Chris's Top Five Life Annoyances, by Chris Agy, July 2002

Do you ever wonder what's going on in 60 Minutes head? I mean, how many of you like to listen to that curmudgeon Andy Rooney whine about what's bugging him? Besides being male, what's he got to complain about? He gets paid big bucks to pick apart things that bother him, and between you and me, he's been on so long and complained for so many Sundays, that his life's irritations are barely worth raising your voice over. So I'm thinking I should send the producer my resume and this list:

Chris's Top Five Life Annoyances: As of July 2002

5. The FDA: Who are these people? What kind of scrutiny are they under? Where are their standardistas?

The what's good for you, bad for you yo-yo has nearly convinced me to ignore their healthy eating edicts. But last year I bought into the latest proclamation and ; decided to up my grams of soy. So I bought a bag of ranch-flavored mini soy cakes, like rice cakes. I made the mistake of not reading the label until I got home. To get the day's suggested minimum, I would need to eat 25 grams. One serving was nine mini-cakes, providing 8 grams of soy, so you would have to eat 27 soycakes to get your daily serving. These small 50 cent sized disks weren't just bland like regular rice cakes, rather their taste was akin to dust. I ate my nine at lunch, with my friends watching me closely, unless I choke. Two days later I read that increased soy consumption had been linked to an increase in breast cancer.

4. The Quad-City Times' new format. Did anyone think we needed more community news? The coverage of international and national events was inadequate before, now it is slipped into two to three pages in section C. Instead of coverage on our global world, we get what's happening on a road map.

3 and 2. The local weather and the local weather forecasters. Quite a few native Iowans have said to me, .Well, there's bad weather everywhere." If you've only lived in the midwest, I'm sorry to tell you this, but no, no, there isn't.

It's quite pleasant in many places. Of course, everywhere has days, seasons even of miserable weather. But nowhere have I needed so many electrical devices to combat the weather. You need a humidifier to send moisture into your air. You need a dehumidifier to take the moisture out of the air. You need a sump pump to take care of moisture coming into your house.

Then there are the reported temperatures that are gauge temperatures, not what it feels like temperatures. Does anyone care what the temperature feels like to the gauge? Does the gauge care? Give me the heat indiced 103, so I can really complain.

I've barely started, we could talk wind chill, localized showers, where one side of your house gets rain and the other doesn't, 12 inches of rainfall in one day, tornadoes, floods. People, not all places have all this weather stuff.

Then there are the weather forecasters. I'm fairly sure they are really very nice people, probably trustworthy and honest and responsible, and somewhat intelligent in every other facet of their life. But really, how can you be wrong so often? How can you be caught by surprise so many times? With Doppler and SkyCam and satellites? Just the other night there were severe thunderstorm warnings for northern and eastern counties, but we, in the Quad-Cities, had just a chance of a storm. How can just a chance end up as an all night drenching? If they were being rated on predicting on our fourth grade reading assessment, they would most definitely fall into the needs column.

The forecasters talk about the average temperature or the average amount of rainfall. Anyone who has lived here for awhile begins to realize, the weather is never average. They simply add up the extremes of high and low and come up with something a lot more palatable than what we are experiencing.

And when it really gets tough the forecasters here tell boldfaced lies. Watch the next time we have a stretch of bad weather, they throw in chances of things they know will never materialize. 

1. My number one annoyance. Cosmetic companies that use twenty-year- old models to advertise age-defying night creams. Excuse me, what age is it they intend to defy?

I want to see a menopausal woman defying age, one not sucked into the FDA's (see number 5) Hormone Replacement Therapy snafu. One like me. I was handling all of the increase in gray, lines around the eyes, lines above the lips, creases down from the nose with a fair amount of grace, complimented by the onset of farsightedness.

Then one morning this past year, after a few days of inflamed and swollen eyes, I looked in the mirror to find wrinkles on my eyelids. Not horizontal wrinkles following the curve of the eyelid, rather vertical wrinkles starting at the interior or the eye and radiating outward. What in the Hell? I looked more closely. Turned on the light on the magnifying mirror. Where did these come from? Now I don't mean I had a few gentle lines, I had pleats. I thought about calling in sick. Sorry, I have major wrinkles, I can't teach. I have found the wide-eyed look of surprise decreases the furrows. However, if you try smiling at the same time, you appear deranged. Where is the nightcream to take care of this?

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