The New Dark Ages indeed.

I am not going to comment about the state of the union address b/c I did not bother to watch or listen to either Dubya or to the democratic rebuttal. I am SICK about the Alito confirmation, and although I didn't think that John Kerry stood a snowball's chance in hell to get a filibuster up and working, it was nice to see the effort. Wasn't he a silly to first call for democrats to oppose the nomination from a chi-chi ski resort in Switzerland? Makes ya really look like a man of the people, John. Way to go. I will be the first to say, “I TOLD YOU SO” when they manage to destroy a woman’s right to choose.

I do have a funny story to tell for the day, though. I stopped at a neighborhood post office this morning to fetch some of the new stamps…see my earlier posts for ire about the postal service…there was a guy in front of me in doctor’s gear, you know, stethoscope, lab coat, hospital ID, $300 shoes on his feet, and youngish, he was fighting with the postal employee about the costs associated with registered mail or getting a delivery confirmation. Dude, if it makes ya mad that your letter’s going to cost $2.40 to send out, don’t bitch at the lady behind the counter, she doesn’t set the damn rates. $2.40. Christ, that really is going to destroy your budget for the month, doctor-man. Plus the fact that in addition to the $300 shoes, he had on Hilfiger cords and an Armani E/X t-shirt on under his lab coat. I wanted to ask him how he dared to harass the postal lady, but didn’t want to get into a fight in the post office with some random third year medical student. But it might have been fun. As it was, I rolled my eyes at the lady behind the counter and she gave me one of those “I get that all the time” looks. I was very polite to her in hopes of balancing out the bad karma that the kid was giving out.

If I ran the postal service, I would axe about 3 million post offices. Seriously. I know, I suggested that you check my earlier posts about the US Postal system, but there’s a few things I haven’t said that I’d like to, so bear with me while I rant some more. Teeny-Tiny Diamond Ohio has a post office, for what earthly reason I’ve never been able to figure out. That’s just one little bitty place; there are hundreds more. Their mail has to be trucked in anyway, so you can’t tell me that they’re saving fuel expenses by having a local post office in some podunk town. The only way you MIGHT be able to successfully argue that to me is if they were all getting their mail dropped out of airplanes. Not to mention all those employees, electric and heating expenses, and the cute little mail trucks with the driver’s controls on the wrong side. In that history of the postal service that I read at USPS.com, I learned that the postal service didn’t always deliver to every home in the United States. I hadn’t known that, but it explains a few things. I think that there could be a trimming of their expenses, though, by having more processing stations than actual post offices. And having the mail carriers have longer routes from each processing facility. So you could theoretically have a mail carrier who would have a route that would start 100 miles away from the processing facility. How often do you actually mail a letter? Don’t you pay most of your bills online? Usually, when I buy stamps, because I DO write lots of letters, I buy them online and have them shipped to me. That does require a little bit of planning, but no more than remembering to defrost something for dinner or packing a lunch the night before. I just keep track of how many stamps I’m in possession of and buy more before I run out. OK, maybe the end of that particular rant for the moment.

It must be true that Microsoft’s going to take over the world. My family over in Sweden sent me a chat request through MSN Messenger, so it must be big there. I chatted with M for a short while today and it was really neat to talk to her, although not a new experience for me. AOL’s IM didn’t work through the firewall at my old bank, but Yahoo!’s messenger did, so I used to use that to chat to friends while on the clock. The bank eventually blocked access to it, but not before I’d managed to chat to someone on the opposite side of the floor for about 53 hours. He he hehe. It is such a good thing that I don’t work there anymore. Happy Wednesday, Y’All.