Track Lighting is trash

I hate track lighting.

Yes, I know it's popular and in big demand, but then so have a lot of things been in demand in spite of the fact that the design stank. Take for instance the flat roof. The people who were busy building them knew perfectly well that they trapped water, began to sag from the weight of the trapped water, and began to leak within just a few years of completing the house. BUT the flat roof said "Hey, I'm new, modern, exciting, the latest fashion! YOU WANT ME!!!!" and that's how a stupid damned fashion gets disseminated and perpetrated.

Take for example the Euro sink. An ugly basin with a raised collar edge, dropped into a hole in a counter and sitting there above the surface. You spill water, you PICK IT UP, rather than just wiping it into the sink with your hand and then drying it with a towel. There is no other way to get water and other bathroom debris into that damned thing. Toothpaste spatter? Wipe it UP, not wipe it in. Well, perhaps there was a benefit in that your diamond engagement ring was less likely to get accidentally knocked in. What about wet spills in the kitchen? Pick them up, presumably with a dry-ish dish cloth. A few peelings from the cucumbers flipped over thataway? Pick them up, you can't just push them sideways into the garbage disposal. Yes, there was a minor advantage in that the new euro sink you installed could add an inch of basin depth without your having to lower the plumbing under the sink instead. And then there's that precious advantage of being in fashion. Mustn't ignore that, because to the weak-minded, that's all that matters.

Granite countertops are another example. Hideously expensive, sickeningly impractical, capable of being deliciously pretty or hideously ugly, the granite countertop is never questioned as the height of what every homeowner should want in their kitchen. Never mind that they chip your best china, break glasses just because you were inattentive for a moment when you set the glass down, are flat as a pancake and allow any and all of your spills to flow onto the floor or worse, onto your belly. You're forced to use a cutting board for even the most minor of jobs or you'll dull your knives. The granite chips, forcing you to get it repaired. most people can't afford both the countertop and the backsplash so they have a tile backsplash installed (it looks so much better anyway) and they may as well have had an entire tile countertop (with the front edge raised as in days of yore) installed in the first place. But no, that offends the fashionable eye. It's dated.

So, back to the track lighting. Remember the kitchen with a huge lighting area that spread from one side of the ceiling to the other? Garish, unsubtle, bright, greenish-white, usually from an ugly home-made aluminum frame and cheap plastic "suspended ceiling" panels. But fluorescent light had its advantages. Almost no dark areas in the kitchen was probably the best one. Because the bulbs used so little electricity, the lighting could cover the whole room. Shadows were never an issue except around the stove where your range hood had an extra light for you to see better.

Whose brilliant idea was it to put spotlights over some of the counters in your kitchen? I'm sure it works, mostly, but any area that doesn't have a spotlight on it, you have to move your work into a brighter area. Of course, if they're incandescent lights, the lighted area is a more pleasant color than that glaring fluorescent green-white yutz we used to have back in the Seventies. On the other hand, a kitchen with some good areas and some weaker areas isn't a good kitchen, sorry. But that's what's POPULAR and impracticality be damned. So over the last three decades, we've gotten used to it, and anything brighter is "ugly". Find me a better option, please. Maybe a strip of light (quasi-fluorescent) with a nice golden candlelight color (NOT AMBER!) and not as glaringly strong as it used to be?

Fads. You can take 'em and stuff 'em. But that's another post altogether.