Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Monday, February 2, 2004
12:17 - Hooverville	(top)
So I was down in Pacific Grove, seaward of Monterey, last night visiting a friend who's on vacation up from Los Angeles. Sort of a traditional thing. He's a funny, funny guy-- deep into the animation and voice-acting circles, with all that implies. Two hours of plain conversation with this guy leaves one breathless, one's sides aching, and the comedy sector of one's mind reeling from all the exercise. We went into an ice cream shop after dinner. It was a quaint little place, with candy piled to the eaves, old arcade games against the wall, and strange flavors of ice cream like "Super Hero" and "Rabbit Tracks". My friend went up to the counter to order; he noticed the tip jar on the counter, which had coins taped all over it from countries all over the world. It had Canadian toonies, Danish kronor, coins with Y-shaped holes in them, Paris subway tokens, and dozens more. My friend asked if he had the Korean 50,000-won coin, or whatever it is. He and the proprietor, a young-looking fellow in a baseball cap, looked for Korean coins all over the cup. "Really? You're kidding me." "I'm serious," my friend said. "I was in Korea last year, and I had the 'American Breakfast' in the hotel for like 20,000 won, which is like twelve bucks." He paused for thought. Then: "Of course, that was a few years ago. Now it's probably more like five won to the dollar. 'Cause, y'know, Bush." The proprietor tossed his head. "Oh, don't even get me started," he growled. Now, this isn't a new sentiment. I talked about it last week-- how Bush is being roundly blamed, even among the astute and thoughtful and sharp-minded, for an economic problem that a) he did not create and b) he has largely resolved. What struck me was how the very word Bush has now apparently become shorthand for "the reason why everything sucks." Don't have a job? Bush. Foreign investors backing out of contracts? Bush. Smog over LA? Bush. Too much traffic on the freeway? Y'know, Bush. And it communicates all the necessary meaning, packing a consciousness's worth of disgust and contempt and frustration into a single plebeian syllable. Maybe it's to be expected. Maybe in bad economic times, a two-term president is just not something Americans can stomach. Maybe we just don't have that kind of attention span, or that kind of patience. After all, Herbert Hoover only inherited the downtimes that created the "Hoovervilles". God, it sucks, though. Oh, and later, the same friend opined that the Walt Disney Company, in order to survive, ought to remove not just Michael Eisner, but also Senator Mitchell, from the board of directors. Why? "Like a Republican knows anything about being creative," he scoffed.