this one with people are stupid, but there are some subtle differences)
I think meat water has great commercial possibilities, once you get past the techinical hurdles.

and many more...

I've really lost track of the numerous loose ends that are out there. I usually get this about once a week or so. Some weeks go by without any, but then I'll get three conversations shut down in a day. The reason I bring this all up is because, just recently one of these topics came up again, and I just have to share.

Last week, Anne and I were having making dinner for some friends of ours (Will and Dennis) and we had a nice evening planned. But just as we were putting the final touches on cleaning the apartment, and getting ready to put things in the oven, the lights went out. Now, I realize that our two-block blackout may not be quite as dramatic as the one that wiped out large portions of the Northeast and Canada, but this one happened to me. TO ME! Just plain unacceptable.

Anyway, we had to relocate our dinner to a restaurant. Which was fine, because we got some pretty good Thai food. This brings us to the rant. The restaurant we were in has a pretty nice hourglass as a decoration. About a year ago, I had commented (in this restaurant) that I think that it would be a great idea to have a sand timer with a variable aperture to vary the amount of time it took for the sand to get through. Being in the restaurant brought it all back and I tried to start up the conversation again. I probably only got through a couple sentences before I got shot down with "We aren't having this conversation."

I just think that it's a great idea. You could adjust the diameter of the aperture to vary the amount of time it took for the sand to drain between, say, 30 minutes and 90 minutes. Sounds great to me. I mean, not everything takes exactly an hour. In fact precious few things do. Say you wanted to put something in the oven for 45 minutes. That hourglass doesn't look so great now, does it? But with my new variable sand-timer, you could set it to that duration and flip it over and keep a constant eye on it so you knew when that time expired.

Okay, so maybe it doesn't sound that practical, but I just think that it would be inherently cool. Of course, Anne and Will are just too pragmatic to understand the coolness of a useless gadget, but I could talk about it for hours. Well, maybe not hours, but a good 30 to 45 minutes, easy. We could time it.

Hmmm, I wonder if there is some way we could give a sand timer a stopwatch function...