Not So Socially Acceptable

Auto-Magical!

2011-07-22T14:15:00.000-07:00

Found my bag of magic pixie dust and off to work, but before I go thought I would throw out some insight on the thaumaturgic ways of the cult of information technology….yeah… hocus pokus open-sez-a-me.

So I have noticed (well not just noticed… but over time) that most (80%+) people have no clue and no concern for how anything actually works, what the fuck? Folks just want it to work and hope someone is around they can ask stupid ass questions of when it stops… it’s all just like magic if it’s anything more complicated than a screwing in a light bulb. While I originally wanted to focus on computers and other directly IT related items/activities, I just realized the issue really is encompassed by pretty much anything more complex than tying a shoe lace. So what happened people? There was a time that anyone could explain how the TV worked, how Information was broadcast over the air or could read the plain English on the screen and follow the directions.

Oh Noes! What do I do…. What does it mean “To Continue, click OK.”? It’s on my computer and I don’t understand all that technical jargon like “Continue, OK“ and what is a “click”?!?!…..Can you help me???

I had all this stuff I wanted to say… but I have managed to lose my train of thought while writing the above. So, whatever, yes I am bitter… Google is your friend.

cough Not Bitter cough

2011-06-09T13:18:00.000-07:00

Came across this comment posted to a gawker site "article" related to this image and well ... here read it:

Nikki stopped grinding a number of years ago--what with being 27 years, and a couple of kids older. And unfortunately, the bank cleaning was the first kind of cleaning she's done since she married Dave and moved to that McMansion that he only really wanted for the 3-car garage. We all know that a lot of things happen during courtship that don't during marriage (I've been with the same woman almost longer than I haven't) and those "funky times" tend to go away faster than the purple rain falls after kids arrive. Now, as Nikki has edged on towards menopause, things have only gotten worse.

Dave bought her the new 7-series she wanted (to show off to the girls at that new terrace restaurant) and got rid of his E36 coupe because it "wasn't really a family vehicle" anymore. Since he's got a boat to tow now--his pride and joy--the Excursion sorta-kinda made sense. I mean, he's got a 6-mile commute, so who cares what kind of mileage it gets? Besides, it was a great deal in this economy.

Unfortunately, it was the boat that got him in trouble. See, he hauled that goddamn boat out to Lake Tahoe--Nikki and the kids and that fucking Schmitt clan next door wanted to vacation in Tahoe, with a boat, and they didn't want to drive there and rent one. So Dave, being the stand-up guy he is, volunteered to hitch it up and drive all the way out there while the rest of them flew in. Dave made it a day early and fell into a local bar to congratulate himself. That's where he met Lindsay. She was there, drinking alone but waiting for her girlfriend, who was still trying to find a face to put on at the hotel. Dave was happy to talk to someone after such a long, solo drive and asked Lindsay what was good to eat. After a lot of alcohol, it turned out Lindsay was.

Dave's felt guilty about it for months now, though he's justified itself to himself that it was the most man-like he's felt since he last drove the E36 to the dealership...well, maybe the time before that. He cried on the way to the dealership. But unfortunately, Lindsay called him out of the blue the other day to ask when he was going back to Tahoe and the wife picked up. And Nikki, being the self-righteous born-again that she pretends to be, decided that she'd punish Dave the best way she knew how--by taking the kids and the money, not understanding she'd already taken away everything else that mattered to him.

Hell Yes!! amirite?

anyway... yeah wanted to share. btw origin credits go to Jalopnik.com for the "article" and the comment was written by "Deathrabbits".

Just Say.... No?

2007-09-06T07:50:00.000-07:00

I got asked an interesting question last night, now normally I try to keep these write ups general and not focused on individuals, today will not be one of those write ups. Before I get to the question I think I should fill you in on some of my background; I am a convicted felon, I was caught selling drugs A LOT of drugs, I got caught and tried and convicted. Even with that holding true I have always had this same opinion about this particular issue.

The question was: What do you think when you see the “Just Say No” commercials on television?

My answer was fairly summarized at the time, but the more I think about it the more I have to say on the subject. And so this article is born.

I think those commercials are a waste of tax dollars, yes I am currently gainfully employed, quite gainfully, and I do pay taxes. The people that should be listening to that commercial are laughing while they snort a line, light up a joint, heat up a spoon, or drop a tab. They don’t get it, they don’t care, and they aren’t listening. The target audience of those commercials winds up being kids, 13 and under, the ones that say “Daddy why do you smoke? It causes cancer.” You know I was that kid, at 8 I asked my father, and I hid his smokes, etc. then I hit 13 and lit up. I hit 17 and started selling acid and X, and later Cocaine and X and Weed. Those commercials are a waste. You want a solution to the drug issue in America?

You can do one of two things. And this Half Assed approach that civilized America (and a few other countries) is taking isn’t either one.

Option 1)
Stop calling it a “War on Drugs” and make it one. Don’t arrest drug dealers, shoot them on site. Make them dead, I don’t mean shoot them in the leg, I don’t mean let them bleed out… I mean kill them. Shoot them once to knock them down, then walk up and put two in the head. Dead. Found a fiend? Kill them. Make it Treasonous to use or distribute illegal narcotics. Take that money spent on commercials and give the military a bonus for every drug dealer they take out. A little video surveillance and a bullet will prove more effective than all the TV time in the world. Will this wind up with a few innocent people dead? Sure… but within a couple years there will be no more need.

Option 2)
Make drugs legal. Tax the hell out of them, and deny medical aid to anyone in an Over Dose condition. Don’t build treatment centers. Let the idiots kill themselves, they will you know. Stupid is defined as the inability to learn. Well Drugs kill people. Do them at your own risk.. let the morons die. And hope they don’t reproduce in the process. This method will take longer but eventually they will “sort themselves out.”

Even when I was doing some less than legal acts I held these opinions. Stop Half Assing it.. take care of your business… I take care of mine. I despise drug users, I refer to them as Fiends. I always have. I feel no pity for an adult (18 and up) who decides of their own free will to do drugs. It’s not my place to tell someone how to live their life. More specifically; I Don’t Care. Any way you look at it any thing less than those two options are a weak attempt to appease those who care. Any thing less is doomed to failure and is in place because of people who don’t understand the situation that believe that people are duped into the situation, or are weak and need help. If you are one of those people .. .go back to sleep, La La Land is waiting for you, but it’s not in this article.

