Let’s talk cupholders

Let’s talk cupholders. Recently a coworker was telling me his last car had o cup holders. So one of his 3 buying criteria was that his new vehicle have cupholders. He got a durango w/ 7 cupholders. Now when he told me this I was thinking to myself, "surely it had at least one cupholder, no one would be dumb enough to make a car w/ no holder." Apparently those idiots at Ford don’t follow my logic. My rental Taurus of course has no cupholder. It also have a strange headrest that in fact is not restful at all. It forces the top of your head forward and offers no neck support. Dammit.

Speaking of conveniences, let’s talk shopping. Malls in particular. Most of you know I love to shop. And that’s true even here, yet for very different reasons. First, let’s talk local (more like yokel, but anyway). Right next to my hotel is a mall. Well, that’s good, right? Yes, but only for laughs. You know how most malls have about 4 ‘anchor’ stores (JC Penny, Hects, Macys, etc)? Well, this one has 2. And in between those anchors there are lots of stores? This has a few stores between. Connected to this mall is a Walmart. Not only does this speak about the class of mall, it’s odd that the Walmart is s big as the entire mall. I walked around both, trust me on this. This actually had such an effect on me I went out to buy a camera to take pictures of this ‘mall’.

And that may have been a mistake. I take that back, it was. This time I bothered to check online for where a nearby Best Buy was. Madison. No problem as I knew where that was and wanted to check it out anyway. Well, now I’ve seen it. All of it. In particular the capitol building and this one strange section of town. Over and over again. It’s like all roads led to that section of town. As for the capitol building, I got stuck in one of those European Vacation circles of death, nuff said. I did see the two college sections several times as well, those were actually pretty cool. The capitol section was a small replica of DC w/o all the violence and degradation.

And yet I still hadn’t found Best Buy. I even stopped and got one of those cool plastic city maps. These maps come in real handy because you can look at the street signs and find…Oh shit, why bother (they still don’t believe in signs). Even when interstates are nearby, there are no signs around to let you know this. It’s very odd. Plus, no payphones have phonebooks. I just don’t get it. Well, I finally did find the Best Buy and two malls. These were actual malls, with stores and all. And I did actually buy a cheapo camera just to take pictures of stupid shit when I travel.

Like the bank I saw on the way in to Madison. I’ll have to give it to these guys for advertising because even from the highway I knw it was a bank. This was largely due to their sign, which was simply the largest one word sign I have ever seen. BANK That’s it, just BANK. And yes, I’ll be taking a picture of that Friday. I also took a picture of the local Jimmy John’s. This is some sandwich food chain up north (and apparently one in Chapel Hill). I took this picture because Chris keeps yammering on about it. Sadly, I didn’t eat there.

In another effort to include some of my friend’s nuances during my travels, I played Ms Pac-Man at one of the malls. Every time I hear about this game the conversation always end sup with, "was it the fast one or the slow one?" Not being a huge fan of this game I had forgotten the difference. I have played the fast version recently (at The Cellar Dave, for which Chris said the High Score was a bigger challenge than you were up to). This speed matches a person with decent eye-hand coordination and quick thinking. Very much like today’s game-crazed youth. The ‘slow’ version of the game most matches an Emu. I know this firsthand because there are in fact quite a few Emus (or is that Llamas?) here in WI. Why this is I don’t know. As any rationale person would do I forced the joystick harder because that was obviously going to work. Needless to say I actually got killed by the Cherry. It was ugly really, just kept spitting it’s own pits in the poor defenseless Ms PacMan’s eyes. A bloody mess really.