Musings & Thoughts for Tuesday, February 16, 2021: My Top Five Pet Peeves

Hello, Dear Reader, and welcome once again to A Certain Point of View, Too. It’s late afternoon in New Hometown – and chilly, too. Currently, the temperature is 68˚F (18˚C) under cloudy skies. With the wind blowing from the west-northwest at 9 MPH (15 KM/H) and humidity at 53%, the feels-like temperature is 68˚F (18˚C). Today’s forecast: partly sunny skies and a high of 69˚F (21˚C). Tonight, skies will be partly cloudy. The low will be 53˚F (12˚C).

Today’s topic, my friends, is Pet Peeves.

According to the online edition of Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a “pet peeve” is defined thusly:

Definition of pet peeve

: a frequent subject of complaint

Examples of pet peeve in a Sentence

 One of my biggest pet peeves is people driving too slowly on the highway.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, has pet peeves. You have them. Your friends and relatives have them. Your co-workers and boss have them, too. (Don’t be too surprised if your eccentricities or other distinguishing features aren’t pet peeves for them!) Everyone I know – including my relatives – have pet peeves. And, frankly, I have quite a few pet peeves.

Here are my Top Five Pet Peeves of 2021

5. Fans Who Overanalyze Action-Adventure Films Too Much

I love movies, especially action-adventure films along the lines of Die Hard, the Indiana Jones series, Star Wars, the James Bond series, and the first two films in the Terminator franchise. To be honest, I’d have to say that much of my movie collection falls into the action-adventure category – according to the Statistics page in My Collection at Blu-ray.com, Adventure films comprise 15.7% of my Blu-ray collection, while Action films make up 14.6% of my Blu-ray collection.[1]

I mention this because although I have quite a few action thrillers that are grounded on reality – the five-film Bourne series and the Paramount/Amazon Video Jack Ryan franchise – most of my actioners are purely escapist fare along the lines of Die Hard and Raiders of the Lost Ark.[2]

Like many fans of franchises, I belong to several Facebook groups, including one devoted to Indiana Jones. I don’t visit them as much as I used to before I got more involved in blogging and script writing, but I still “drop in” on occasion – mostly, to be honest – to post relevant reviews or to respond to comment threads that Facebook “pushes” on my timeline.

One of the reasons why I don’t do the Groups thing – especially in those that are dedicated to Lucasfilm intellectual properties such as Star Wars and Indiana Jones is that there’s way too much over-analysis of fare that is intrinsically dependent on fantasy and the willing suspension of disbelief.

Take, for instance, this thread in the Indiana Jones group, starting with this original post (OP):

I didn’t mind Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It had a very unique story and cool action scenes.

But still, Temple of Doom and Last Crusade will always be my favourites.

Some members said that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has its good bits but overall not the best film in the Indy franchise. I don’t necessarily agree with the naysaying about the 2008 movie, but most of the comments made sense.

Others, not so much.

Here’s one that falls into the whole Over-analysis of Escapist Fare pet peeve category:

I hope nobody uses the argument that just because Indiana Jones look for a fanciful object like the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy Grail that means it’s okay for space alien crystal skulls to come in… It’s just too silly. Like Harry Potter has to do with magic and everything but if in one of the movies they give him a wisecracking inner-city robot with gold teeth I’m going to think that doesn’t fit.

The OP’s author replied:

I thought it was an interesting idea. Putting sci-fi elements in an adventure movie. It can be really cool when two different genres mesh together. For example, Back to the Future Part III has western elements, even though it’s a science fiction series, and it works surprisingly well. I guess it just depends on how the colliding of genres is executed.

To the guy who said that adding crystal skulls is “too silly,” another group member said,

I completely disagree with you . For an Indiana Jones movie set in the 50s the subject matter was perfect . What is “ too silly “ is a matter of opinion , and a bit of an odd one for a film that lives in the realm of fantasy .