Closing thought: Ignorance can be cured, but Stupid is forever.

Hershey's Kisses

2007-06-07T18:36:00.000-07:00

It's the little things that have the most lasting impact. If you read an artical and it contains a typo, it's what you will consider for a minute or more... and it will linger.

It's the little things in life that will tell the truth. The smile when you walk in the door, or the grimace. The touch in the car.. or the twitch at your attempt. The gleam in their eye when you speak, or the downward turn of a gaze. These and many other obscure, easy to miss things are what will tell the tale, will be your snitch, these things will clue you in to what is really going on beyond the facade. Pay attention you may get to the truth of the matter... but be careful.. you may not want to know.

What you discover will almost always be a result of what you have generated. It is a Reap What You Sow environment. The truth is if they enjoyed your touch at one time and now flinch away from it; you have fucked something up. I speak from experience. The root of such issues are usually something small that they have picked up on... something they have noticed about the unintentional response(s) you have portrayed during a moment that seemed jovial, or at least light. Pay attention, you may be able to fix something you want to keep in good condition.

By the way.. I know how to spell article.

Grasp It

2007-06-05T19:34:00.000-07:00

Control, it's an odd thing, it comes and it goes. You can almost always control yourself, but nothing more. Control issues are a real pain in the ass, you start to try and project that control on your environment... and the more you project the more it fights to take back that control, it's a never ending battle. And eventually you lose, not forever.. but you lose and you have to cope until the environment stops fighting, at which point the projection begins again.

Maintaining constant control is like trying to grasp at water, you start to realize that the only thing your doing is getting your hands wet.... that the water is holding on to you. Hydrogen bonding and all....

food for thought: how can you possibly be in control? you are going to die one day where is the control in that?

Lead, Follow or Get out of the way

2007-06-04T21:53:00.001-07:00

To play the game you must have Balls, or at least be able to rent one or two. People get so caught up in what they have to lose they forget what they had to risk to get it. Rehab is for Quitters! the minute you stop having the balls to throw out there, is the minute you stop gaining more than you own. Fear kills, being affraid of losing what you have gained is exactly what will cause you to lose what you have. I know ... your thinking.. "that doesn't make sense dude!" but bear with me it may become clear as mud by the end of this.

Gains are defined as things you manage to aquire, a house, a bank account, a position at work, a car, toys... etc.

What you have? well all you ever really have is you, your character.. that which makes you who you are.

The rest is just stuff. it's all gains from playing the game. your courage is what will get it all for you, if you are not willing to risk something you will not get something. ever hear the term "It takes money to make money"? well it's true.. if you don't stick it out there you won't get anything back.

If you don't have the courage to risk what you have. you have already lost who you were. Use them or lose them.

Closing thought; if you can't put it out there then what good is having it anyway?
yeah not as witty as usual but I am kinda "blah" today. but I still stick it out there and I still see a return on investment.

Sin Sells...

2006-10-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

But the real question is should we be buying?

Well as I think I have pointed out in previous write ups I am not religious, in fact I am an atheist. But the fact remains people shell out cash for that which is not in their best interest. Which is what the bible refers to when it mentions sin (don’t eat shell fish cause 8 months out of the year, in the region the bible was created in, they will kill you.) Usually my titles are a little more subtle and obscure in reference to the write up itself but this time it is what it is. Sin Sells; people will pay to have a nekid chick hang out with them, people will pay to forget the recent events of life, and people will pay to have a someone dress up like a barbi and be spanked.

So what is it about forward movement we are all avoiding? Is it fear of potential? Fear of failure? Maybe it’s just the realization we are going to die before we get the chance to experience that carnal need/want of something we can’t pinpoint. Or maybe it’s just human nature to destroy ourselves… I think it’s the latter.

We develop ways to kill ourselves; Cigarettes, Cocaine, Alcohol, Driving fast, Thermonuclear Warfare. We want to die… just not right this second. We are self destructive. We marry “the person of our dreams” only to find out they drive us nuts and enjoy doing it… but they look good. We will go to extreme measures to ensure that we can and will experience the hardest lessons in life, because we don’t believe the thousands of people that have done the same thing when they say “trust me it sucks.”

So what is it about “Sin” that appeals to us? Is it the taboo? Or just the pleasure it invokes for the moment? Or a mix there of? Does it make us feel more alive to be on the edge? To be stressed and pressured until we aren’t alive any longer?

Sometimes people want to feel alive instead of just being alive, sometimes breathing isn’t enough; people want to get that surge that says “you just did something no one else has done.” Wake up…. It’s been done and probably better. Now go do something meaningful with your day… help a family, save a kid, take care of your responsibilities. Fuck the dumb shit and do something that will be important one or two generations from now… more importantly go do something you won’t have to lie about later.

Closing thought; if you think you will have to lie about it… don’t do it. If you can have the Sin and not lie about it more power to you.

What To Do?

2006-08-21T14:22:00.000-07:00

Choices, we make them every day; Turn left? Turn right? Write out this line? Do this? Don’t do that? Yeah you know what I mean. So do we respect the decisions we make? That’s what is bugging me today.

To respect a decision is to acknowledge it was made… and to realize the impacts of that choice. All, or at least as many as can be foreseen, of the impacts. Not just the impacts to the decision maker. So many fundamentally selfish decisions effect people around us every day, and it’s disturbing how often they are made without even a second thought to most of the results of the choice.

That’s it… I could give examples but I think that would belittle the meaning and narrow the scope.

Rarity of a Smile

2006-07-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

Today at the gas station I made a stranger smile, I stopped to snag a Dr. Pepper, one of those key style stations no inside just an attendant in a box and gas pumps. There was a guy pumping gas at the pump closest to the attendant box. I parked behind him and walked up to snag a soda, as I got back in the car I noticed I still had my old empty from the day before in the cup holder. So I swapped out and went to toss it in the trash. Now, the guy pumping gas was an older guy I would say mid to late 50s. He had looked up as I bought the new soda…. then looked again up as I walked back with the empty bottle.

“Mmmm that was good” I said to his enquiring glance.

