Fuck you.
No, really. Don't think I don't mean it.
Thank you so much for being so irresponsible that I wind up in court over your unpaid bills.
What, exactly, is the deal with Outback Steakhouse? Every time we have gone to one in the last 10 years, there's been a wait of at least an hour, usually two hours.
The last couple of years, we've gotten Outback gift cards for Christmas. So, last night we try to go to an Outback close by to use up the gift card. We arrived at 5:30 PM. Clipboard girl tells me "60-70 minutes." I see empty tables, and nobody else waiting. OK, we have 5 people, maybe they don't want to stick us at a small booth. Fine. We'll wait.
Half an hour later I go back to see where we are on the list. Clipboard girl tells me "I have you down for 6:50." So you won't seat us early no matter what's available? "I have you down for 6:50." Well, then here's your little buzzer back. We're going somewhere else.
And we did. We were seated and eating well before 6:50.
I give up. I'm tired of waiting in long lines for mediocre food. Outback is OK, I guess, but it ain't Ruth's Chris. And it certainly isn't worth all that time in line.
So here's what I think, based on the fact that every Outback I've eaten at for the last ten years has done this: I think they do this on purpose. I think Outback artificially increases the wait times to generate long lines to make it seem like they are more popular than they really are. Even if every Outback doesn't do this, most of them appear to be grossly mis-managed, or at a minimum configured to reach capacity much sooner than other restaurants.
So, I'm done with them. Their food isn't good enough for me to wait that long to eat, every time. It would be one thing if this were an isolated event, but it happens every time.
There have been 2935 comments posted against this weblog. Almost all of them are "comment spam." Looks like I'm going to have to figure out how to block these kinds of comments, it's impossible to keep track of them manually. I may have to start over, try to import all the old entries into a new weblog, and not allow comments at all. Which won't really be a big deal, nobody really posts interesting stuff any way.
What the heck is up with the bizarre comments showing up on all my entries? Frickin weird. And a giant pain in the ass to clean up since I have to delete them all.
Wonder if Movable Type has a means of preventing, or at least reducing, these spam-like comments... Have to look into that.
Sometimes (not often) I hate being right. Several years ago, our school system had a bond referendum on the ballot for $600 million dollars to help build new schools throughout the county to help with the overcrowding problem. Thanks to a massive disinformation campaign by local Republicans and misguided Libertarians, the referendum was defeated. As a result, every year the county reassigns several thousand students from local schools to schools several miles away. This obviously pisses off the parents whose children are being reassigned, and yet the school system's typical response seems to be "Quit whining. It could be worse." Which is true, but even so... And the local news doesn't help the matter by mostly interviewing people whose kids AREN'T being reassigned, minimizing the apparent impact. Quit whining, you whiners. As long as my taxes don't go up, I don't give a damn about your bratty kids...
Anyway.
My kids' school is somewhere around 120% capacity, so last year the county proposed converting it to a year-round schedule. They made no provision to convert a local middle school to year-round, though, and when challenged on this, they responded "You're free to apply to the year-round magnet middle school in the next town up the road." This left the very real possibility of having children in both traditional and year-round schools, within the same family. I predicted the proposal would fail, and the county would "reward" us by reassigning our children to some crappy old school down the road a few miles.
And that's exactly what happened. The original section of our neighborhood, which was developed in 1998-1999, has been reassigned to an older school 7 miles down a very busy road (the kids who were going to the old school have been reassigned to a brand new school 5 blocks away). Newer sections of our neighborhood, including houses currently being built, will continue to be assigned to our local neighborhood school.
Even better is the fact that there has never been a proposal to cap enrollment in any away at the local school, which would allow our children to continue to attend. Even now, as part of the reassignment, the county has no plans to cap enrollment. If they cap enrollment, the county has to provide transportation to new residents whose children are assigned to a distant school. Instead, they put the burden of transportation on existing residents, and allow new residents to attend the neighborhood school. Brilliant!
Dammit. Somebody hosed up my guestbook. Think I'll take the thing down. It's more trouble than it's worth. Some yahoo is always trying to get clever by putting html in their entry, and all it does is cause problems for me because I have to go fix their mistakes.
Anyway, what's with all the comments from people in Germany?? Strange. Maybe they all know each other.
Blogger appears to be more trouble than it's worth. I'm still having trouble posting text with embedded links. So, I'm going to try Movable Type based on this guy's recommendation. It will probably take at least a day or three before I get it working again, so we'll see how it goes.
But, while I'm at it, here's the post I was trying to get Blogger to accept...
Check this out for an alternate take on the whole W vs Saddam thing. This guy doesn't appear to trust W very much, and I can't say I disagree with him on that... I do find it ironic that back in the 2000 campaign Dubya was supposed to be strong in domestic policy, and weak in foreign affairs. After all, he had trouble remembering (and pronouncing) the name of the guy in charge in Pakistan.
And now here we are, domestic economy is a mess and the surplus that took several years to generate has vanished almost overnight. Oh, right, presidents don't have that much effect on the economy. Unless it's bad, then it's Clinton's fault. Or if it's good, then it's Bush's doing.
And we're about to invade Iraq, possibly forcing Saddam's hand into using whatever nasty crap he's developed on our troops and/or Israel. And Sharon is definitely NOT Rabin, or even Shamir. A fine mess.