So the womanfriend and I — probably her first to be fair — have been noting an annoying trend developing in the past, oh three months or so. It might go back longer, but certainly began with the warming of weather which, in Chicago, has undergone several iterations. Anyway, the trend is the playing of music from one's cell phone, i.e. without headphones. Sure I've noted a handful of black train-riders doing this for quite some time, with seemingly no knowledge and definitely no concern that they might be bothering anyone. But there will always be outliers or, if the trend develops, the early adopters. The trend has expanded to include jogging couples (something in me rather dislikes jogging couples to begin with) and the plight of humanity: teenagers.
Of course what it represents is a reversion to the days of the boombox, without — again, as the womanfriend put it — the cachet of carrying around a heavy(ish) device. She did not use the word "cachet" because she is not a pompous windbag. I am not always so fortunate. Plus, while boomboxes weren't killing it on the audiophile front, music blasted from your phone sounds even more like utter garbage. I may not want to hear your music anyway, but at least have some damned standards about sound quality! In 80s Cusack terms, it's about like this:
Perhaps the film title might be amended to Text Anything.
Another strange trend, or perhaps better branded as business tactic, is when bad restaurants do a redesign. Same bad food in a shiny new package! But I assume they're doing the math, and the large upfront cost of remodeling is somehow more economical that a long sustained cost of better chefs and better ingredients. There's also the fact, I suppose, that with the same dogshit appearance, even if you upgrade your food quality, people won't expect it so long as you have the same dogshit appearance.
At any rate, for the time being, that's a wrap.
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