Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “One of my pet peeves”. I don’t need to think about it. It’s cellphones. I hate cellphones. I don’t mean “Ugh, cellphones annoy me”, I mean part of my brain actively wants to do violence when I am in a restaurant eating and someone has decided they need to watch videos at the table. (Specifically, taking their cellphone and throwing it into traffic.) I HATE CELLPHONES. I hate CONSTANTLY having to listen to people’s annoying ringtones and notifications everywhere — in the library, in the restaurant, at church, at funerals — I hate having to listen to their one-sided conversations everywhere, especially the boring ones. (If you’re going to impose noise into my life, at least make it fun, like city hall gossip or some wild anecdote I can steal for a story.) I hate it when I’m standing in line and the noise goes off and the person starts talking on the phone instead of handling their business and the clerk behind the desk just looks dead inside because he’s basically being treated like a human NPC whose existence is contingent on the Main Character not having a phone call when they’re in the middle of transacting business. I hate seeing people walking down the street staring down like they’re trying to reverse evolution by becoming knuckle-draggers again. You are a human BEING, dammit, your ancestors built cathedrals and wrote hymns and went to the Moon! STOP SCROLL-SLOUCHING!

I. HATE. CELL. PHONES.

And now with off my chest, let’s do WWW Wednesday! 🙂

WWW Wednesday

WHAT have you finished reading recently? William Henry Harrison, Gail Collins.

WHAT are you reading now? 1932: The Rise of Hitler and FDR: Two Tales of Politics, Betrayal, and Unlikely Destiny. David Pietrusza. A lot of very granular Democratic primaries talk mixed in with Hitler sounding psycho.

WHAT are you reading next? I began looking at 1929 on Friday, but that was during a day when I’d only had four hours of sleep and was too exhausted to keep up with the narrative that kept bounding back and forth between different timeframes and viewpoint characters. Amity Shlaes’ Forgotten Man history of the Great Depression is far more likely. I’ve already read and enjoyed her, despite the fact that she wrote 600 pages about a man obsessed with budgets.