This piece is good in itself, but it got me thinking about and noticing something else.

If someone is over 35 or so, they tend disdain anything and everything to do with The Hunger Games. If below 35, they probably like it. (I am over 35, but as usual I am an outlier.)

Why causes this divergence of views? It’s not quality; Catching Fire was a great film, one of the best released in 2014. And the books are quite a bit different than the films.

It’s not maturity, as that just doesn’t map very well to age in my experience.

The split views about the works comes I think from culpability and its denial. The over-35ers realize the books and films are aimed at them – even if subconsciously — and that the works are allegorically holding them rightly accountable for the world they’ve created and are going to create. We are, after all, living in the early stages of a slow-motion climate apocalypse.

No one likes being blamed, even if the blame is placed rightfully.

My contention is that almost all of the over-35er antipathy toward those works stems from their correct realization that they are the villains portrayed in the works.

And they do not like it one bit.

Most small businesses fail relatively quickly, and a large percentage of those fail because they are run by morons.

Seems to happen a lot particularly in the restaurant business.

Here’s a personal example. There was a pizza place that opened up when we still lived in St. Petersburg.

It was on a busy strip of road and there weren’t a lot of competing pizza places nearby.

So far, so good.

But they bought an actual fleet or cars to run delivery with. Not pay for use of employee cars – no, they paid for a fleet of SmartCars. At least four. Perhaps more – I don’t really remember. Not a good idea, having a huge CapEx at a low-margin business. Already a bad sign.

And the kicker is that I went in one time to try the place out thinking they’d have slices of pizza for sale.

Nope, they had no such thing, despite that being their best business proposition in that area as it was surrounded by commercial properties and not residential. The lunch crowd could’ve been very large, and would’ve paid a few bucks for a slice.

Making $3 per slice is a lot better than competing with Domino’s at $10 or $11 per pizza. $3 per slice plus a drink is way, way more profit.

And the even worse thing is that when I went in to ask about pizza in slices they were utterly rude to me. Like dripping with venom. I am sure they called me an idiot as soon as I walked out the door.

As I walked out I said to myself, “This place won’t be open in a month.”

Sure enough, about two weeks later it closed and was gone.

Utterly predictable. If it’d been a stock I would’ve shorted that business into the ground from day one.

So they did no market research, no business analysis – nothing. They can’t have, because they made every mistake possible to make.

I know nothing about the restaurant business, but I do know something about not being a huge dumbass so if they’d paid me $10,000 to tell them also how to avoid being huge dumbasses they’d probably still be in business today.

I dislike how common Southern expressions especially outside the South are presumed to be AAVE and I am accused of “appropriating” the way that I grew up speaking from 9 months old on.

No, dumbasses, Southern speech and AAVE overlap significantly, so much so that when I visited my Northern relatives when I was but a wee marauder they said I “talked like a black person.”

The Southern diaspora of black people into cities in the north is often the only exposure that Northerners have with shards of Southern culture.

Learn some history, please. Learn anything. Learn something.

But most important, shut up.