Lilith, the black cat



June 13th, 2008, a Friday

Some things are so annoying, aren't they?  I mean there are categories of annoying, some more important than others.  But they can add up.  After a while, makes me wanna holler, throw up both my hands, as Marvin Gaye so aptly put it (yes, he is still hanging around).  Let's begin (well, you knew we were going to).  

Ann Curry.  There, I've said it.  Queen of annoying.  If you don't know who she is, you're lucky (chief news reader and sometimes reporter on the Today Show).  Forget that she is always touching people and her sympathetic interviews are nauseating and her "tough" interviews are obnoxious.   My complaint is very specific.  The night the tornado hit the Iowa Boy Scout Camp, they sent Ann straight to the scene so when the early morning news cycle hit, she was right there, looking appropriately devastated and concerned in the field with sleeves rolled up.  But her barracuda side came out when she arranged some parents and scouts for a group interview.  She ignored the parents completely whom she had put in the back row and concentrated on the two boys (although maybe she talked to the parents for a quick minute later but I finally had to turn the channel so I'm not sure).  The young teenagers were remarkably composed considering they had just watched fellow scouts die and get seriously wounded when something that sounded like a jet plane landed on them.  They were proud of how prepared they were, pointing out, of course, that being prepared was the boy scout motto.  They spoke of how they assisted with the wounded, using words like gauze and applying pressure to stop the bleeding like they were trained to do.  But Ann, now ghoulish in her search for dramatic and powerful television, wanted more.  She kept leaning in, subtly pressuring them for language that would devastate us and make us empathize on an emotional level with those poor boys.  But the boys were handling themselves far better than she was, telling the facts and showing respect and objectivity.  She kept saying things like "describe how that felt" even after they had described what happened.  One of the boys told how he and another boy huddled under a table when the tornado hit.  Then it was gone, he said.  She pounced like a wild animal saying "then he was gone!".  And the boy, horrified, said "no, no, the tornado was gone".  She actually seemed disappointed.  There are so many things wrong with this it is hard to imagine what they all are.  NBC must have put her on a private jet in the middle of the night to get her from New York to Iowa so she could devour those Boy Scouts.  Was that really necessary?  Maybe a nice report from a local station would have done just fine (and I'll bet the Iowa media left those boys and their families alone).  And what about the parents?  Who thought it was a good idea to put their sons in front of a national television audience with Ann Curry after what they had been through?  How about just taking them home and holding them tight and telling them what a good job they did helping to save their friends.  (It might have been a good time to get out the teddy bear Mom had put in the top of the closet.  But then Ann Curry might have found out about that and it could have been embarrassing.)  The morning after the biggest thing that will ever happen to the scouts, they should not be appearing on national television.  That's messed up.  Shame on you, Ann Curry, for not seeing that Boy Scouts have been trained to handle emergencies with maturity and dignity and that is what they were doing in the interview.  Us viewers should have been thinking about how terrific those scouts were under pressure, not how that wasn't enough for you.

Then there's the arrogance of money.  That's annoying.  But not as annoying as pandering to money.  Take the Richard Garnder Antiques catalogue that for some unknown reason arrived in our mailbox (maybe the couple who built the house thought it applied to them?).  It is a full color glossy book, 126 pages long.  A beautiful painting of a woman gathering lillies in the forest (do lillies grow in the forest?) appears on the cover.  The back tells us that it came from England and boasts that their showroom has been voted best outside London.  Amidst the late 19th century mother of pearl ducks and the William and Mary oyster olivewood chest, are nearly blank white pages with one phrase of text to draw the moneyed eye.  "Exceptional antiques for exceptional people", "you will always receive Richards personal attention" and my favorite "reassuringly expensive".  Who are these people? 

And what about the people who paid $22,000 per seat on the floor to watch the Lakers play the Boston Celtics.  I mean, to lose to the Boston Celtics at home.  Here's what I think.  Give the $44,000 for the pair of tickets to Feed the Children and watch the damned game on TV.  

See how annoyed I am!!!!!!!

But here's some good news.  A Dutch company did a survey of insurance statistics and found that when the 13th of a month falls on a Friday, it is actually safer.  Less car accidents, fire and thefts occur on Friday the 13th than when Friday falls on other dates.  And a Dutch guy said it so it must be true.  Naturally the logical Dutch guy found it hard to believe it was because people were more careful on Friday the 13th, but statistics don't lie.  So just because today is Friday the 13th, don't you worry.  You are a little safer than last Friday.

So when it's the ninth inning and you're three runs down with two outs and your team hits a three run homer to tie, all those annoying things just don't seem to matter.  Until the bottom of the 13th when you've stayed up way past your bedtime and the other team hits a walk off homerun to win the game.  How annoying!

GR