If you wanted , you could find elements of every movie and deem them “ just too silly “

Being an Indy fan I would choose not to .

It always puzzles and annoys me how people have waited till the fourth movie to decide that the subject matter is suddenly “ too silly “ 

This is what I said in response to that last comment:

 I share that annoyance. Truly. IJ is a franchise that asks you to believe that the Nazis had “Flying Wing” bombers and secret U-boat bases in the Mediterranean in 1936 and that ancient artifacts have lethal superpowers; that a human being can survive without his heart for more than two or three minutes; that Indy never loses his fedora or his bullwhip; and so on and so forth. And yet, people can’t accept the notion of “interdimensional beings” or “nuked in the fridge.” I’m so glad the Internet wasn’t around in the era of the 1930s serials…imagine all the turmoil Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials would have caused.

4. The Ever-Shrinking Digital Album on Amazon Music

For many years now – I’d say a decade or so – Amazon has added free digital copies of albums purchased on physical media – such as compact discs  (CDs) – on their online store. I am that rare sort of music fan that still prefers to buy CDs, although I have added quite a few digital-only albums to my collection (hello Original Soundtrack from Lawrence of Arabia!) over the past two years.

A couple of years ago I purchased Sony Classical’s John Williams: Greatest Hits, 1969-1999, a two-disc collection of composer-conductor John Williams’ themes for films and fanfares for special occasions (such as the 1984 and 1996 Olympic Summer Games.  

On that occasion, Amazon not only delivered the physical two-CD album, which distributes its 28 theme and fanfares evenly between the discs (14 on each), but also the digital version, which also had 28 tracks listed in the Amazon Music app.

Well, recently my Amazon app is either not showing its content correctly on my computer screen, or Universal Music Group, Sony Classical’s parent company, is pulling a weird Jedi mind trick on me. Either way, I have fewer tracks (three) on my digital album than I did when I purchased the album a few years ago.

Technically, this is more of a pet peeve than it is a major hassle; I still have – unopened, mind you – the CD edition, and even there I still have the original CD set I bought in a Miami record store – one of my last pre-Amazon music purchases – back in 1999. So if I want to listen to the full 28 tracks, I still can. It’s less convenient since I’d have to get up, get the CDs out of their cases, and play them either on my PC or the Blu-ray player. (What tragedy, right?) But it still annoys me that Amazon Music is doing the Vanishing Music Tracks thing on my app!

3. Living in a House with Cigarette Smokers

My late mother smoked cigarettes throughout much of her life; by her own admission, she started smoking when she was 12 – in 1940 – and only quit in the spring of 1994 when she was 66 years old…and that only because she and I both came down with a bad and scary case of the flu not long after we returned to Miami from our last trip to visit family in Bogota, Colombia. (I still remember her explanation about why she finally quit – cold turkey, at that! – after nearly 54 years of smoking Pall Mall Gold cigarettes: “I remembered my father had emphysema[3]during his last years. When I found myself struggling to breathe with all that phlegm in my lungs, I kept thinking that if that was bad, how much worse can it be with emphysema?”)

When I was a kid, I hated the smell of cigarette smoke. I hated how the stink permeates everything and lingers long after the cigarette butts have been stubbed out and the ashtrays emptied into the trash. I also suffered from headaches and irritated eyes, as well as a lot of respiratory ailments that went away when I wasn’t around chronic smokers on a 24/7 basis.

I thought I’d put those smoke-filled days behind me after my mom quit smoking nearly 26 years ago. With rare exceptions, I had not been around anyone who smoked cigarettes or any tobacco products on a regular basis.

That is, till I moved in with my now ex-girlfriend and her family.

The Caregiver – as I now call my ex on this blog because that is her primary role in my life (though she doesn’t go a great job in that regard as of late) – wasn’t a smoker when I met her. But her oldest son smokes quite a bit; cigarettes, e-cigs, and joints. He usually smokes outside – especially at night – but sometimes he either “forgets” that he’s not supposed to smoke indoors or just blatantly does it while gaming.

