Today's pointless rant is on background music. It seems it's everywhere these day. Little hidden speakers constantly pumping out mood music to unsuspecting ears for whatever reason. You find it everywhere, restaurants, grocery stores, the mall and so on. The other day I was at a gas station pumping in some over priced Arab oil while a speaker set directly above my head lazily poured out some muzak through it's scratchy weather beaten metal case. I stood there listing to it thinking, 'Why? Is this making my gas-pumping experience more exciting or meaningful?'
I really hate it in restaurants. Oh sure in bars and places you have the jukebox, but that is to be expected. It's music you not only want to listen to, you can choose. But restaurants are supposed to be a place of quiet conversation. When you can hardly hear the server take your order because a muzak version of Michael Jackson's 'beat it' is blaring over your head it sort of dampens the experience.
I think my main problem is I am not able to tune it out. Many people can, like an A/C unit or a refrigerator humming in the background; it just gets tuned out. However scratchy speaker muzak bores a hole right into my forehead. A long time ago I had a very brief job at some no-name restaurant washing dishes. I had dish washing jobs before, I never minded it. Gives you time to stand and think while your body does the mindless motions of pushing dishes through a washer. However, this one place had the dishwasher in a separate room, a small tiled room lit by a single bulb. For whatever reason they decided to install a muzak speaker in that little room, and it constantly doled out the same dreary music that was in the dining area. I hated it. I could not even think. It droned on and echoed over the tiled walls, I could even hear it over the roar of the big stainless steel industrial washing machine. I was only at that job for about a week, but if I were in there any longer I would have probably shinnied up to the ceiling and disconnected the speaker.
End pointless rant.
Today's idiot is the guy who got lost for four days in a small track of woods behind UCF.
http://www.wftv.com/news/9792454/detail.html
Now, to be fair, I know how easy it is to get disoriented in a small patch of woods. When I was in middle school I used to walk to school, following a set of train tracks that rolled through the woods. The train tracks are gone and today it's been replaced with a paved walking trail that is crowded with yuppies zooming by on roller blades while yakking on their cell phones. But back when I was in middle school it was a quiet deserted path and I hardly ever saw another person. At one point the tracks ran parallel to a deserted orange grove. The grove was still filled with trees but no one ever tended them so it was overgrown with stubbly scrub and piles of rotten oranges that fell to the ground. On the other side of this small grove was the entrance to my subdivision. One day I decided to take a short cut and plow through the grove. So I set to it, weaving around trees, pushing aside giant banana spider webs and scratchy grass. After a while it felt like I had been in the grove for a rather long time. Then in the distance between some trees's I spotted a metal roof. It baffled me because I did not think there were any buildings in the grove. So I set towards it, pushing aside brambles. Suddenly I stumbled out of the grove... and I was only a few dozen paces from where I had first gone in. The roof I was looking at was a building on the other side of the railroad tracks. I felt a moment of total disorientation, amazed that I had done a complete circle.
The grove is gone now... the monster church next to it plowed it down to make more parking space for its peons. I wandered over to it one day after they had bulldozed down the trees, amazed at what a small area it actually was. I could throw a rock across it.
However, to get lost in a small track of woods for four days is just silly. According to the report he was never more than a few hundred yards from civilization. At some point you think he would start marking his trail or figuring out how to walk in a straight line. I think for his birthday someone needs to give this guy a compass.
Actually, news articles on this guy are conflicting. Some just say he wandered around for four days, others say he was stuck in mud for four days, and yet a third says they simply found him waist deep in mud, but was probably not stuck. Something fishy going on there.
I had wings last night at the wingshack. I ordered a pitcher, Amber Bock. I swear it was watered down. I even checked the hole that holds ice to see if it was leaking out water or something. It was not. Were they serving me watering beer or has it been so long since I had Amber Bock that I simply forgot how watery it is? The mind boggles.
2026 Update
Spinning the clock back twenty years to feed on scratchy ceiling muzak, a drowned pitcher of Amber Bock, and one man’s four-day dirt nap.
Twenty years on, background music didn’t disappear; it metastasized into algorithm-engineered playlists specifically designed to make you linger by the checkout. That single scratchy speaker above the gas pump has given birth to millions of invisible earbuds, a world where everyone’s personal soundtrack drowns out the very mall they’re walking through. Restaurants now have screens buzzing behind the bar, and nobody thinks twice about a wrist computer interrupting a conversation mid-sentence. The lost woodsman? His compass now lives inside a pocket supercomputer with satellite maps, and yet I suspect a new fool would simply follow the blue dot in the wrong direction, mud included. The tiny orange grove made for an amusing walk in circles; the modern version involves circling a parking garage trying to find where he abandoned his electric scooter. We traded scratchy ceiling muzak for the blessed agony of someone else’s downloaded podcast blaring from their phone on the bus. Progress? It’s the same sonic sewage, just pumped out in higher fidelity.
“2006 Ed, you spent a whole week in that tiled dish room plotting revenge against the speaker, but never once considered yanking it down on day one—what exactly were you waiting for, a signed permission slip from the muzak king?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, you got me there. Honestly, I think I was waiting for the moment when it got so bad that I'd have no choice but to climb up there and rip it down, like some kind of dramatic standoff. Day one it was just annoying, day three it was a personal insult, but by day five I was almost enjoying the hate. That scratchy little speaker gave me something to do, mentally speaking. Also, I kept picturing the look on the manager's face if she caught me up on the counter with a screwdriver, and I figured the story would end with me banned from every restaurant in Seminole County. So I waited, and I quit, and the muzak won. Some battles ain't worth fighting unless you've got a signed permission slip from the muzak king, I guess. Take that, cowardly me.
