Boston Tea Party

            Cheerio old chap, this weekend do yourself a favor and come visit the great queen for a spot of tea. Pay your homage to her majesty for all she has done for you. Show her your undying loyalty and devotion to England.

            Fuck that bitch Queen boys! Thursday night we go to the harbor and run a muck. We’ll set fire to the ships. Let those British bastards burn or drown.

            They want to tax our tea?! We’ll go steal that tea right from under their filthy noses. I’m not going to stand for such an abuse of falsified power and neither will you. The Queen has no power over us from all the way across the sea and she needs to be shown who makes the rules over here.

            We will all dress like a bunch of redskins so if anyone sees us they will blame the natives and we will have help getting rid of them, worst comes to worst. Do not bring any muskets. This will strictly be a bare hands and knife mission to stay in character.

            After we return from our task we will celebrate with a lager at William Wilson’s home. He has land as open as the desert for us to be able to see anyone approaching for miles. If done correctly there will be no one following us anyway.

            My brothers, come support the Sons of Liberty in their struggle to free us from oppression. Stand alongside us as we show the Queen we will stand for such heinous acts no longer. Stand up for the colonies. Stand up for your family and your freedom.

           

Just Another Waiter's Rant

Dear Horrible Restaurant Guests:

Let’s make one thing clear from the very beginning; we are not friends. I will gladly serve you and your mistress a porterhouse, in a restaurant that you deem too nice to bring your actual wife, because I make pretty decent money doing so. Just because I do it with a smile and give a fake laugh to your corny jokes, does not mean I enjoy your company in the least bit. Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of people who come in to eat everyday that are pleasant, and I will go out of my way to make sure they have the best dining experience possible, you are not one of them.

I can tell who you are a lot of the time before you even sit down. Strutting into the dining room as if the ground your feet come in contact with turns to gold. Of course you turn down the first table because it’s not a booth in a corner; our restaurant seats 500 people on a Saturday, we have 4 booths in corners that seat between four and ten people. No you and your significant other who is beginning to look like a horse from all the face-lifts cannot have one since you didn’t even have a reservation and its peak hours. This table is going to take up maybe two hours of your entire life, suck it up, or next time plan better; we take reservations for a reason.

Then the nightmare continues as I greet your table. “How are we doing this evening, welcome t…” “I’ll have a Grey Goose martini straight up, bone dry, chilled, and she’ll have a Pinot Grigio.” I fight back the urge to tell you to shut the fuck up and let me finish mid sentence, solely because my bills don’t pay themselves. “Would she like Riff or Santa Margarita?” “No Pinot Grigio,” you exclaim as if I’m the dumb one in this scenario. They’re both Pinot Grigios; pick one.

Reciting you the specials becomes another unnecessarily tough task. Listen, there’s a ton of specials, they take a long time to say and explain. Not only that, I also have to say them to the six other tables in my section. So I don’t need you interrupting after each one because it gave you a flashback to this one pointless time that no one in your party even cares about, let alone me who just wants you to have an emergency where you have to leave and I can get a new table in your place.

After dealing with a grueling two hours of your bullshit to the point where if I continue to fake smile, my face may crack, you pay your bill. Surprise, surprise, not only do you act like a piece of shit, you also tip like one. I don’t give a fuck what Oprah says about today’s economy, ten percent is never acceptable, unless you got bad service. I’ve been doing this for years, I’m sadly a professional, and you’ll never get ten percent service from me. We servers tip out everyone and their mothers, the busser, the food-runner, the bar, the barista, the glass polisher. Your measly ten percent just dropped to about three percent. Do the math, if you’re leaving seven percent or less, I just paid for you to dine at my table.

It’s really not a difficult concept, your mother always told you to treat people the way you would want to be treated yourself. That lesson did not get valeted with your car, nor checked with your coat. When you come out to eat act like you have some class, not like you’re simply a pompous ass.

Good Riddance.

Print is the Past

            We have come far as a society. From the days of passenger pigeons and typewriters, we have come to a day and age where you can communicate with a person halfway around the world in an instant. Computers replaced typewriters, then with the development of the internet and smartphones, there was no need to print out information; people had everything they could need at the tip of their fingers.  In Joseph A.’s blog post, “Digital World” he provides further evidence that we are past the point in history where we need to print information to get it out to the world. He is correct, and the world should heed his words.