The guy didn’t change expression for a min, but as I pulled away I looked up and saw him smiling as he relayed the scene through his mind. It was kind of cool; a sincere smile from a stranger, not laughter, not excitement, just a moment of happiness for someone completely unknown to me. He seemed less “blah” for a minute as I drove away… that was nice and it cost me nothing. A passing thought about a trivial moment of coincidence.

That’s all, I just wanted to put that in words and share it for a minute.

Ta...

2006-04-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

I think I am done with this, I have no more I want to say publicly. I feel better for having said things out loud and have no remorse for anything I have said. I know the readership was limited and it’s not as though I impacted anything in a globally sweeping manor, but I feel better and that was the point.

I want to thank everyone for taking the time from their day to peruse my thoughts and to humor my compulsion to do this. Thanks! In closing I wanted to impart one last thing upon those inclined to read and think.

Don’t change for others, change for you. Changing for any other reason is doomed to failure and likely to take others down with you.

I hope some of my previous posts get a brush through from time to time, I will keep the email up and check it for commentary (the comments email to me automatically), and of course any conversation is welcome as well.

I hope you have enjoyed the brain prodding and the occasional humor. Take care.

Thank you, please Drive Through.

That’s it, there is no more.

Can you hear me now?

Jump a Fence

2006-03-31T11:00:00.000-08:00

Around here lately there has been a big stink about some proposed changes to some immigration laws. Specifically about the part making coming into the country illegally a felony. Before we get too far into this take note of the “Illegally” part of that. Grab your floaties we are swimming to a newer, better life.

In Houston Texas 500,000 students walked out of school to “Protest the Illegal Immigration law changes” also known as an organized skip day… most of these students don’t even know what they are protesting. They seem to think it’s targeting Mexicans specifically, which it’s not, if you remember Misnomers I pointed out that an immigrant is not specific to any nationality, more importantly it seems they think it’s targeting any immigrant. Neither of these are true however, the law changes are for anyone that breaks the law by entering our country without going through the process to become a citizen or to get a visa allowing them to work or go to school here… in short the law targets people without a tax number. There are a few things to think about regarding this; one being that it is already illegal to enter the country without documentation (the process of getting a visa or citizenship), this revision will just make it a harsher penalty since the current penalties are not stopping people from doing it. Another is that we have some serious security issues in this country lately regarding people coming over and wanting to blow things up… 4th of July not withstanding (U.S. independence day… you know people fought for this countries sovereignty). Tell me, would you let someone in your home that you thought may shit on your living room floor? And if they did wouldn’t you want to be able to do something about it? Another point of interest is that the folks that are actually affected by this change don’t vote nor pay taxes. So really their opinion in the alteration or creation of laws in this country does not matter at all.

As a proof of how little the protesters understand about the issue they are speaking out against, they are all marching up to city halls to protest. The law is a federal matter… the Mayor can do NOTHING for them. To protest a federal matter march to the office of the US Representatives of your area or a senator… at least then you are dealing with someone that is actually involved in the process. Basically read a book, read a newspaper, know something on the topic before protesting it if you want to be taken seriously.

Closing thought; this is happening in a lot of cities in several states, I used Houston Texas because I live there and have more information about it. I honestly believe the kids that are doing this are just using it as an excuse to skip class. Stupid people… can’t live with them can’t shoot them… or can we?

Shuffle

2006-03-30T08:45:00.000-08:00

Random thoughts, random actions, lately I haven’t been able to keep a decent train of thought which of course has slowed down my writing. So that being the situation at hand I thought “what the hell…” use it and write about it.

Random firings of various brain cells and poof my finger moves to a given key, this goes on for hours on end every day. What is it that makes things like this possible really? I mean have you ever sat and thought about what actually happens to cause basic movements? Yeah I have and I dint walk for a week afterward. But what the hell I am just lounging in a chair most of the day anyway. The actual chemistry of it seems pretty straightforward; a cluster of cells transmit a signal to a nerve that happens to link to muscles in a specific region of the body and they begin to retract and detract. Nothing to difficult there…. I can’t wait for the global networking system using the earths field of gravity as its medium for transmission that is going to be too cool. No matter where you go you will be able to receive your data as long as you have a unit which I am sure by that time will be something along the lines of a PDA or a wrist component, using the QBit processing, 28+ fluoride molecules processing information faster than a global server cluster… huh huh huh more power…..wonder what my son is doing right now…. Today has been slow and dull, I can’t seem to think of anything specific to write about, damn I hate fluorescent lights, ooo cool song. Maybe I will play a game of chess with the kiddo tonight, yeah that sounds fun. You know I always used to think it would be fun and cool to have a job where they paid you to sit around and be available “Just in case”… boy was I wrong, cause this sucks…. Hmm I wonder if she ….

…Well that answers that. The world, or at least I, may never know…. Damn I am tired… I type to slow, I keep losing track of the thought, hmm wonder how much longer before a good voice recognition software comes around… then again I type better than I speak not sure that would be particularly beneficial for me. Somewhere right now someone is getting some… shit this freaking computer needs more RAM, like I need something else slowing me down…

And so goes the random misfiring of my mind over about 4 min or so, I think I missed a few but what can you do my fingers only move so fast.

Obviously no real closing thought today… but as an imitation one; wonder if mixing some Ritalin in the M&M’s would help?

Indecision is a bitch

2006-03-29T07:26:00.000-08:00

In life there are choices, these are the deciding points that develop our situations from that time forward. There is always the option to go back and attempt to correct an error, but it’s never as easy after the initial opportunity has passed. The character of a person can be defined moment to moment via choices everyday.

People are stupid. Yeah like you didn’t know that one right? Well humor me, I want to get more depth than just the conclusion. People are not inclined to see beyond the instant gratification of any given moment, and more often than not the shameful moments are covered with lies and criticism. Which in turn insures that the next time the situation or a similar situation arises the same actions will be taken because they can get the satisfaction of the moment and mask it as needed. Shame is there for a reason, if you think you will have to lie about it later you probably would be better off not doing it. Some examples would probably be good here but I bet you can think of someone you know or something that was done, by you or someone you know, that exemplifies this better than I ever could to a broad audience. Take a moment to reflect on the instances…..

