the passionate ailurophile

Well, at least I do when:  1. the music is very, very bad, and 2. when said bad parade goes right past my house.

Every year, this shit town has a Holiday Parade.  Usually it is after Thanksgiving, but this year, I learned that it will be this coming Saturday, November 22.  They had put signs on every tree and lamp post telling people on this street about the parking restrictions and the closure of the street for the parade.

And every year, this is a major pain in the ass for people who live here.  When they close the street for the parade, they also re-route the buses (all four routes) that run here.  Also, if you don’t get your car out by a certain time, you can’t until the stupid parade is over.  And DOG forbid that the local FFAâ„¢ (Future Felons of America) rips down the signs near your house and you don’t see them.  This is the ONLY notification the town gives people, and if you don’t know, and you can’t get your car out to get to work or wherever, too bad for you.  They don’t even put anything about this on the official town website.

This stupid parade used to be in the early afternoon, but if you wanted or needed to go somewhere that day, you had to be out before 10AM, and you could not get back in until well after 2PM.  We try to go out just to avoid having to hear it.  But last year, I was sick with the flu, and I HAD to hear it.  I also had to hear all of the loud-mouthed skeevy jerks hanging out on our porch uninvited, using our steps as seats for watching the stupid parade.  Trying to chase them off does not work.  Neither does calling the cops, they won’t come out for things like trespassing.  I know, I’ve tried.  I swear,the racket was so bad, I thought it would NEVER end!

It looks like they will be having it later in the day this year, as the signs said we need to get the hell out of Dodge before 3PM, and not to try coming back until past 7PM.  It happens we do have plans for that evening, the Granite State Baseball Dinner up in Manchester is that night.  It starts at 5PM, and since it takes about an hour to get there from here, we thought we could leave by 4.  Not now, we can’t.  So we decided that we’ll leave at around 2PM, just to make sure, and hang out at the Wild Rover up in Manchester for a couple of hours, until the dinner starts.   We can have a few beers (and much better beers than they have over at The Skeevy Corner Bar), and talk about how glad we are to have escaped that horrible parade.

The actual dinner portion of the event doesn’t even start until 7PM, so the parade will be long over by the time we get home.  The two hours before the meal is served will consist of autograph sessions with the players in attendance, a silent auction for charity, and probably lots of speeches.  I’m just really, really glad that this crap town bothered to notify people of the parking restrictions and all this year, some years we HAVE gotten stuck here because they never bothered to tell people at all.  If I had not seen the signs, and we ended up missing the dinner because of this, I’d raise such a stink about having spent $150 on tickets that I could not use.
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Another thing this crap town is doing that pisses me off – they are having a presentation at Government Center about the transition to digital TV.  This would be all well and good, except that they are having a rep from Comcast, the cable company from hell, do a presentation.  I am already seriously annoyed by their commercials where they are trying to fleece low-income people out of money they don’t have, by trying to lead them to believe that getting cable is the easiest way to guarantee that you will be able to watch TV after February 2009.  And now they are going to pull this same crap at a local town meeting, no doubt.  Do you REALLY think that Comcoast is going to spend a lot of time explaining to people how to get the converter box coupons?  Nope, it will likely be just lkke their commercials, they will gloss over the less expensive, as in close-to-free, alternative, and talk up their service.  No doubt this skeevy town is getting a kickback from Comcast for having this “infomercial” meeting.

Although we are all set for the transition (we have the converter boxes), I think I might want to attend this sham of a meeting anyway, just to see if what I strongly suspect is true.  I hope they will let me speak, at least I’m going to try.  What I want to tell people is that they do NOT have to get cable if they don’t want to, no matter what the Comcast rep tells them.  There are a lot of old people in this town, many of who are living in one of several subsidized senior apartment buildings.  If they have to live in this shithole town, in subsidized housing, they likely do not have much extra money for anything.  I mean, if they had any money to speak of, they’d have found someplace nicer to retire to.  Even the ten bucks a month that Comcast is advertising for their very, very basic cable service is probably a stretch for a lot of these people…and that offer is only for a year.  Who knows how much they will raise it up to after that, and by then, all of the coverter box coupons will be long gone.

I just hate to see people being duped and ripped off, especially elderly people.   I wonder if I should print out some applications for the converter box coupons (there are .pdf forms on the website) and bring them to the meeting to hand out to people, maybe even help some of the old people fill them out.  Hell, I’ll even provide the stamps and envelopes for mailing them!  I doubt Comcast will have any on hand at the meeting.  Converter boxes are mentioned on the town’s website, but many of the old people here are not online, so they’d never see the information.

I’m sure that this little “meeting” will be as about as fair and balanced as the Fox News Channel.   It might be fun to show up and piss off Comcast!