Holy Mathematics Batman! I could work at Starbucks!

So I enjoy coffee, in fact I really enjoy good coffee. In the tiny town I live, we are fortunate to have a Starbucks inside our local grocery store. It’s the one saving grace of this town for me. The other local coffee shop here is less than savory in my humble opinion. So as I often do I stopped in the other day to pick up a bit of overpriced refreshment and enjoy a quiet moment to myself before I started my work day. Then everything went wrong.

So as you know it’s back to school time and that means that a new crop of fresh young pimply faced youth to work the registers at the local fast food and eateries around town. Now I understand that the youth of America need to have the experience of earning a paycheck. I understand that this is where so many of the great corporate people start. A simple job exchanging funds in simple transactions that help create the backbone of the American financial system. But this also, might I remind you is the place where total dumbasses work! For instance I stopped the other day for a fresh cup of java and noticed that a different teenager was working the counter and I thought little of it as the school season is upon us. I place my order with the young man who I assumed was listening to what I was saying after asking me what he could get me. He looks at me and says “uh, what was that order?” This is a bad start I think to myself. Lets just say I have little patients with people who are morons. I have even less with people who are doing a job that impacts me while they are being a moron. I bite my tongue though to keep from telling this young man that he needs to cut his hair, stand up straight, don’t say “uh” at the begining of his sentence and for Buddha’s sakes! STOP smoking so much pot that your short term memory is impacted to the point that you can’t remember that I just ordered a grande, none fat, light foam, shots on the bottom, caramel macchiato! Now you might say Adam that is a bit much to remember for a simple drink, I say to you. YOU WEREN’T THERE SO BACK OFF, IT’S MY COFFEE AND IT WAS 7AM! ! ! So now that we are on the same page lets resume. After I stare holes into this kids face with a look that only a moron wouldn’t realize was me trying to restrain the demon inside of me screaming for vengeance for the offence against me of not remembering the order of a grande, none fat, light foam, shots on the bottom, caramel macchiato. A demon begging me to smash this kid’s face with the empty paper cup he is holding in one hand and using the sharpie held in his other to stab him with. I say as nicely as I can without telling him he’s a total idiot and should never be allowed to speak again, “I would like a Grande, None Fat, Light Foam, Shots on the bottom, Caramel Macchiato please”. The next question was “what do you mean shots on the bottom?” At this I truly contemplate killing the young man, its early and I am not in the mood to teach a person who is tasked with making coffee beverages how to make a FUCKING CARAMEL MACCHIATO! Even if it was slightly complicated. He should know that shots on the bottom means to put the expreso shots in before he puts in the steamed milk. By this time their was a line forming behind me of other groggy eyed patrons who were no less happy about the situation as they were noticing the issue of moronitis I was experiencing with the young man at the counter. I realize with this many people watching that hiding the body might be a problem. So I explain through gritted teeth how to make the drink and I politely wait. He starts to make the drink and realizes he hasn’t taken my money for the order as of yet. So he stops what he is doing and comes back to the register and says “$4.18 please” I think to myself, holy shit Batman! He actually said something right! I hand the lad $5.20 so he doesn’t have to count out much change and also lighten my pocket a bit from extra coins that would be handed to me.
This is when I should have realized that I would have been better off just going back home, planting a garden, growing my own coffee beans, roasting them and then brewing my own cup of coffee. He takes the money and pushes the buttons on the machine which makes all the beepy noises that announces to everyone that Starbucks is sticking it to us little guys by charging us a ridiculous price for a product that cost them less than .50 cents to make. Go team capitalist pigs! This is when this young person’s brain decided that it was too early for any mathematics and turned off. The drawer pops open and the kid stares at the all the shiny pieces of metal in with the paper that has all the funny pictures of people on them in green and grey colors. I say that because that was the only look that was evident on his face. Clearly by his reaction to the prospect of being given $5.20 for a bill that was $4.18 was so complex for his young educated mind that it just turned the fuck off. So this now brain dead vegetable is trying to figure out how much change I should get back. Clearly all that was going through his adolescent brain was “OOOOOO shiny!” So he picks up a few coins and checks the weight of them in his hand, at least this is what I think he was attempting to do. I thought perhaps in his backwards thinking mind he was trying to figure out why each coin was a different shape, size and weight. But no he was actually trying to count change! (atta boy, keep trying to do your job even if your brain has decided to go into a coma for a while) The coins in his hand he places back into the drawer and contemplates the difficult mathematic equation before him. Suddenly a light turns on above his head, he springs to action and pulls several coins from the till and with a smile on his face he offers them to me like a trophy. I look at him, then to the coins, then back to his face. “Where did you learn to count change?” I asked. “Uh, what?” he said again. By now there are about five people behind me. So I know I can't harm the kid and I know these poor souls were about to step into a situation that some would not be able to handle without yelling at this boy. So I decide to do his job for him and say “my change should be $1.02. I gave you $5.20 and the bill was $4.18. Simple math says that would equal a difference of $1.02. That is the amount that you should have in your hand, not the $0.78 you currently hold. “Uh, um… oh ok”. He pulls the correct change from the cash drawer and hands it to me then goes to make my drink at which point he says……. "what was that drink again" I wanted to kill him.

