Let's talk about some complaints first, even though complaining is counter to my usual sweet and agreeable nature.
You know about Google maps and Mapquest. I rely on them both from time to time, and usually find them very helpful. But when you need them most is when you're trying to find someplace like my country home, which is out where God left his shoes in Southwest Michigan. Mapquest gives more or less accurate directions, but then on its map indicates that my house is about a half mile away from the actual location. What's actually there is a single-wide mobile home. So far as I know the people who live there are respectable, decent folks, but it's not the 10-room 2-story home I tell visitors to look for.
Google maps also puts my house a half mile away, in the opposite direction. In their infinite wisdom, the people who create these things decided to extend the "street" (actually a gravel road) on which I live several miles beyond the point where it actually dead ends. In their imagination, they run it over some neighboring land, and then, miraculously, up the middle of the river for some distance.
Supposely you can report mistakes to both of these services. Yep. You sure can. You can pray to the ghost of Elvis Presley too. The results would be about the same.
Yellowbook is also on my bitchlist. When I first ordered a telephone at my country home (from General Telephone Company, another nightmare story) I insisted on an easy-to-remember number. That worked out well for a number of years until Yellowbook decided to publish it as the number of a pizza kitchen that had gone out of business 13 years earlier! Yellowbook whined that it only publishes numbers provided by the telephone company, but the telephone company, which by then was Verizon, said that was a bunch of horseypoo and that it was the excuse they always use. Reluctantly, I got a new telephone number, and a year later Yellowbook published it as the number of a defunct tourist motel. Fortunately for me, a lot fewer people wanted to rent a cottage there than wanted to order a pizza. I guess that's why it went out of business.
Just a quick gripe: Why do cable and satellite television have so bleeping many commercials??? I pay a lot for the service, so why is there more advertising than on standard broadcast television?
Among things I avoid like the plague is A T & T. What one of their personnel promises you one day another one will deny the next, claiming the other one must have been an independent contractor who wasn't authorized to commit the company to anything. Yeah? How come this "independent contract0r" was answering phones at their headquarters?
How about some things that I like and recommend heartily?
Mountain Dew is one. Yes, it's supposedly high in caffeine. Twenty-four ounces of it has as much caffeine as about one cup of Starbucks coffee, so not the end of the world.
As a hardcore beer lover, I'm happy to agree that there are now many American beers that do not taste like horse urine. (No, smart ass, I never tried horse urine, but imagining what it must be like leads me to the conclusion that the cheap American lagers of past years would be pretty close!) Among the best are those produced by Goose Island Brewing Company in Chicago. It's actually on a river island named, not too amazingly, G0ose Island.
Hoorah for a on-line bill-paying service called Paytrust.com. It has saved my wife and me hundreds of hours and who knows how much in postage. Unfortunately for me when I'm wearing my absent-minded scientist hat, it's still important to put the decimal point in the right place. (For those who think they know proper grammar and don't, no, the correct wording is not "my wife and I.")
But nuts to Pay Pal. Too many horror stories. I'd never get a Pay Pal account of my own, and only make a payment through someone else's Pay Pal account if there's no other choice.
My wife's Toyota Prius has been a pleasure. Adequate acceleration, roomy enough, and around 47 mpg, city or highway. Yes, I know that many American auto workers are now out of work. I would like the next auto we buy to be made in America, and hope that sometime soon I can persuade myself to trust U.S. car makers again.
I love alkaline batteries, and when there's a choice I take Energizer, simply because I like the little bunny in their advertising.
One of the best inventions since the wheel was the microwave probe. Cook the meat until the temperature at the center is 180 F? Plug in the probe, poke it into the meat, set the temperature, push start, and walk away. It keeps heating until the meat reaches that temperature, then keeps it there, cycling off and on as needed. Works similarly with a bowl of stew, or a potato, or, well, you get the point. I always like my tea at precisely 170 F. Put a tea bag in a cup, fill it with water, put in the probe, set it to 170 F; that simple. Same for reheating.
At present I own four microwaves. Only one has a probe, an old dinosaur that I can't even lift by myself. That marvelous device, the probe, has been replaced by buttons that automatically set the time for various types of foods. You don't have to think "one minute" or "120 F," you only have to press "leftover," for example. Of course, those don't work well because not all leftovers are created equal. It gives an illusion of simplicity, and the owner gets to ruin hundreds of leftovers and spent countless hours experimenting with the right setting instead of taking a little time, once, to learn to use the probe.
And that's progress?
Got any pet peeves of your own? Or things you especially like? Let me know about them. That's what the COMMENT button is for!