Sometimes situations call for tough choices, and regardless of what you or your friends have attempted to convince you of they do matter. Everything matters. It may not matter to the world at large but it matters to someone and most often it winds up mattering to you. These are the choices where right and wrong become clouded by excuses, preferences, and apparent appeal. Failing in the obvious indicators here let me define “everything matters” ~ you kill a mosquito that does not wind up biting the person next to you who then does not have to pause to notice the lump in a window reflection which places him 3 seconds further up the road in the morning commute, causing him/her to either miss an accident or be a part of one. The outcome is in no way foreseeable but it is there none the less. Everything matters although I am not asking you to not kill a mosquito it seemed like a good arbitrary example of the little things impacting the bigger picture. Life is in the details, unfortunately you can’t get too caught up in the details or you will miss the life. This is where another choice comes in the form of pondering the possibilities or act and attempt to make decent judgment calls that will not wind up with you homeless and alone. That of course is an extreme example, but hey skip a few days of work and see how extreme it is when you are 100 bucks short on rent. To hesitate is to miss out.

Ah the complexities of day to day living, things we don’t even realize we are doing the majority of the time. The mind, whether consciously or subconsciously, weighs our wants against our needs, and those against the possible outcomes with every decision we make. As we get older we either get better at it or we fail. To deny that fact is to allow the decisions others to impact you more than you would probably like. Then there are those that crave the drama, the anxiety, the rush, the stress, of working out poor decisions made by themselves or others around them. What to say about those, I don’t know but I attempt to keep them away from me. To each his/her own.

Closing thought; well I feel better now, it may not make a lot of sense but random thoughts rarely do. The choices we make should be either stuck to or corrected, nothing in between. Half-assing it won’t get anything done and tends to make the choice moot, at which point you will begin to stagnate. I don’t drink from stagnant pools. I realize I didn’t really tie up the “People are stupid” comment but I think if you read between the lines you will see what it is that made that the opener. And if not… well the choice is yours.

No Clue

2006-03-28T10:58:00.000-08:00

I have no clue what to say today so instead here is a random internet find....(it is work safe)

Fly Hunting

Are We There Yet?

2006-03-27T10:00:00.000-08:00

I was going to write something on religion today called Proof… and realized “Crap… already did that one.” Then I thought I could do one about the meaning of life … “Crap I don’t 'know' the meaning of life…. Fuck it People don’t ‘Know’ there is a god either” so the Meaning of Life it is.

Funny thing about understanding the meaning of life, if you over think it you won’t get it. I realized when I was about 16; the meaning of a single life is really pretty simple and self explanatory, or seemed that way to me. The complexity it seemed, comes in when you start to think on the meaning of life as it relates to all life on the planet and potentially beyond. After much thought over nearly 20 years regarding that concept I have found myself just as cynical as ever and coming to conclusions of biblical proportions. This is what helps me understand why people believe in the great invisible friend, or friends, as it has been through out history. People have needs and those needs are deepest when it comes to understanding why we do things. So anyway the meaning of life, what would change if we knew for certain the answer? Well for me when I concluded that I was close enough to right I suddenly became bored with most everything I encountered, I also lost my fear of pretty much anything. Death was no longer a concern, just a certainty. Which was actually a kind of relief for me, and led me to look into religion as a whole, amongst other things I had been told were true most of my life.

So here I sit writing an opinion about something I have no proof of other than the simple rationale of it, which I am sure with enough thought could be debunked and refuted with “But God said….” Not that it would change my mind. I wonder at times like these if I should even tell anyone what I think about a subject for a lot of reasons; one of them being the outcome for me was raw boredom with so many things that I would almost hate to bestow that on someone who still finds joy in things I miss. There are others that are a consideration for not posting this one but I have never let offending people stop me before and won’t let it stop me now, which happens to cover the last of my thoughts on why not post.

Why we are here relative to singular existence:
To experience all that you can experience in the time you have.

Shrug there you go, a simple perspective from a simple person. Think about it and then you can burn me in effigy, and/or criticize my simplicity.

Post Script:
These thoughts do not translate well in writing and I am not particularly happy with the way this one turned out. But screw it I do stupid things all the time no reason to stop now. To elaborate the meaning is to over think it and to lose site of its simplicity. I have found that the simplest answer is often the correct one (someone else said that I just can't remember who). In this case it works for me.

Just Between Us...

2006-03-22T07:52:00.000-08:00

When two people decide they will be sleeping with no other, it becomes a commitment. Sometimes it is unspoken, others it is discussed, and still others it is less than mutual. What is so often not considered or noticed is that mutual monogamy has responsibilities on both ends of its spectrum, not cheating and alleviating the want to cheat. This is not a gender specific issue, it’s a responsibility issue anytime you enter into a contract (commitment) there are benefits and responsibilities, if there is one without the other then you should probably reconsider your position in that contract. So let’s break down the concepts involved here…

First let’s define monogamy, even though I am relatively certain everyone knows what it means whether they admit it or not.

mo·nog·a·my
Function: noun
Etymology: French monogamie, from Late Latin monogamia, from Greek, from monogamos monogamous, from mon- + gamos marriage, from gamein to marry
1 archaic : the practice of marrying only once during a lifetime
2 : the state or custom of being married to one person at a time
3 : the condition or practice of having a single mate during a period of time

As with most conditions or status’ involving more than one person there are attributes that have to be upheld to keep the title accurate. Primarily you have to not have sex with anyone other than the specific partner. Sex in this sense (to me) would include anything intimate; kissing, affectionate holding, romantic interludes, fucking, oral copulation, pretty much anything you wouldn’t want to see your partner doing with someone else. Ok now we all knew that but to define it is to insure it. On to what this is all about.

The current expectation, it seems, of people in a monogamous relationship is that the partner will not under any circumstances break the rule of this commitment. People seem to think they can pull a few months of “not in the mood” and its ok, or deny their partner affection, attention, concern, and/or courtesy just because they don’t feel the need. This is wrong, and more importantly it is not conducive to maintaining the commitment. To me the prerequisites of maintaining a monogamous relationship are that you have to cooperate in the needs of your partner. This includes basic attention; conversation, basic affections, (at least) occasional sexual relations. If one of the individuals involved drops their end of the responsibility they should not be shocked nor upset when the other finds what they need elsewhere. You can not expect someone to go to an empty well for water forever. Too often I see men and women who will not act in accordance with the contract they have entered and assume it’s not their problem, and worse, get extremely self righteous when their partner alleviates his/her unacknowledged desires outside of the partnership. It’s just wrong.

