You know what really grinds my gears? Old people. But that's not what this is about. This is about when people add an unnecessary "'s" to the end of an establishment's name. I don't know how it got started, but everyone does it.

Many places use this construct intentionally, such as Applebee's. The idea here is that someone named "Applebee" started or owned the restaurant at some point. Hence, you add the apostrophe s to show ownership. Whether or not this Applebee person exists is irrelevant; the point is that the name is possessive. Also, Applebee's sucks.

Perhaps the place I most often hear this mistake applied to is Mount Lookout Tavern. People abbreviate it and then add an apostrophe s on the end for unknown reasons. The result: MLT's. Mount Lookout Tavern's... what? What does the building possess? Just call it MLT. Fewer letters and everything. I once called Josh V. out on this when he said that he "went to MLT's". He made up some crappy excuse that he was implying that he went to Mount Lookout Tavern's trivia night. That's a Luke-style excuse.

Another big one is "Kroger's". This would actually make sense because the founder is a person named Kroger and he possessed the chain. But guess what - there is no apostrophe s on the end of the name, so it's still wrong.

Finally, I was at Chipotle the other day and a woman was talking on her phone and ordering at the same time (another cause for rage, but I "disgress"). She said to the person on the phone that she was at "Chipotle's". I haven't been so disgusted in a long time.

Now I'm going to leave Katzen's and go to stupid horking Kroger's beacause I have no food. I might also have to stop at Speedway's, as I'm getting low on gas and haven't been accosted for money yet this week. On the plus side, tomorrow is Friday, so I'll go to Skyline's for lunch.

Ok, enough.

I went to the Ren Fest on Sunday with Andy and Amy Grant. We went to the gaming joust, where the knights rode past some rings and lanced the rings. Then they threw spears into some hay with bullseyes painted on them. Then, strangely, the knights geared up for the joust. We were surprised because the gaming joust typically was just that - games and not smashing each other with lances. So anyway, Sir Robert and Dame Jessica battled it out. On the first pass, they both broke lances. On the second pass, Sir Robert broke his lance and Dame Jessica was unhorsed. I was pretty pumped. I had never seen that happen before and I've been to the Ren Fest many tymes. Dame Jessica got up and back on the horse for another pass. Sir Robert broke another lance on her and she fell off again. This tyme, she did not get back up.

It was very strange. Everyone got quiet and didn't know what to do. We were supposed to cheer for Sir Robert for winning, but Dame Jessica was obviously hurt and cheering for that didn't seem right. They didn't announce a winner or even proceed with the winning "throw candy into the crowd" deal. Everyone just kind of slowly dissipated, feeling weird.

I wonder if they've run into that before. I mean, with the number of jousts they do and the danger level involved, someone has to have been injured before. Even the announcer didn't seem to know what to do. He just kept saying, "This is real, people."

In conclusion, awkward.

I was talking to R. Con about efficiency yesterday, and it got me to thinking about all the things my parents made me do back when I lived at home. Many of them I have declared inefficient and no longer do. When I look back, they seem totally pointless to me. I'll go over them below.

Making my bed.
I knew this was pointless the very first tyme I had to do it. The obvious reason against is that I'm just going to sleep in the bed again that night and it's going to get messed up. I couldn't think of any reasons for, but R. Con came up with some pretty weak ones. He said it felt weird for people to see his bed unmade. I just keep my door shut, but honestly I wouldn't care even if people did see it. What are they going to think, that I'm kind of messy? I'm pretty sure that's common knowledge.

The other reason R. Con stated was that the bedsheets might get more dust on them slightly faster. But unless that causes me to have to wash the bedsheets more often, I don't count it. This brings me right to the second thing.

Dusting.
My parents made me dust my room every week on Sundays. Every horking week. Dust builds up on junk, but not even close to fast enough to require that. When I lived in Mike W.'s condo, I did not dust my room for over three years. I'll admit that was bad, but the things I used commonly did not build up dust - bed, chair, mouse/keyboard, floor (I vacuumed), Xbox. The things that were the worst were my desk, bookshelf, and some junk underneath my bed. They were covered in dust, but honestly it didn't take me that long to clean them off. If I had dusted them each week, the amount of tyme spent would have been many hours. So anyway, three years is definitely too long to go without dusting, but one week is way too short.

