Angry Bob

There’s a Time-Life infomercial shilling the “Greatest Country Music Ever Recorded” playing on TV right now and it disgusts me.

Hate doesn’t even plumb the depths of my revulsion for the slutty, putrid wallowing in the pig slop of everything repulsive about the most animalistic groveling nature of human kind that defines old school country music.

Not the new stuff. Since the late eighties, early nineties country music crossed over and no longer resembles its disgusting past.

But the past! Oh God how I hated it.

My father was cutting edge cool when I was a small boy in the late 50’s – early 60’s. We had a full blown mahogany piece of furniture that was a stereo record player before most others had anything like it. He played Big Band, Swing, Jazz, Folk and show tunes. I loved every bit of it (well, everything but the show tunes). If I and my brothers weren’t dancing around the room to the music, I would sit in front of the satellite speaker and feel the full force of sound take me away.

Then in the early 60’s we moved south into the Heart of Dixie, deep into the hell hole of ignorance and repression and my life turned to shit. Everyone spoke a foreign language. I was surrounded by trash.

My father went native and there was no stopping the relentless torture I was subject to through our car’s speaker. Every trip we took became an endlessly streaming hell of whining and crying pounding into my skull making me want to just rip out of my skin, jump from the car and dash headlong into oncoming traffic just to end the unholy nightmare!

Waylon Jennings, Porter Wagoner, Boxcar Willy, and the rest of you whiny bastards, I celebrate your passing.

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Well, Verizon FiOS was an interesting experiment. While I was promised by the sales people at Verizon that they could duplicate what I have with Brighthouse, the reality proved to be much different.

It seems Verizon has a screwball notion that the only way they can offer a static IP (something I need for the website and mail server) to its customers is through a business account. They do not offer anything like Brighthouse’s Virtual Office (a home office solution), and their business accounts cannot offer FiOS TV! After talking with numerous folks at Verizon and hearing no legitimate technical explanation I can only assume this stems from a self-inflicted policy.

So it’s back to Brighthouse. I did get to experience FiOS TV for less than a week, though. The picture quality was stunning. I think it’s the way to go in the future if Verizon can get the kinks out of their services.

I dropped Vonage in the process and kept telephone service through Verizon so at least we’ll be “talking on glass.”