For the sake of clarity, this does not mean that it’s okay to cheat. If your partner is having a (singular) bad day and is not up to catering to your needs you should deal with it, more specifically you should cater to them instead. It does not mean that you should just randomly go and work it out while still maintaining the illusion of a partnership either, if someone finds themselves in this situation they should make it known, and work it out. Working it out does include, but is not limited to, ending the partnership. This also does not mean that there can’t be circumstances that generate the inability to adhere to the two way aspect of this, use your judgment. For any partnership to work all (both) parties have to understand the guidelines and the limitations, not just hold on to the expectation of the bottom line.

Closing thought; I am monogamous myself, if I decide it’s not working out I end it or give them the option to end it or work things out, but either way I don’t cheat. However, I would not expect someone to not cheat on me if I were unwilling to supply the needs for extended periods of time. This is by no means a cut and dry thing, but it’s my guideline and I stand by it.

Hi Definition

2006-03-21T08:56:00.000-08:00

To sit and ponder the actions of others, and more importantly the reasons behind the actions of others is to sit and ponder the actions and reasons of your self. To try and define another human being is to attempt the impossible. The myriad of possibilities and subtleties is as chaotic and grand as universal astrophysics. To be 100% accurate with any judgment is about as likely as winning the dummy tax (lotto). Generalizations with an attempt to fine tune are about as close as I ever seem to get.

In day to day activities we all see people interacting, some of us take pause and think about the what’s and why’s of the interactions and others accept it at face value. Most of us will do either one dependent on our level of preoccupation with whatever may be going on at that time. All of us make passive judgments of people based on what we see and experience in relation to them. These are all daily occurrences whether we realize we are doing it or not. As far as I can tell all of the judgments we all make are based on a measuring stick of what we like and dislike about ourselves or things we will or won’t do. At this point Hypocrisy has the option to enter the equation and will, if given the chance, become some ones basis for judgment of us. Hypocrisy is an odd thing in that sometimes it is something you think you wouldn’t do, others it is something you do but dislike about your own actions and detest in someone else. Either way it gives a very negative perception of ourselves, via ourselves and others.

To recognize our own shortcomings we will sometimes measure ourselves up against those we see around us, good and bad, other times we will measure ourselves against our own self image. All of this in an attempt to become what we want or hope to be, sometimes we lose site of the fact that everyone is doing basically the same thing, observing and improving or attempting to improve.

Closing though; the book of knowledge lays out before us everyday, we just have to stop and read it. Well translate it then read it. Well recognize it, translate it, then read it…and remember that everyone else is trying just as hard to do the same general thing.

Something Positive

2006-03-20T09:22:00.000-08:00

See told you I could say it… Something Positive, there that’s twice. Now, the other day at lunch a friend of mine and I had a waitress, she was not particularly attractive, but wasn’t ugly either, “had a few extra pounds” for real this time… about 10-15 pounds (4-7 kg) over weight, and an almost cute face. Anyway I am getting to the point … really; she had a tongue ring, actually a piercing as it’s a rod with 2 balls on either end as opposed to an actual hoop. I want to talk about that and its effects on perception from a single male perspective. Slap on the washable tattoos and clip on rings… time to party.

The first thing I notice about a female depends entirely on the situation and the female. Some girls I actually do notice their eyes first, others I notice the tits, conversation, ass, legs, tattoos, and with the waitress it was the tongue ring. Perhaps because she was playing with it between her lips when I first saw her, but regardless that was a turn on for me for what, I like to think, are obvious reasons but just in case; I am male, I like to think about sex, and a tongue ring makes me think about oral sex which is just that much better. There were a lot of things to like about her now, she was much cuter at that point than she would have been had I not seen the piercing. And that little glance my direction (you know checking to see if we needed refills) suddenly mattered. Which gets me thinking about accessories and females, perhaps there is a logic behind it all after all.

I often criticize people (women) for all the effort they go through to do simple stuff like grocery shop, go to the mailbox, well pretty much anything that requires stepping outside the house. But there I sat attracted to a girl based solely on a single piece of, normally, not so obvious jewelry and her apparent talent with it. So I sit corrected, by my own maleness at that, that stuff works and girls are obviously more in tune than we give them credit for sometimes. Or maybe it was just dumb luck, either way I have been wrong before and will be again I am sure. But back to the tongue ring….

Closing thought; nothing intelligent to say today, it’s Monday… you know how that goes right?

Cries For Help

2006-03-17T07:12:00.000-08:00

When I write these articles, I don’t think of someone and start writing. I think of a widespread issue that I encounter and observe and I write about that. If you read a rant or 12 that seems like it’s (they’re) about you, you should probably consider the topic and decide if it applies to you. If it does and you don’t like it, perhaps you should work on correcting it. I assure you no one I know is so special as to warrant a 2 hour write up to be posted for the world to see. If something I write in these articles offends you or causes you to go into defensive mode, it’s my opinion the problem isn’t the article but something you don’t like about yourself. Nothing I say or do can fix that particular issue, the onus is on you to decide if you can deal with having a relationship with that particular issue. And that leads me to today’s article, problem solving from the inside out… put down your Dr. Imgonnafixyou book and take a look at this…

People walk around with problems they don’t understand, can’t identify or don’t know how to resolve. Sometimes it’s a problem generated by personal belief, upbringing, or ignorance of the problems existence. In all of these cases it seems there are indicators that will show you the way, the situations themselves are not that indicator but your responses to them are. When a pshrynk says “and how does that make you feel” he/she really isn’t being a smart ass, they are attempting to get to the root of the issue, to identify it and it’s generated responses so they can help you deal with it in a manner that would be beneficial to you. While I am not a pshrynk and I can not ask you questions, I can save you 100 bucks an hour (or more) by explaining how the process works. The goal is to identify; pay attention to your reactions to things that you encounter, take a mental note of it and give it some thought on why you responded the way you did. I don’t mean “Cause daddy touched me” reasons, I mean what just happened inside you to generate your current response. Did it make you nervous? Perhaps you have an underlying fear. Did it make you angry? If so what about it made you angry? Perhaps you have some deep insecurity you didn’t realize.