Emptying the dishwasher.
Man, I hated this one. I still do. My dad would always call out for someone to do it at the most inopportune of tymes. Using my skillz of eliminating worthless steps, I determined that putting the dishes into a cabinet is a waste of effort when I'm just going to get them out again. Now I just leave the dishes in the dishwasher after it runs and take them out as I need them. After use, I place them on the counter above the dishwasher. When all the dishes are used, I move them all back into the dishwasher and repeat. Step eliminated.

I've considered placing the dishes back into the dishwasher after use to minimize the loading step, but I would have to remember which ones I used or else inspect the dishes for grime. I could also devise some kind of loading system to help determine which dishes are clean, but this all sounds like it might be more work than just loading it normally.

Yardwork.
My dad was the king of yardwork. He would get down on his hands and knees and hand pick out all of the crabgrass or dandelions or whatever the hork offending plant he found. Naturally, this carried over into the kids, who had to mow the lawn and do the edging. Andy had to mow the lawn for the most part and I was stuck edging.

Edging sucked. If I got too close to the lawn, it would make a gash in the grass, which was totally unacceptable to my dad. If I got too close to the fence, it would abrade part of the outer wood, leaving a bit of the brighter, less-weathered wood from underneath. On more than one occasion, I would get done, put the trimmer away, and go back inside to try to cool off from the triple digit temperature, only to have my dad furiously yell at me because I didn't do something right and make me go back out and fix it. Finally, the edger would occasionally throw debris up into my face. It never hit me in the eye, but it came close.

As a result of this, I now hate yardwork with a vengeance that little else can achieve. But even beyond the forced labor of my childhood, I simply don't care what the yard looks like. And it's even harder to do work when you don't care about the result. Consequently, I put off the yardwork as long as I can. Honestly, I wouldn't care if the grass grew up to my shoulders; I don't horking go outside. And if it doesn't look pristine, guess what. I still don't care. Dandelions can grow in my yard. Don't care. Giant, sentient, carnivorous, flesh-eating plants? Care = no.

The point I'm trying to make here is that I militantly don't care about my yard (or anyone's). Take that, dad.

"Study time".
Somehow my parents decided that all of the time after 6:00 PM on weekdays was study time, meaning no video games. I'm pretty sure their reasoning went like this: "What is their favorite thing to do? Ok, now they can't do it anymore." It was stupid, though, because it's not like I would spend the entire evening studying. Instead, I would just be bored. My dad even went so far as to say that I should do at least an hour of "homework" each night, regardless of how much I actually had. I don't understand the reasoning behind assigning a static amount of suffering when the actual amount varies greatly. What was I going to do, do more of the math problems from the book than were assigned? Come up with some of my own questions and tack them onto the end of my homework? Great idea, parents.

Because of that nonsense, I now do absolutely zero homework at night and spend nearly all of the tyme playing video games. Or because I'm not in school anymore. Actually, maybe it's because of that second one.

Restriction of video games.
That last item kind of transitions into this. It wasn't obvious when I was younger because I was used to it, but now that I look back, my parents were really crazy about the whole "video games and TV rot your brain" thing. Actually, maybe they were right about most TV, but video games definitely don't. Anyway, we didn't get cable until I was in college (yes, that recently) and only then because Andy paid for it. By that tyme I no longer cared about TV, but as a kid I wanted to watch Nickelodeon and junk. Denied. All my friends had it, but I couldn't.

My parents hated video games even more. After years of begging, we finally broke them down and they agreed to get us a video game system... the Game Boy. Yep. When I talked about playing video games earlier, I was referring to switching on the Game Boy and playing some 2-bit color, monophonic, 160x144 goodness. It was wonderful because it was all we had. Now that I'm on my own, I play a ton of video games. I wonder how much of it is because I was forbidden to as a kid.

This last one kind of got away from the whole efficiency thing, but it's in there now, so it's staying.