Entries Tagged as 'rants'

Starbucks losing big bucks

On the cover page of Yahoo news is an article about how Starbucks is going to close up to 600 stores this year and over 12,000 jobs will be lost. Sounds to me like Starbucks just priced themselves out of business.  Who can afford a $5 cup of coffee when gas is over $4 a gallons?  Someone with Starbucks needs to realize this and adjust their coffees, pricing or something if they want to remain open, you think?  Just another sign of the struggling economic times I would say.

Quite an education

Can you believe there is a website that helps you understand what today’s ‘hip’ people are saying?  It’s called Urban Dictionary. It’s a user contributed website, a little like the Wikipedia idea, where they throw up a word or a phrase and the users write in with the definition plus use it in a sentence or two to help clarify the meaning. They have a “word of the day” so you can stay on top of the newest slang.

Why?  Why do we have to learn all of this when we are already having to learn Spanish to appease that sector of our country.  Now we have to appease the ‘gangster rap’ or skateboard society.  I don’t think so.   I’m amazed to find that people actually talk like this every day.  Sure I want to distinguish myself from the pack but I want others to be able to understand what I’m saying otherwise how are they going to know I have said something utterly brilliant.  It’s not very brilliant if no one can understand, now is it?  Absolutely amazing!!

Animal Shelters

This time of year there are always a lot of kittens and puppies at animal shelters from people not having their animals spayed and neutered.  There are also a lot of adult cats and dogs being surrendered by owners and now we are seeing many that are abandoned or dropped off because of the economy getting more and more uncertain for many people.

The next time you have the urge to take on a pet, I hope you will go to the shelter and adopt an animal from there.  Animal shelters also need donations as the economy tightens in on them too.  Here’s a list of items that can be dropped off and will be put into good use:

  • Clean, old newspapers to be used for litter and lining cages
  • Toilet seat covers (cats love to lie on them in their cages)
  • Any type of cat or dog toy (plastic or washable)
  • Old bath towels and blankets
  • Canned cat food, any brand
  • Bagged, dry dog food (particularly desired is Science Diet but other brands accepted)
  • Laundry soap
  • Bleach
  • Heavy ceramic food and water bowls
  • Antibacterial hand soap
  • Candles - citrus or spice
  • Paper towels

Shelters also need volunteers to come and walk dogs and play with the animals for short periods to give them exercise and socialization skills. If you have spare time on your hands, you can put that to good use helping out some of our society’s most helpless and most easily tossed aside, pets.

Bright man

Each year from the 9th grade on, about 10% of that class drops out. In today’s market place, a high school diploma is not a luxury, it’s an absolute necessity.  There aren’t many jobs that don’t at least require a high school diploma anymore.  Nashville, Tennessee’s new mayor ran on a ticket that was all about the public schools and the high dropout rate that this county and several of the neighboring counties are experiencing.  So the goal of their new mayor is to attack that dropout rate.

The new mayor assigned a special task force on education to look into what could be done to combat this.  They came back with two answers to the problem: pay teachers more money and hire more guidance counselors.  That indeed may help but it’s not an answer to the problems in our schools. Maybe they all need to go back to school and they might learn a thing or two, ya think???  All that money he wasted on nothing when it could have gone into something that really might have helped.

Now what to write about

There’s nothing worse than staring at a blank piece of paper or a blank screen for an hour and nothing coming to mind to write about.  I guess that’s called writers block by some but I call it annoying.  All I need is one little line, one little thought to get the juices flowing and put the ideas down on paper but they’re stuck somewhere in that gray matter we call a brain.

Sometimes all it takes is to step outside for a moment and then other times, it takes walking away from the computer or blank paper to jog something.  Then sometimes, all it takes is jabbering about not having anything to write about and all of a sudden you realize you did have something to say.  See!!!!!