Things along those lines, look within not without, no one can “Make” you feel a certain way, they may have triggered the feeling but it was already there waiting for its moment. It was helpful to me to look into the reasons for emotions, and what they tend to indicate and may help others as well, google is an awesome tool.

Closing thought; I promise I am not writing about you so don’t get offended by my words, it’s not my fault nor my problem if something I say applies to you. More specifically it’s not on me to make sure you are comfortable with whom you are. If you are uncomfortable with your actions or results correct them, not me.

Side Note:
This in no way means I don’t want your comments, and you can chew on me or my words all you want, I like the alternate perspectives. For whatever reason I had an urge to expand on my previous article, “Fence Theft” feel free to read it again if you want to see the blunt objective version of this.

Influence

2006-03-16T07:55:00.000-08:00

The time is now, the population needs to wake up and smell the shit we are shoveling. The envy, distaste, angst, or what ever it is that drives this species to restrict the non-intrusive actions of those around them, must be stopped. People are killing each other over silly shit like which invisible friend they talk to at night. They are imprisoning each other over how someone goes about relaxing at the end of the day. Folks are ridiculing each other regarding over how they get their sexual jollies. These are all things that must come to an end. Put the big guy on hold, grab your doobie, and slap that ass, this trip could take a minute or two….

The nosey, intrusive nature of the public has reached a point of detriment to any freedoms we could ever hope to have within our private lives. When intolerant self-righteous groups find out about each other it ends in blood shed, or at the least small riots and bigotry. Jews, Muslims, Christians, all read the same book in essence. There are differences in translation, but like they each argue; it’s all about translation, personal insight and as they won’t usually say; personal gratification. And yet they can’t stand in the same space for more than 5 minutes without inferring some altercation building ridicule or speculation. This is both stupid and hypocritical each party should be subject to what ever tribulation they are wishing upon the other. In this country Freedom of Religion is a founding concept, but it’s still a stigma for anyone to say publicly they don’t believe in god. This is all stupid and irrelevant to anything resembling maintaining the ability to breath.

For a person to sit down on their own couch and relax with a drug of choice is to break at least 2 laws, in most countries including the U.S. One law being possession and the other trafficking (the purchase of), these are the equivalent of prohibition (a brief period of American history where alcohol was illegal) which failed miserably for a lot of reasons. So who is that person hurting exactly? His family; yes but that is none of the rest of the worlds business. His personal well being? Sure, but again not the worlds concern. It is only a sense of self importance that makes a person believe any of this is something they should be shoving there opinion into. And that is at least 2 of the 7 deadlies as well as breaking at least one of the big 10.

With all the hate, angst and hostility you would think that a blo job between two consenting adults would be a good thing, and it is unless the public at large gets wind of it. You see anything other than vaginal sex is Sodomy. Sodomy is illegal in quite a few countries, and looked down upon by a large number of the self righteous. Generally this happens in relative privacy and is no ones business except the two (sometimes more) people involved in the act. For someone to make this a public issue is ludicrous, but because some jackass couldn’t convince his wife to perform the act, no one should get one. The Taboos of private acts are not restricted to sodomy but it’s a strong example.

For people to sit and debate is one thing, to have them impose their anxieties in their absence is an assault against personal freedoms. If you don’t like it don’t do it. Leave the rest of us the fuck out of it. No one is so important as to impose their personal restrictions upon another.

Closing thought; Get a crowbar, we should all be working to pry the head of public opinion out of our asses. As a side note; during prohibition the very law makers that voted for it continued to imbibe of the same alcohol they had attempted to make unavailable for anyone else.

The Zen of Bridge Maintenance

2006-03-15T07:15:00.000-08:00

So many times in life someone will tell another something that they have every intention at the time to follow through with. This indicated intention builds a level of expectation, expectation only has 2 results; it happens or it doesn’t happen. In cases where it “kind of happens” or more specifically partially occurs would qualify as it did not happen, I will get into this more later. Expectation is a root of problems which would imply by the nature of tracing back that intention is the root of issues in relationships between people.

To invest interest or anxiety into a spoken intention is a fools errand, it will leave you open to a lot of misery, with very little pay off. I say this due to so many examples of so called intentions such as; “I will call you later”, “I will always be on your side”, and “Our tech support is knowledgeable and easily accessed”. These are all generic examples I am sure everyone has heard before either knowing at the time or finding out later that it never materializes into anything. More specific situations that fit to each of us individually are foundations for disappointment. These disappointments are what drive people that care away.

On the other side of the coin there is lack of appreciation. When someone does what they say they will do, it is just meeting expectation. I think this is where surprise comes in handy, don’t say “I will get you flowers today on my way home” just do it. The effect here is appreciation, without appreciation the value of the deed is degraded to simply meeting expectation, quickly forgotten by both parties, and completely overshadowed by any little thing that may be on either person’s nerves that day. These build a whole other kind of resentment that only adds to the issues found in any relationship.

When an expectation is only partially met the person attempting to meet it has failed and both people are left feeling negatively about it, E for effort is only good till 4th grade. The resulting feelings are different but related, one person is feeling let down while the other gets the sense of failure or possibly being unappreciated (for the effort). Neither of these is conducive to a working relationship, and will eventually cause it to fail miserably and/or make it miserable to endure.

I am writing this because there are so many people around me right now, that have come to me repeatedly in the last week or 2, who are having this exact problem with someone in their lives. The Someone they refer to varies; some are parents, some are children, some are spouses and others are “friends”. The relation to the person is not relevant to me, as the measurement is still the same:

Place the intentions in a list, then move them to a “Pass” or a “Fail” column based on outcome, when they are the “Kind of passed” use your own judgment (this is the path to excuses and defending the person however), I recommend placing them in the fail or leaving them out of the result columns*. If the Fails out number the Passes then perhaps you should consider leaving that “Bridge” to them for maintenance and stop worrying about it. If it’s a bridge worth having it will still be there, if not then it wasn’t important to them and you are better off. If the Pass column outnumbers the Fail, perhaps you should re-evaluate your expectations and the source of those expectations. Sometimes the happiness just isn’t there to be had, with or without a reason.

The important thing here is that you understand why you feel the way you feel and find a way to work it out so you are happy, and as a result hopefully, both people involved are better off.

Closing thought; Actions speak louder than words, Nike™ said it best: “Just Do It.” More importantly acknowledge your failures and do better next time. It doesn’t take long for the failures to outnumber the passes otherwise.