If our rooms were not next to each other it would not matter much, but they are, and when he starts puffing away on those coffin nails, not only do I smell it, but my eyes start to get the never-forgotten irritation that comes whenever I’m near a smoker.

2. Loud Music

If you’ve run across some of my posts about life in New Hometown – and more specifically, in a house with five other people – you know that one of my pet peeves is loud music. Disco and hip-hop especially, but even music I normally don’t mind – like hits from the 1970s and ‘80s – played at extremely high volume levels annoys me. I get headaches and I’m more irritable when someone decides to play music of any genre at volume levels so high that you can hear it from any room in the house….through closed doors, even!

Among one of the wedge issues that caused the breakup between The Caregiver and me was that…she loves to get inebriated and dance to the Bee Gees (at Studio 54 discotheque volume levels!) as if she were a young girl in her early teens on weekends. I, on the other hand, don’t. (And it’s not the musical group I object to; ’tis the sound levels that are the issue here.)  I tried hard to overcome this, but it was like trying to make a square peg fit properly into a round hole.

And my Top Pet Peeve is….

1. Trump Followers’ Adoration of the 45^th President (on Social Media)

Seriously. If I were a rich man…I’d pay out a fortune just to get Trump supporters – most of whom are old enough to know better than to act like lovestruck teens when they see a favorite music artist or movie/TV actor – to stop heaping so much public adulation for the 45th President on social media.

I have been around for nearly 60 years – I’ll be 58 in March – and I’ve seen popular Presidents (Ronald Reagan was probably the first one that counts, since I wasn’t of voting age before 1981) and unpopular Presidents (Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush come easily to mind), but I’ve never seen any President as polarizing as Donald J. Trump.

Maybe if we had had the Internet and the proper tech to support social media, Facebook groups, and Twitter when I was younger, we probably might have seen a pro-Nixon personality cult back in the 1970s; Trump supporters now tend to be older, whiter, Protestant Christian,  and more likely to be fans of “law and order” than his detractors, and that was also the same demographic for Nixon fans back in the late Sixties and early Seventies.

What is annoying – and alarming – about Trump supporters isn’t that they have a world view that is different from mine or other liberals. I have no quarrel with people who believe in God or think we need to have a strong military. I do have issues with bigotry, nativism, and isolationism, and these are the baser instincts that drive conservatism.

No…the troubling and vexing feature of Trumpism that annoys me the most is the fawning, cult-like way in which 45’s supporters express their adulation of the man.

Here are a few recent comments I saw on Facebook today:

 We don’t need any more law suits on Trump, we need congratulations & The House of representatives to get busy on the needs of the Country!!!! Why are they so Afraid of Donald Trump!! Because he was for the American People, not lining his own pockets! I hope you people are satisfied!!!

I am a Veteran and he did everything good for this country. Look at it now, going to hell in a hand basket. But you all did it so enjoy.

I Stand with TRUMP and you can stand were ever.

---

[1] Blu-ray.com gives members a breakdown of their collections when they click on the “Add to My Collection” button whilst looking up individual Blu-ray or DVD titles. It creates colorful pie charts based on the data you provide whenever you add a new title to your list; the charts then give you a rundown on what genres you seem to prefer, which studios’ films you purchase more often (In my collection, Warner Bros. is top dog with 22.4%, Paramount Pictures is in second place at 16.7%, and Disney/Buena Vista in in third place at 15.4%, thanks to all of my Star Wars, Touchstone Pictures, and Walt Disney Pictures films. Pre-2019 20^th Century Fox comes in fourth at 11.4% as of February 16, 2021.), year of release, MPAA rating, and even the retailers I buy the most from.  

[2] Not to mention comic-book film adaptations, including Superman (1978) and Spider-Man (2001).

[3] The old name for COPD.