Mall Madness

This game, Mall Madness, came up on my RSS feed for Amazon deals.

Funny thing about this game, from when it was published when I was a kid. Now, we didn't have allowances, nor did we save up for the things we wanted. We pretty much asked for things, and if there was any reason at all for us to have them, we'd get them...sometimes right away, sometimes at the next 'gift holiday' like a birthday or Christmas. If there was no reason for us to have them, or if my mom and/or dad thought the particular item was without virtue for us, we obviously didn't get it.

There were just a few times in my childhood that I look back on and think, "Oh, that's where I found out what sort of stuff annoyed my parents." Wanting the game Mall Madness was one of those times. I can't remember which one of us asked for it, but I distinctly remember the tirade launched into about the subject matter of this game. The gamer in me wonders what the engine behind the subject matter is, and whether it's a good game or not, but I think, regardless of whether the B ever wants the game or not, I'll never be able to buy it. I think I'd always hear my mom in my head telling me she didn't think I should play it.

For the curious, I was also not allowed to see the movie Xanadu as a kid...not because the subject matter of the movie was deemed too 'adult' for me, but because my mom had seen a commercial for it and thought it just looked dumb.

I think this is why subject matter in things tends not to bother me, but if something is just straight-out dumb, I tend to shun it.

Adding to the Discourse on 'Cool'

I have a wonderful friend who recently insinuated that the Wii is not cool because it is a...wait, let me quote this directly:

...a little, plastic-looking white thing...

I think that probably makes all this crap uncool too:








And that's just what I could grab from the VERY FIRST PAGE of some guy's Flickr set of all of the Apple front pages in recent memory. In fact, the only thing that distressed me at first about the Wii is that it looked like Apple made it.

Now I'm completely confused about what is cool... ::scratches head::

Bedtime Struggles Begin

So, the B, induced most likely by the stress of our recent move, can now climb out of her crib and does not want to be put there to nap or sleep overnight. Our kid who we used to lie down in the crib and she'd put herself gratefully out...that kid is gone. This one just wants me, but oddly, I don't want to go to bed at 8 for the rest of my life.

PMOG

If anyone who reads this is playing PMOG, shoot me a message there. I'm kathyl on PMOG.

Who Programs These Phone Trees?

So I'm calling the company I'm considering getting phone service from at our new address, and the first thing the phone tree prompts me with is, "Enter the telephone number of the address where you have service or the phone number where you would like to get service."

Bwah?

I mean, granted, the phone service is not the only service this company provides, but when one actually is a purveyor of phone services, has it not occurred to them that there will be people calling from outside the area, wanting to hook up brand-new service, and they will not have an answer to that phone prompt?

I waited through the computer lady asking me to please input the telephone number requested three times ("I'm sorry, I didn't understand you, can you please enter that again?") and I tried the 'press 0 for an operator' trick to no avail. Eventually, the phone tree kicked over to its secondary option to route my call, asking for a zip code where I had existing service or wanted new service.

Still...annoying. Head-scratching. You give people phone service! Is it such a stretch to think that a good number of the people calling have no way to start drilling into your phone tree without having to wait through the timeout on the first option? That's really, really annoying.

Are you completely kidding me?

First CBS does "Kid Nation", where parents signed away all sorts of rights to protect their kids so they could get their 15 minutes of fame. Oh, and learn about "real life", which you can totally do with a television camera pointed at you.

Now NBC ups the ante with "The Baby Borrowers", where parents of babies--BABIES, I saw the commercial, these kids are LITTLE--hand their progeny over to random gum-smacking teenage couples so they can play house for a little while. Oh, but it's not TV, it's birth control. That's their tag line.

If you hand your kid over to one of these shows, they should revoke your custody. Is that not obvious to everyone else? Who hands their toddler or younger child over to some television producers so that young Tiffani or Brittnei or whoever can totally prove that she's, ya know, awesomely ready to be a mom?!?

She's Two

Our girl turns two today. I can spend the day, no matter how much work we have to do on the house, secure in the notion that I have no chance of being busier today than I was two years ago.