The Coonridge Digest: Freida’s Best of 2004

Greetings from the Ridge.

We’ve scratched another 12 months off the calendar and I’ve been watching closely. Freida Marie’s Best of 2004:

Believe it or not, I’ll start with the French. God knows we could use a reason to like the disagreeable rascals. This the year the French invented, patented, and installed cell phone jammers. If you go into a Parisian theatre tomorrow night and try to use your cell phone, Viola! Eet ees jammed! If you’re sitting there sipping a bit of Chateau de Rothschild while watching Cyrano de Bergerac and your Aunt Bertha from Berlin tries to call you to get your recipe for schnitzel flambe’, Viola! She ees zapped!

The French government just gave the go-ahead and several American companies are drooling to get the device. Vivre Zapper!

This may sound like an out and out commercial plug, but hooray for the Senseo coffee maker! (And the Melitta and the Bunn and in a couple months the Walmart-O and whoever else manages to rip off this sensational idea.) Yea, I’m a coffee addict and I’m always on the lookout for the next big fix, but this time, honey, I’ve found it. My percolator is in the trash, I dropped my drip machine into the nearest ditch and my bean grinder now holds down a stack of unpaid bills. As for me and my coffee, we will stick to the pod. I call it Starbucks in Your Kitchen, and I’ll never again be able to stomach restaurant coffee. Whoopee!

There was a day when I thought Spam filters were excuses you gave your mom for eating out when she’d open the can marked "Hormel Fine Foods," but anybody with Internet access knows that whoever came up with this name for email garbage was smart enough to choose a four-letter-word.

Sweet little old ladies who hooked up to the Internet to receive pictures of their grandchildren in Peoria are now being inundated with advertisements for things they used to see only in magazines when they’d visit weird Uncle Harlin. But there are good guys in cyberspace as well as outlaws and although it’s a tit-for-tat industry with the moral idiots always catching up with their own technology, you can now buy Spam filters that would please any Baptist.

And although I haven’t watched a complete reality TV show since the first season of Survivor, I applaud them as one of the best things about 2004. From what I’ve seen in the ads for these shows, they’re peopled by contestants who are both attractive and nasty. Speaking on behalf of the vast majority of the world who are neither of these things, I applaud the fact that they seem to go together.

I’d easily pick the entire nation of Greece for providing us a safe and welcome respite from a world gripped by the fear of terrorism. The land of Aristotle and Baklava even managed to control the weather at one of history’s most pleasant and memorable Olympics. In spite of a world of increasingly randy athletes with 24 caught using drugs in Athens this summer, the Games once again reminded us that there was still an ideal world out there where nations compete without bloodshed. No one thought they’d be ready, thousands stayed away in fear, and the Greeks kept on running.

A special thanks in 2004 goes out to my two new friends, Ebay and Amazon. Thanks to these smiling brothers of cyberspace, I only read about what the rest of you suffered this shopping season. I’ll take the smile on the face of my friendly UPS man to the weary growl of an overworked retail clerk any day.

The temperature was a winner this time, as 2004 became the fourth hottest year on record. As my Aunt Alberta used to say, "Yes, global warning is bad thing, but when you’ve got arthritis in your left knee, the extra heat can almost be forgiven."

And finally, freedom remains the best idea man has come up with in all this struggling centuries on this planet. I have a friend who escaped the Castro regime in Cuba. He spent the election season sending me Bush promotions while I zapped him my admiration for John Kerry. He recently wrote to me, "Thank God for political disagreement. I have lived in countries where everybody has to think the same way politically and I can tell you first hand it’s not fun, and I didn’t like it so much that I left my country and came to the country of "political disagreement" without fear of having the police knock at your door in the middle of the night and taking you away from your family, never to be seen again."

May your new year be laden with just enough troubles to make us think and just as few riches as we can get by on.

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.