My stupid alter ego, Dan, is still away visiting his aunt and uncle. Another glorious day of ranting and raving on this otherwise tedious and uninteresting blog! And here’s what’s on the mind of Mr. Crankypants today….

What’s with all the overly loud music these days? You know what I mean. Like the New Bedford Whaling Musuem sponsoring monthly gatherings called After Hours, with the stated purpose “to socialize with old friends and meet new ones,” except the music is so loud you can’t socialize. Mr. Crankypants went to “After Hours” a few months ago, and tried to have a conversation with an old friend, but the music was so loud we gave up trying to yell at each other over it. Then an attractive young woman started eyeing Mr. Crankypants, and wandered over to say something, but alas whatever she had to say was completely unintelligible due to the loud music. Mr. Crankypants’s Significant Other said that the pretty young woman wasn’t eyeing anyone, she just had indigestion, and all she was saying was, “Got any antacid?” Which just proves the point — the music was so loud that Significant Other couldn’t hear anything at all.

It’s not just the Whaling Museum, of course. There’s the restaurant up the street that has live music on Mondays and Thursdays. It’s pretty good music, but there is no way you can carry on conversation over your dinner, unless you ask to be seated in the very back room, and even then you have to shout.

At least that restaurant has good music. Down the street from Mr. Crankypants’s apartment is another restaurant that has bad outdoor music on summer evenings. This particular restaurant aims at attracting the over-55 crowd, so the music is a banal mix of insipid 1950’s rock-n-roll and arthritic easy-listening hits (originated by dinosaurs like Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan), sung by middle-aged crooners with potbellies accompanied by karaoke machines. They crank up the volume so loud that Mr. Crankypants can hear the middle-aged crooners two blocks away. When you go down to look at the restaurant, you see a few lost souls huddled at the tables farthest away from the speakers, their hair blowing back from the volume. There’s no way anyone could be carrying on a conversation over that music. Clearly, it’s the sort of restaurant you go to when you don’t want to talk with your date, or when you have to take your unpleasant relatives out to dinner — you surely don’t go there for the high quality of the music.

The Baby Boomers started this trend of overly loud music. They ruined their ears when they were young by listening to too much loud music. Now that they’ve gone deaf, they keep turning up the volume. Which will make everyone in the succeeding generations deaf. It’s probably a good time to invest in companies that make amplifiers and speakers, for theirs is going to be a growth industry.