Some Quick Complaints

We were out earlier tonight, and while we thought our car was safely parked, it had an encounter with a bird that earlier had apparently eaten something that disagreed with it. We debated whether or not we needed to go straight to a car wash or not. We were tired and wanted to go home, but we'll have to go out in the morning to get it washed before we can do anything else.

A subject came up a couple of weeks ago that I was reminded of tonight. Very few public restrooms these days have the old-fashioned cloth towel dispenser in which a cloth towel rolls out so that you always have a clean towel and then is collected by another roll in the bottom of the container. Maybe it's too late at night and I've had a martini or two too many, but I can't think of a better name to call it than "old-fashioned cloth towel dispenser." We were with some twenty-somethings the other night, and somehow (I wasn't there at the beginning of the conversation, so I have no idea how) the subject of these devices came up. A few of the younger people involved had never even encountered one before. It doesn't seem like a bad idea--surely it would cut down on the waste of bathroom towels. I don't know whether the towels are washed or simply thrown away, so you'd have to balance that against throwing away paper towels. Perhaps someone's done that, but I haven't seen it.

I also want to lodge a quick complaint against those new computer (or iTunes?) juke boxes. They entice you with a plethora of album covers, but then when you click on one, they offer just one or two tracks from it. I was looking at a digital jukebox tonight, and I clicked on the Talking Heads anthology, Sand in the Vaselene, and they displayed the full range of "And She Was." That's all. I haven't gone to pull that double-album CD off my shelf to look at it, but I don't need to double check to guarantee you that the CD has more songs than that. Jeff Buckley's Grace is given only "Hallelujah." I can understand if there's only a certain amount of room in a jukebox, but this is digital! An iPod is a tiny fraction of the size of the jukebox, but it appears to hold a hundred times the music or more. What's the problem? If they're going to entice me with a full album cover, I want full albums!