View from the cop: Crime & punishment
View from the Cop is moving to a new site on Wordpress. Blogger Steve Rose of the Sandy Springs Police Department gives his take on crime, offers safety tips and give his weekly picks from the police blotter. Follow Steve Rose to the new blog site.
AJC.com > Metro > View from the cop > Archives > 2007 > November > 28
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
It’s Hannah Eeeeeeeee Montana!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
What in the heck is wrong with you people? It’s a 15-year old daughter of a guy with the most perfect mullet in the history of man.
Did you pay $1,200 for tickets to see Hannah Montana? Well if you did, why don’t you take time out of your busy day and let someone smack the %#@& out of you!
I know, I know, the pressure is there. You don’t want your kid to be the only one who didn’t get to see Hannah Montana and her amazing voice which none of these pre-teens have heard because they’re screaming too loud! Look, if you are backed into a corner on shelling out big bucks on this, here’s a suggestion. Offer $500 straight up—cash on the spot. You save well over half of what you would spend and chances are they’ll take the money and run. Granted, you might feel stupid afterwards but hey, feeling $500 stupid is better than feeling $1,200 stupid.
Besides, you will have insulated your guilt when your daughter comes up with those big sad eyes and gives you that song and dance about how everyone else got to go to the concert and she didn’t, leading into that “deprived” spin, “Oh pitiful me.”
Stand your ground! “Forget it sister! I paid good hard cash to you and I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty! Now put down that gun.”
I too was a parental victim of a pre-teen-mediocre-talented-obsessive-frenzied event. Five words: New Kids on the Block. The first time wasn’t so bad because we were at Bobby Dodd Stadium and the screaming was somewhat absorbed into the ozone, which I believe now has some effect on global warming.
But I actually took my daughter a second time, this time to the Omni, which, if you remember, had the acoustical clarity of a wash tub. Two hours of screaming equated to about six-inches of scar tissue on each eardrum. All of the daughters were screaming. All of the parents were passing the flask in what could only be described as a mass act of comfort. We were as one. I don’t remember how much I paid for the tickets but the fact that we went twice, and given how poor we were in those days, either meant the tickets were affordable or I had way too much guilt.
Here’s another problem. When the price of entertainment or alleged entertainment spikes to these heights, it automatically attracts counterfeiters who, with the aid of some really good ticket software, can print off and sell thousands and thousands of dollars of completely worthless paper that can only be verified at the night and time of said entertainment event.
This scenario, as a parent, is total Armageddon because now you’ve compounded the emotional impact of the excitement of seeing the alleged talent with the now devastating blow of realizing that said pre-teen cannot see the event thus spinning the already unexplainable hormone-driven behavior into the Netherworld of devil child for the next six months. I’m talking spinning heads and pea soup shooting out. On your end, your despondency will further sink into depths that only Dr. Jack Daniels will understand due to the fact that you just got ripped off for a couple of grand.
It isn’t a pretty picture.
Ride it out, parents, and remember that these events have checks and balances and soon we will return to a base line of musical talent and not just hype. When the craziness and frenzied hormone festival settles back down, people will once again return to their senses and welcome the music that we all know to be timeless.
Slim Whitman. Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute. Mott the Hoople. The classics. You can’t put a price tag on that.
.JPG)
-1.JPG)
Services »