* If these are more numerous than the others you should think about that in and of it’s self.

The Little Things

2006-03-14T07:36:00.000-08:00

Sometimes someone will tell you what they think to be true at the time, and although it seems accurate at the time, the truth of the moment fades and the truth becomes a statement of habit instead of a real feeling. Over the last few days I have been reliving moments like those, trying to figure out how I got where I am relative to people that have come and gone through my life. And with this I am breaking a rule of mine for this article; I am going to write about me. It’s not a whine, a complaint, nor a pity me thing, these are just my thoughts about situations I have encountered that even over time have not faded as I thought they would or should.

Within specific moments things feel right, they feel forever, and in some cases the need to say something along those lines seems to appeal to people without regard to the likelihood of it not lasting. These are the “Lies” of emotion I think, they feel true and are true at that particular moment. They also are the truths that later are used as reasons for continuing something that is obviously not functional. Although at the moment they are the truths that fuel a feeling of security and well being, in time they become statements of habit and later statements of resentment. Resentment in time will lead the curious to try and find what happened that changed it all. A lot of people are satisfied with “I don’t know what happened” and leave it at “it doesn’t matter, it’s over now.” Not me, that’s too easy for me I think, I am the person that couldn’t care less about dieing children in the neighbors yard much less in some other country. When I do care about someone and the relationship fails I analyze it until I reach the brink of insanity, trying to see how I can keep from making the same mistake(s) if I find someone else I give a shit about. The conclusion I have come to is that it’s the “Truths of the moment” that are the generator of the results I have repeatedly encountered.

“I love you” after sex means nothing, “You make me so happy” after a gift means nothing, “Don’t ever leave me” means nothing in the first month. I have to remember this again, there was a time I didn’t accept comments like that as anything more than ego stroking. But in times when I find myself caring about someone I start to get a hope that they are being real. I suppose that’s the real issue right there… Hope.

Closing thought; I really don’t know. But I am trying.

And Then There Were 3

2006-03-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Today a conflict began and ended in the time it takes to push a button. The missiles have not even landed yet but we all know the result will be final. Those not killed by the initial 3 blasts will be dead by the end of the year. Even as words are placed upon this page there are people moving as quickly as possible to the outskirts of a blast radius they believe to be the primary concern. What they don’t want to realize is the fallout will be worse than the blast, that death is knocking on the door and it doesn’t matter if they answer it or not.

In the next 10 minutes 12.5 million lives will come to an abrupt halt, with another 24.6 million deaths occurring in the same region over the course of 365 days. This coupled with zero population growth will ensure the elimination of human life in that region for the next 1000 plus years. On the upside we will have a beautiful glass landscape to tour once the negative after effects have subsided. Do not cry for those that are about to die, they are going to a better place, a place where virgins cater to their every whim, where the streams flow honey and milk, where bushes bear the fruit of god.

……………..

So I ask you, given the willingness of the aggressors to die killing anyone that does not believe as they believe; why shouldn’t we kill them all? By all I mean everyone currently breathing from grandparents to new born children. Those that would teach the infants to grow to be the same intolerant hate mongering self serving fools they themselves are today. That’s cruel you say? You say it would place us in the same category as them? You believe that the passive live and let live will win the day?

I say fine so be it… we will have won though, and lived to argue about it for as long as we want, as opposed to climbing on a plane, train, or bus heading for grandma’s house only to die dreaming of rumballs and family events. I say it’s us or them. You want to be with them? Get you a ticket, in this country you can go be with whomever you like, we won’t stop you. Keep in mind what you are going to be a part of, the same ones that have set themselves as a target of world angst, those that have determined that the same freedom that allows you to go join them is their sworn enemy, oh and don’t forget they don’t like you either.

Let’s end this now, and live to argue about it later. It’s cold and inhumane but the ends do justify the means when it comes to survival. Don’t fool yourself that is exactly what this is about. I couldn’t care less about the ideals, the perception, nor the shift of world angst, wipe out the aggressors and apologize about the method after the result is peace and another 50+ years of freedom.

Proof

2006-03-10T09:10:00.000-08:00

There is within us all a need to understand the truth of a situation or circumstance. Some have such a strong need they will go and find the information required to understand it and possibly grasp the truth. While others will seek out information to confirm what they already believe to be true. This has been on my mind for about a month now and I think I have finally developed a way to relay what it is I see and believe to be the basis for both ends of this spectrum. Pop your Zanax and smile cause this won’t be sugar coated.

People have, since the beginning of conscious thought, realized the need to understand what is going on outside of their direct sphere of influence. In cases of limited information people tend to generate a belief of the situation being considered at that time. That belief over time (a few seconds or a few millennia) becomes accepted as truth and from that point forward becomes a meme to grow or die out based on evidence as it becomes available. Some larger examples of this would be position of the world in space, the shape of the world, racial based abilities, existence of deities, and flight. In all of these cases there was a widely held belief at one time, and in some cases still is, that was accepted as truth for lack of any proof to say otherwise. In brief the world does revolve around the Sun, the Earth is not flat, race has no bearing on ability, and people can fly with assistance (planes, gliders, etc).

Notice I skipped deification? Yeah it’s still widely held that there is a deity. Honestly it’s the only thing I can think of that is prevalently and vehemently believed to be true with a complete absence of proof. So let’s get the definitions out to make sure we are all using the same vocabulary.

Truth~
The body of real things, events, and
facts

Belief~
A state or habit of mind in which trust or
confidence is placed in some person or thing

Ok now without speaking directly about any particular belief or truth let’s recognize the difference between the two. Truth is what it is, without the need to be justified or accepted, whether it is understood or not it will still be the truth. People have to breathe to live. That is a fundamental truth whether anyone believes it or not. It is a reality that at some point every person will die, also true whether anyone acknowledges it or not. It is a belief that a person will succeed or fail at a particular task prior to the task being completed. It is a belief that there is or isn’t life on other planets, until we find one that proves it, or visit them all and find none.

