Rants

Today’s Photo Friday challenge is Glamour and I had a very hard time coming up with a picture for it.

Tonight we made a little outing to the local mall and I brought along my camera figuring I’d snap a glamorous mannequin in one of the stores or in their window. Nope. Couldn’t find a single one, at least not a complete one anyway. A few waist up things with no heads and a couple of full bodied ones, again with no head. How glamorous is a neck stump? Not very.

My back up plan was to head into the book store and snap a pic of the magazine Glamour, but they don’t carry it or it was either sold out.

I ended up with a nebulous challenge filler, using definition #3 and an old Miata photo.

I remember when we first moved to Aiken 15 years ago, everyone was so excited as they were just breaking ground on our very own mall. No more driving all the way over to Augusta, GA. After a year and a half of watching the building get constructed, it opened with much fanfare and a 65% occupancy rate. All the stores we names of stores you would see in any mall (although in some cases, 2/3 scale of a regular mall stores because we are a smaller market.) They all had big bold neon signs and marble store fronts with shiny glass and brass. Marble tile floors and bright lighting. It was a glamorous place to shop.

Over the years the place filled up to near capacity with stores, but somewhere along the way shoppers tastes changed. Malls became passe, the strip mall, anchored by Targets and Old Navy stores experienced a renaissance. The malls occupancy rates fell. The unthinkable happened and an anchor store left. Then another. In an effort to survive they cut rents and now former cart merchants moved in the abandoned store fronts. Gone were the nice signs, replaced with hastily created canvas banners. Store with names you never heard of moved in. The occupancy rate is approaching 65% again.

It is not so glamorous to shop in the mall anymore. The once hallowed halls of upscale commercialism is now becoming a giant Wal-Mart where the departments are separated with walls instead of aisles.

It’s sweeps month. TV is fresher: 4 weeks of first run Friends. TV is livelier: famous guest stars like Danny Devito pop up on Friends. TV is sexier: Danny Devito plays a stripper at Phoebe?s bachelorette party on Friends. I don’t watch Friends, but I get to see promos for the show on one I do. Sweeps means I get to see fresh episodes of West Wing.

The title of this post was intended as sarcasm, but who am I to judge? And really, what is more believable, Phoebe becoming aroused with a naked Danny Devito or Tony Zeigler, presidential aide single handedly brokering the salvation of Social Security?

I know I brought this on my self, I’ll never learn, etc. but we made a shopping trip to Wal-Mart tonight. We need a bathroom scale and one of those triangular pillows for sitting up in bed. First stop Target, they had scales, but no pillow. I suggested Wal-Mart because they are just the type of store to have those pillows. Plus it was Tuesday at 9 PM, it shouldn’t be to crowded. So we put the scale back and headed up the street to Wally World.

The store was not crowded. Wal-Mart HQ must know that this is an off night for shoppers, so they restock. We nearly got run over twice by associates hauling goods out to the shelves on carts. We couldn’t find the pillow here either. A woman swore they had some just yesterday, but they weren’t where there were, so they were gone. Picked out a scale and headed for the checkouts. They were manned as if there was nobody in the store. This is one of those big ol’ Supercenters with like 35 checkout lanes, two were open. Each line was 6 deep with people with full carts. No express lanes were open. After 5 minutes of standing and steaming, I told Donna, “Just put it down, we’ll go back to Target.”

Sorry, Wally World you just lost $34.95 +tax, Target got it.

If you have been reading here this week you know we had an ice storm here Sunday/Monday. I bet almost 75% of the people in the area lost power. Some for only a little while others are still without. Our power was only off until Tuesday evening, but cable didn’t come back on until Thursday night, we were lucky.

I didn’t see this, but my wife read it to from this morning’s paper. We have what they call Rants & Raves where people call or email in their bouquets or brickbats. I’m sure a lot of places do this now a days, sells papers. One person wrote in to complain that the cable company was lax in their responsibility because they were still without cable and they were going to cancel. Don’t you think that maybe the cable company volunteered their bucket trucks to help out the power guys restore electricity to houses and that might be a little bit more important than somebody getting to watch QVC or Jerry Springer.

This morning’s paper reported that NASA had lost contact with the Spirit rover:

“Since Wednesday, its 19th day on Mars, the Spirit had sent back to Earth only meaningless radio noise or simple beeps acknowledging receipt of commands. Among the possible causes: a corruption of its software or computer memory.”

I find it suspicious, first the British probe Beagle fails to report in and now this…is it a simple “Windows Mars Edition” bug in the rover or could the Martians be sabotaging our attempts at fact finding?

Back in December I chronicled a major event in my life, the purchase of new underwear, twice. You get what you pay for. When you spend $10 for 5 pairs of underwear you, get underwear worth $2. In the short span of perhaps 4 washings the briefs from Target are coming apart. In 3 of the 5, the elastic in the waistband is coming un-sewn. In all the color is fading fast. While we were on Hilton Head Island this weekend, Donna and I did a little outlet mall shopping and one of the stores we ventured into was a Jockey store. They had some nice briefs that were 3 for $11. After taking a pair out of the pack, I could see that I was definitely a size large in their world. I snagged a couple boxes. Donna was over digging through the store’s clearance table and when I showed her my picks she said, put them back. Huh!?! On the table she was looking at were two of the very same things I had in my hand, but priced at $3.99. Niiice.
P.S. If you click on that briefs link, what you will see is exactly what I look like in them. 🙂 (Well, maybe, wished I looked like. Whater ever you do, don’t press the “Detail” button.)