How the hell are we raising a gernation that can’t even do simple math? I suck at math but I can add and subtract! I mean if this is the kind of kids that are being raised today and will one day be serving me a burger and a beer (lets face it, this kid won’t be any CEO… EVER) I may never eat out again. Why do all the dumbasses start their day by screwing up mine? But the good news is that if the economy keeps going the way it is going, I might just have a future in counting change for little Timmy working at Starbucks.

Smurf Hollywood for ruining my childhood!

Hollywood, you’ve destroyed my childhood.

Ah the 1980’s, golden time of cocaine and yuppies! For some of us though it was a time of joy found in the form of cartoons. Hollywood, being the demons they are; have decided that those with expendable income is those who remember the 80’s! Those of us who have fond memories of the 80’s, those of us who are now watching our childhood trashed by those things we loved being brought to the big screen. Yes I grew up watching Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, Ducktales, Rescue Rangers, Smurfs, The GummiBears and many more. We have seen Hollywood abuse things people have loved for decades like Batman and turn them into a laughing stock of motion pictures. When George Clooney became batman I had lost faith that I would see a good superhero movie in my lifetime. (Thank the asteroids that Christopher Nolan redeemed the franchise.) I have seen comic books I loved as a child turned into movies that embarrassed the hell out of me to admit I watched. I have seen them turn He-Man into a live action film in the late 80’s that was a total disaster! Evidently they thought that since He-Man came out in the 70’s it was ok to turn it into a movie and make anyone how actually saw it feel like a total idiot. I think they actually put something in the film that taught us to be dumber after seeing it. Do you remember when they announced that they were doing the first Spiderman movie? Yeah I got excited for about half a second until I saw that they did to create the Green Goblin. When Xmen came around, I was super excited it being one of my favorite comic books growing up. Xmen didn’t disappoint me for the most part, I had my complaints about it but what fan wouldn’t. The comic book movies are actually doing a decent run for some of them. But as for what Hollywood has done to two of my most precious cartoons of my childhood, it can only be described as a desecration! A mockery of anything that once was held as good and pure, a failure to realize that some things shouldn’t be revisited and should be left as a memory of something special. But what the do the fat pompous assholes in Hollywood do? They say lets take Transformers and G.I. Joe and “reboot” them! That sounds like a good idea! It sounds like we are taking the good things that were in those cartoons that millions of kids in the 80’s loved and make them better! How should we do this one executive asks another. By taking a giant crap and putting it on film and calling it Transformers and G.I. Joe! Lets take Transformers and make it more modern, lets take Prime and turn him into a pussy, kids understand people who are wimps. Lets turn Bumble Bee into a sports car because kids like sports cars. Lets be sure we have a stereotypical “black” guy for a robot and lets make sure he dies because that will just seem sad but not so sad that the kids can’t handle it, “black” people die all the time in Africa, kids see those commercials so it would be fine for them to see the car that is voiced by a African American actor to be ripped apart and carried around at the end of the movie and have the pussyfied Prime say a couple cheap words about him being a good friend. Oh but don’t worry we can do anything we want, we will get the guy who actually did the voice of Prime in the cartoon to come back and that will make this film legit! The other executive looks at the first and says BRILIANT! ! ! Hire Michael Bay! ! ! He makes crappy movies where things blow up! ! ! We will be so Fucking RICH! ! ! Wait wait wait! ! ! Lets make a second one as fast as possible and make it even worse that the first one and make next to no sense and have the dumb people of America pay to see how much more we can screw with their childhoods by making a movie about robots that have next to nothing to do with the real Transformers and just call it transformers so that we can suckle some more money off the youths teats. Sorry, had a momentary lapse where my imagination takes off, I have to stop myself from going further because in these imaginings I always show up in them and murder the executives in the most brutal way my mind can think of at the time.

