Bathroom Stalls are not Parking Spaces

This post was inspired by Christine Wolf’s Bloggin’ When I Got Nothin’ suggestion and two unrelated ChicagoNow posts that got my attention yesterday because they shared a theme: thinking of others before or at least in addition to yourself.

Kim Z Dale wrote about accepting a drink voucher if you are not going to use them. I commented that it certainly seemed odd. Trying to come up with plausible explanations, maybe he was collecting them for his next flight (either a connecting flight or a longer upcoming one)?  Or maybe he jumped at the free thing not realizing that he didn’t want/couldn’t use it and didn’t know how to walk it back?

Mary Ellen Smolinski wrote about using the handicapped stall in the bathroom when other stalls are available.  What we don’t know is if this person simply wasn’t paying attention or wouldn’t have bothered even if Ms. Smolinski had been able to communicate in time: “hey I really need to use that type of bathroom stall because of my physical disabilities.”

I cannot speak for Ms. Smolinski but I suspect she used a strong headline to get everyone’s attention and she fathoms the various nuanced scenarios involved in her ask, and doesn’t expect everyone to avoid the Handicap Stall ALL of the TIME.   In software and systems engineering, there is this concept of a Use Case.  She cited a particular Use Case where someone could have performed the desired action but did not.  If you check the comment pond under her post, you’ll find many Internet Justice Warriors quick to point out other Use Cases where this is perfectly acceptable.

While I would hope to have enough presence of mind to not beat out a person who really needs that type of stall more than I do, I have no qualms about using it even if any of the other stalls are available.  If I walk into a bathroom and all or most of all the stalls are available, I’m going to take the cleanest one I can find.  Sometimes that also means the Handicapped one because it has more space.  Also these days I’m rarely doing my business alone and the Handicapped Stall is the one with the baby changing station.

Here’s the thing….bathroom stalls are not the same thing as parking spaces.  They really aren’t.  Maybe they should be, but in the world today, they aren’t.The turnover in the bathroom is probably faster than that of a parking spot. A car can be parked for hours and hours. People usually are  on the toilet for a relatively briefly fraction of that time (one would hope).

In the world today, if you get caught parking in a handicapped parking spot, you get a ticket.  If you use the handicapped stall, you get a little more leg room.

Tying this all back to the aforementioned common theme, Kim and Mary Ellen have reminded me that we all need to be more woke (as the kids say) of what’s going on around us and think beyond our own wants and needs.  I’m still going to use the best stall available, but I will make more of an effort to avoid using the handicap one if I can.
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Stop talking about the Order of Succession already

It’s not gonna fucking happen, at least not the way all my liberal, hippy, SJW and other left-leaning friends think.  Maybe Trump gets impeached or is removed via the 25h Amendment, though most likely he will simply resign first.  But if you think there is going to be a massive house cleaning of everyone from the President to the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader, and the entire cabinet, you are either naive or disingenuous.

Let’s pretend for a moment that all the key players are involved in something treasonous and insidious.  That kind of thing would simply tear our Republic apart.  There would be no coming back from that and America as we know it would no longer exist.  And as much as I believe our current Congress doesn’t care about a great many things, I do believe they still have some fucks to give about that happening.  I have to believe it.

The main reason we even have an Order of Succession in the first place is because we need some type of contingency for the unspeakable.  Some rare to nearly improbably but technical possible scenarios where a sitting president, his VP, and some member of Congress might die or become incapable of serving within a small time frame such that an election could not fill the gaps.  Some travesties such as a terrorist attack or perhaps an airborne pathogen that strikes quickly and indiscriminately.

The way it will go down is Trump will either resign or be removed by the 25th amendment.  Contrary to all the blow job jokes out there, Impeachment is a high burden to pull off, and if there are faster means, why not.  Enough Republican votes will be promised in exchange for everyone looking the other way with Pence, Ryan, et al.  They will promise not to seek re-election and retire as soon as this all dies down.   We will have President Pence for a couple of years until the GOP can groom their savior.

We wouldn’t even need to talk about impeachment or other means of removing President Trump if all of Congress would simply be the adults in the room, cross partisan lines and work together to keep the President in check for the good of the country.  The problem isn’t that the Constitution doesn’t have a provision for dealing with an autocrat-demagogue president.  It absolutely does.

“It has a legislature empowered to remove him. What the Constitution does not have, and its authors did not foresee, is a provision for having a House that would watch a demagogue president, shrug half-heartedly, and say, ‘Whatever, let’s use him for political cover.’ The problem is not that our system cannot control the president – it is that our system was not designed to handle a Congress that has no interest in trying to control the president. The Constitution’s authors assumed, wrongly in the current situation, that members of Congress would not want a power-mad lunatic in the presidency. They assumed that elected officials might care a little bit about the country and any long term damage such an individual could inflict. As full of foresight and clever power-sharing arrangements as it may be, our core legal document offers nothing to protect the country or the system as a whole when the people given the responsibility of protecting it are members of a party so thoroughly rotten to its core that it is willing to abandon any pretense of principle if they see an opportunity to derive some benefit from the elevation of a wannabe dictator into the White House.”

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Friday Night Ritual: Ordering Pizza

Tonight if all the stars align, I will pick up my kids from daycare, swing around to catch my wife at the El station, circle back to the pizza parlor to pick up an extra large cheese & sausage from Bacci.   More than likely though, my wife will be running late, or even early, and that will throw the timing off a bit.  Worse case is Nightingale has to take a bus from the train station while I keep Boris and Natasha from eating all the Za.

we alternate between frozen Home Run Inn pizza and ordering from nearby local restaurants.

