I was picking up license plates for a new car in Adel, IA and noticed a sign on a building across the street. The sign was for a bar with the prosaic name Hideaway Lounge. It was a bar, i.e., a business where people make a profit off other people’s chemical dependency.
But it was the other business that really caught my eye, a 24 hour crisis center. How ironic that a bar and a crisis center are co-located.
It is an obvious symbiotic relationship but is it mutualism, commensalism or parasitism? An additional irony is the address: 911.
Some of the things that make me stop and think “Really”:
- License plates with stickers in multiple places besides the lower left corner.
- People that refuse to get a computer or use the Internet.
- Parents with children with more alcohol than food in their cart.
- Broke people driving new cars and living in big houses.
- Sports fanatics that can recite sports score and stats but couldn’t name a single person in the Cabinet, their U. S. Congressman, state legislator or state senator.
- Rap music with profane and violent lyrics.
- People that say, “Don’t judge” since good judgment is what keeps us safe.
- Why it is called Happy Hour?
- “Reality TV” since it is anything but real.
- People that define themselves by a brand of beer or a sports team.
- Real estate developers that go broke to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in little old Des Moines.
- Rekha Basu and the Des Moines Register in general.
- The attempt to require equal outcomes regardless of talent or effort.
- High heels on snow boots.
- Housing projects that are meant to help people but instead put them in unsafe neighborhoods.
- Adjustable rate mortgages when the fixed rate is below 3%.
- Aged liberals – I give them a pass until 35.
- Brittney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, and Paris Hilton as role models.
- Maintaining 80,000+ U.S. troops in Europe.
- Save the environment bumper stickers on Escalades.
- Automated answering systems that lead to nowhere that I want to go.
I was picking up license plates for a new car in Adel, IA and noticed a sign on a building across the street. The sign was for a bar with the prosaic name Hideaway Lounge. It was a bar, i.e., a business where people make a profit off other people’s chemical dependency.