If you are wondering, yes I just saw G.I. Joe and I nearly threw up all over the head of the 14 year old in front of me who was loving the show. I sat though this movie watching my beloved cartoon characters of my halcyon days of youth turned into the joke a movie written by 17 year olds who think that everyone just wants to see girls tits and hear fart jokes and watch things blow up. Don’t get me wrong, the girls were about the only thing that kept me from punching the little bastard in front of me right in his puffy pubis head. I’m not kidding this kid would make these noises every time one of the girls in the movie came on screen, it was like he had never seen a pair of tits before and was blowing his load in his pants just from a girl in a sports bra. If you haven’t checked this is a PG-13 movie and it didn’t get it rating from exposed flesh, it got it from violence. But being a man I was also drawn to the over emphasized boobage and was able to control the urge to thump the kid because part of me was thinking things that shouldn’t be thought in a movie surrounded by youth. But aside from the cleavage factor there was little redeeming about this film, not to mention they only took a few catch lines, names and title from the cartoon. Other than that there was very little in common with the cartoon of the 80’s.

Being a somewhat rational person… Stop laughing, I know I’m not that sane but I think myself to be rational. Being a person of thought I told myself that this is a reinvention of a story of good versus evil, this is a chance for a younger generation to experience something of the past that was created to encourage young people to support the military when they reached the age of enlistment. That was until I pulled my head out off my ass and remembered that Hollywood made this film and want only to put their tiny grubby sticky fingers in our pockets and rip out our money, slap us in the face, laugh at us and run away! Hollywood doesn’t care if the youth are encouraged to join the military so they make up these machines that can do amazing things and then put idiots in them and make it seem like what the army does is a fun romp in the park full of gadgets that make you almost superhuman. Oh and none of the good guys really die! Plus you can fly from Russia to Washington DC in like six minutes. Yeah…….. Hollywood has defiled my youth.

Now for those of us who actually really remember these cartoons, you might be saying to yourself. What the hell is your problem Adam? Those cartoons really sucked if you’d go back and watch them! Well the truth is that I have gone back and watched them, they do suck. They were horrible cartoons, they had lousy writers, the animation was subpar, the storylines were beyond weak and there is little redeeming about them. THAT’S BESIDE THE POINT PEOPLE! They are my goddamn cartoons and I want them to remain perfect in my imperfect brain! Hell I’m waiting for the Smurfs to be made into movie! No you sick bastard, not because I want to see Smurfett get gangbanged by all the little blue Smurfs while Papa Smurf gives advice on how to do it properly. Oh shut up, you know you’ve thought that! Come on she is the only female in the whole freaking town! Of course you are going to think she is a whore! But I want to see them put a spin on it, I really do! I want them to make Smurfett a Lesbian! Come on that would be awesome! They could defeat Gargamel only to realize that their race will die because the only girl left is a lezzie! Screen fades to black, image opens with a scene of Smurfs decaying all over their town. The last Smurf Smurfs his last Smurfy breath and “Fin” Movie ends! Tragedy of the Smurfs, the Smurf who wouldn’t Smurf another Smurf to save a Smurfy race! OMG I have issues…… The bad part is I’m not even high writing this, hell I’m not even drunk! I’m calling a therapist on Monday.