            Print is having an extremely negative effect on our environment. Paper could live on for extremely long periods of time, in tree form. Once trees become paper their life expectancy drastically drops. Then once the information is no longer needed, the paper is discarded, “a person can use their mobile device for many years before upgrading to a newer one” (A). Joseph calls for people to recycle used paper, but if everyone switches to digital, recycling is no longer even needed and therefore the efforts needed to get people to recycle can be redistributed to more pressing needs.

            Digital is also much easier to transport than print; bringing a kindle onto a train is substantially easier than bringing an entire library. While I am not as concerned with annoying the people around me as Joseph seems to be, it is still a valid concern, and gives another advantage to the digital side of this debate.  Joseph also is concerned with the ink that rubs off on one’s hands from newspapers (A). No one wants filth all over their hands, and then inevitably on their clothing, print is dirty.

            Everyone loves to share their interests with those closest to them. If we were stuck in the days of strictly print, it could take hours, possibly weeks to get an interesting article to a friend (A), depending on your vicinity to them. In our current technologically advanced age, a person can email and entire article, or screen-shot a snippet, and send it to a friend instantly. Digital is bringing people together by easing their communications.

            While some people may still enjoy the feel of turning the pages of a new book, or the smell of a freshly printed newspaper (as weird as that may sound to some), their time to enjoy those is coming to a close. Digital is taking over in all aspects of the media, even billboards that were once printed, then laid in the same ways as wallpaper, are being replace by upgraded digital billboards that can cycle through multiple advertisements.  Cancel your magazine and newspaper subscriptions, throw out your book collections, buy a laptop and a tablet, and enjoy all of the above. Wherever you want, whenever you want, digital is here to make your life easier.

Work Cited

A., Joseph. “Digital World.” ENG 101 MD Joseph A. Blogger.com. 29 October 2014. Web 11 November 2014.

Digital vs. Print

            Information is accessible to people in many different ways. Whether people learn through the newspaper or the web, society will gain vital information. In “Why Digital is Better than Print,” Dan Blank looks at a few of the reasons. As society continues to advance and expand, people must turn to digital over print, to reduce their carbon footprint and improve the ease in which they access information, proving that Blank is correct in his article.

            When a magazine is freshly printed, it looks wonderful. Firm and glistening, the pages burst with colors and entertain. Yet as time passes, those same colors that once popped begin to fade. The pages begin to wrinkle and the magazine loses its luster. On the other hand digital will look the same forever and as Blank states, “the ability to dive deep into the archives of all media to pull up relevant results the moment you need it” (Blank). Digital will stand the test of time, unlike print which will fade in piles of eyesores.

            Size matters, and in this case smaller is better. Newspapers can be large and overbearing, this point further emphasized when Blank states “that you could annoy the person next to you with the constant shuffling sound of the pages” (Blank). The ink from print constantly rubs off the pages onto everything, from fingers to clothing. Digital can be as compact as a smartphone, with no ink to stain its surroundings.

            As the world ages and societies continue to grow, people are running out of places to put garbage. Once print has come to the end of its uses, most people simply throw out the paper. Recycling is the better option, but is not always followed. Blank states that “digital certainly consumes energy, but the inherent waste is not as evident, as millions of copies of a single piece of content can be replicated and spread across the world in moments” (Blank), digital doesn’t need to be constantly thrown away and therefore takes up less space in our dwindling garbage space.

            As the years pass, digital will inevitably take over. Print continues to manifest itself due to it being what people are accustomed to, but it’s time is coming to an end. Smartphones and tablets make information more portable and easier to access. The days of printing are coming to a close.

Work Cited

Blank, Dan. “Why Digital Is Better Than Print.” I Feel Fine: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Web. danblank.com. n. p. 5 August 2000. web. 3 November 2014.

            

Welcoming Blog

This is my first blog, here or anywhere else.  Never understood the lure of blogging honestly.  None the less, welcome to my blog.  I enjoy writing so I should enjoy that aspect of this class.  Hopefully it will improve my writing, especially my grammar.  Enjoy the posts to come.