If everyone’s mood is good and Mother Nature co-operates, we get some playtime in the backyard for the kids to burn off any left over energy. Then bath and bedtime.

If wifey and I have any energy, we’ll watch some TV and plan the weekend shopping: either a Costco Run or a Peapod delivery.  I’m not sure if this is the weekend we attempt to interact with other humans or just stay home.

It doesn’t seem too long ago that my routine was completely so different.  I would likely be training for some marathon which meant Saturday was a Long Run day (double digit mileage).  So a good night’s sleep was paramount to having a good run.  Unfortunately, I was also always working on Project End Singledom with various degrees of success.  That meant giving in to the temptation to go out with friends in hopes of meeting someone.  I wish I could have back most of those wasted Friday Nights.  I might just have had a better marathon training experience and maybe even qualified for Boston.

Those days seem a lifetime ago and I don’t miss them.  Oh and hey, as our kids get older, here is what we have to look forward to.  Of course I’ll take all of that to the alternative.

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There is a world of difference between Being Critical and being Negative

You’ve probably seen those memes that advocate eliminating negativity, or banning negative thoughts from your life, or putting negative people in concentration camps.  Okay I made up that last one until a reader goes to meme generator…

What I don’t like about the concept is that it doesn’t make a distinction between Negativity and simply being critical or challenging.  Conceptually it shouldn’t have to, one should know the difference.

Scenario 1:  your team is trying to solidify the date for a new annual event the company will sponsor.  Someone suggests the 3rd week in April.  Person says “it will probably rain.”

Scenario 2:  same thing except someone suggests the 2nd weekend in May.  Person says “well every few years it will conflict with Mother’s Day.”

I’m all for mitigating and insulating against negative drama.  Unfortunately many weak minded people don’t differentiate between the two.  And sometimes a conniving or Machiavellian-esque person will define negativity so fluidly so as an excuse to kick someone out of their social circle.

I’ve seen this movie before, it goes like this:

Step one:  communicate to world/friends in common OMG did you see what so-and-so did/wrote/said?
response:  No what was it?

step two:  I cannot even repeat it but trust me, it was awful so trust me when I deem it too harsh for human eyes.

Now you have two choices: conform or be cast out.

I’ve never been accused of being overly optimistic.  Or regularly optimistic either.  Or confident.  But I have been accused of making pointlessly derisive remarks.  While one person’s pointlessly derisive remark is another person’s merely challenging comment, whatever I allegedly said got me unfriended.

I don’t recall the comment.  It is possible that I wrote something that just wasn’t bursting with sunshine and kittens but we’ll never know because she went all FoodBabe on me and deleted the comment.

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Mitch Tribisky, your table is waiting

(Chris Walker / Chicago Tribune)

Hello Mitch, or do you prefer Mitchell?  Either way, welcome to Chicago where the backup quarterback is the favorite, until he isn’t.  I know you got off to a rough start with the neurotic Bears fan base.  We want a starter under center that can be the franchise quarterback, but we don’t really want to pay the price overpay for one.  Kinda like wanting something from Santa without actually even pretending to be good for most of the year.

Don’t worry, we fans have the attention span of a concussed kitten and have already gone through the The Five stages of being a Bears Fan: Anger, Frustration, more anger, more frustration, WTF and rationalization.

Here’s the thing:  Even if the Bears drafted the next Tom Brady they were not going to go to the Superbowl this season.  Even if the Bears could get in a Delorean, kidnap and sign THE Tom Brady, they would not go to the Superbowl this season.  Now if they got Bill Belichick that’s a different story because his contract with the devil stipulates a SB appears every 2.5 years on average.

So I’m okay with the decision to trade up and get a young QB that they can develop.  Note: I forgot to officially state it anywhere to prove it, but I felt the Bears would draft you if you were available because your name is as close to Polish sounding as you can get without grabbing someone from University of Warsaw and that could help him in a town like Chicago.  Unless you become Tri-fumble-sky.

Now here’s the advice you didn’t ask for.  Use the time you have to research some of the less popular Bears Quarterbacks (see the last two three decades).  See also Quarterback Controversy.  Pace and Fox say that Mike Glennon is the starter, and he is, until he isn’t.  See 2nd quarter of the 3rd game of the season.

1. Don’t be a training camp holdout over money
2. Learn to embrace the Media
3. don’t commit any turnovers.  EVER.

Chicago is and will always be a football town and if you get us to a Superbowl you will be treated like royalty around these parts.  If you don’t, you will end up selling insurance in Ohio.  See former Bears first rounders.

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The Delorean Paradox

I’m going to define a new thing — or maybe take credit for something someone else has already thought of — called the Delorean Paradox.  The Delorean Paradox is when someone says something that can only be proven with a time machine.

Anywhere in a Delorean #80sDreamVacation pic.twitter.com/zMRrMJwHoi

— Gretel Armstrong (@SugarGretel) April 30, 2017

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Example1: A realtor says “oh you should have listed with me, I would have got you a higher price.”

Example2: If Bernie Sanders ran against Trump, he would be President right now.

The NFL draft is a bedrock of examples.

Example3:They should have pick this person instead because he went on to be successful in Other Teams offense, or

Example4:so-and-so would still have been available in a later pick.

If it isn’t obvious, not only are most of the things unprovable but they are usually bullshit.  So the next time you are at a dinner party and someone says something that can only be proven with the ability to travel back in time and change events, say to them: “Hey that’s the Delorean Paradox!”

And if you see something like that in the comments section, be sure to drop the link to this post there when you call them out on their B.S.

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