I Have No Starship and I Must Scream

Roger Ebert, with whom I agree most of the time, has given the new Star Trek movie 2.5 stars. I had my doubts too, but I suppose two things concern me more than his review.

First, he clearly splits an infinitive. This is as unacceptable as he feels the new Star Trek film is unimaginative.

Second, based on the title of his article, "The Franchise on the Edge of Forever," Harlan Ellison's lawyers will be calling the Chicago Sun-Times legal staff soon.

Now that I've mentioned this, Harlan Ellison will probably be suing me too.

The Strange Case of Trader Joe

People who shop at Trader Joe's are hip. They're smart too, aren't they? According to the marketing demographics, they are:

Scarborough Data, a market research firm, profiles the typical Trader
Joe's shopper as a college-educated, white homeowner with a median age
of 44 and a median household income of $64,000. Almost evenly divided
among married people and singles, females and males, two-thirds have
no kids at home.

I shop there too. Sometimes I feel like I'm part of the TJ's elite. But then I pull into the Trader Joe's parking lot and realize two very important life lessons:

1) Getting behind the wheel of an automobile will turn the most docile and well-meaning person into a douche bag in mere seconds. If Stevenson wrote the Jekyll and Hyde story today, it wouldn't be a chemical formula that turned the good doctor into a brutish sociopath - it would be a Toyota.

2) Said douche bag, having arrived at the TJ's parking lot, also drops down into double-digit IQ scores.

Still, I'd rather put with the douche bags at TJ's than the ghetto fabulous a-holes at Ralphs.