Now to the real reason for all of this preparation; until it can be proven, present your beliefs as beliefs not as facts. Tolerance is important when dealing with beliefs, without tolerance the truth will never reveal itself. It’s entirely possible that an unproven belief will be acknowledged as a truth but that acknowledgement does not make it true. I don’t care if 1 billion people believe the world is flat, it doesn’t make it true. And just because the truth is the world is a sphere does not mandate someone to change their belief of its flatness, we are all allowed to be wrong. I am allowed to be wrong about whether or not I will ascend to heaven or descend to hell, the same way you are allowed to be wrong about slipping into oblivion. None of these cases requires proof to be believed and we should all learn to be ok about that.

Closing thought; what difference does it make to someone else what I believe, it will not effect their end result. It seems to me that when someone takes offense to someone else’s personal beliefs, it is the offended that has doubts about their beliefs. And that is in no way anyone else’s fault nor problem.

Humbug!

2006-03-09T09:22:00.000-08:00

I am not going to write an article today but I will provide you with a link to a 30 minute program that was very well done about foul language and it's relation to the first amendment.

Humbug!

Thanks to Populater for the online video link.

Who Flung Poo??

2006-03-08T10:04:00.000-08:00

Terrorism; what a common term that has become, it’s part of a catchphrase now, the media's new favorite “Hey watch me!!” catch all word. Someone sets up sniper position and it’s “suspected Terrorist Attack”, or a bank is held hostage during a robbery “Possible Terrorism in your city, tonight at 10”, a traffic signal malfunctions “Potential Terrorist activity on our streets!” The hype is getting to be overbearing, and in truth ridiculous, but it has caused some thought about our stance as a culture about a lot of things. That is what I intend to convey today, so let’s pack up the delivery truck and make some news…

So what is terrorism anyway?
ter·ror·ism
Pronunciation: 'ter-&r-"i-z&m
Function: noun
: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion

Now that we have that out there, I think the key word is systematic, which implies that there is a bigger goal than the direct result of the act itself. In this, the age of mass destruction, the guerilla warfare tactics that are signature of terrorist acts, are ineffectual and no more than a nuisance to those being assaulted. It seems to me that any state, country, or nation that would attempt to conduct war in this manner are a dieing culture, and the acts of terrorism are nothing more than the death throws of their dieing ideals. The ideals are not dieing because the group being assaulted killed them, they are dieing because it’s a way of life that is outdated and unsuitable to surviving modern methods of living. While history has repeatedly shown no culture goes down gracefully, the culture will still die. And those left behind will either integrate or die along with it. Time and Technology move forward with or without the approval of stagnant minds.

The Tower of Babel did not collapse because the Hand Of God struck it down, the Tower of Babel Collapsed because the builders were grasping beyond their ability to reach. That is what is happening today, small groups of people, who feel slighted for whatever reason, are finding ways to make themselves seem more influential than they are. They will meet with the same result; they will collapse upon themselves due to a weakness of infrastructure. For them to believe otherwise is an act of idiocy that will continue to effect everyone they direct there angst against until the collapse occurs.

I already know I will come under a lot of criticism for simplifying it this way, but in its simplest terms it appears that way to me. And what is worse there seems to be no point here, but then again perhaps that is the point.

By Any Other Name

2006-03-07T09:36:00.000-08:00

Social restrictions on silly ass crap gets on my nerves. Right now the one that strikes me the most annoying is language restrictions; “foul language”. I personally don’t tend to bow to the socially imposed this word or that word is bad, to me it’s a word, used to communicate a feeling or thought or both regardless of the particular letter combination. Shit, crap, poop, ka-ka, turd… they all relate to the same form of excrement that no one wants to think about someone else doing, well unless you are into a certain Ska thing that I would rather not get into here. Grab your rain gear we are heading into the gutter. Oh if this offends you, please comment on why, not “just cause” but really what about it offends.

So why the problem with words like; Fuck, Shit, Damn, Hell, Bitch, and Ass? How did these words get pulled aside and marked as “Profane”? My vocabulary is pretty decent and I see no reason to reduce it by 6 words because some group of morons, who couldn’t define why and are certainly dead by now, were bothered by a few particular combinations of sounds. These words are quite versatile and understood by pretty much everyone that speaks a language rooted in Latin. They relieve a lot of stress for millions every day, could you imagine stubbing your toe and saying something like “Oh darn”, I doubt it… and if you say you do I want to see that, got a hammer right here.

I am not saying everyone should specifically use the words, what I am saying is I don’t see the problem with them other than some social stigma/taboo about them. If you don’t use them, who cares… if I do use them, again who cares, more specifically why do people care? I honestly don’t get it, is it just another power trip the masses of sheep can feel over the individual?

Anyway it’s short today, actually have work to do.. if someone can answer that intelligently minus the “just cause” type answer I really want to hear it. Other comments are welcome as well of course.

Closing thought:
Would shit by any other name not stink?

Fucking Blue Lights

2006-03-06T07:11:00.000-08:00

I got pulled over today, on the way to work, for (of all things) my inspection sticker. Granted it’s very expired, and they cop was within her right to ticket me for it. The thing that irritates me is the way it was done and the over all attitude of the process. Don’t tell me “you have just picked up a new 200 dollar expense this month” then smile and say something along the lines of “it’s no big deal.”

Let me start by giving you an idea of what I drive, this way you can see the raw stupidity of some of the comments I received during the process of accepting this ticket. My car is a 1992 Nissan Sentra, that’s right it’s 14 years old, with just shy of 300,000 miles on it (no that’s not a typo three hundred thousand miles). My car has no radio, the fly wheel (clutch compression disk) is paper thin, the driver side mirror is missing (but the plastic plate that holds it is there), the weather stripping on most of the windows is hanging out, and the car is generally just a piece of shit that just won’t stop getting me to and from work. Ok, got all that? Oh and just to complete the picture for you it’s black (or was at one time) and the paint is faded and worn.

So I am on my way to the freeway so I can get to work this morning, and manage to get directly behind a cop, who of course changes lanes and slows down to get behind me. After pulling over the officer walks up (a female who was pretty happy with her job well done so far, I gathered from the smile) and tells me “you were driving just fine, but your inspection is expired”, which happens to be true. So after handing over the insurance and ID, she tells me it will be just a minute while she runs my information. Running your information consists of them finding out the last time you spit on the sidewalk and whether or not some other government agency wants your money/time. And by some freak of nature I turned out to not be wanted this time around. Now as she is walking back over to my car, she is talking to her shoulder (where officers keep the mic for the radio) apologizing for something, I don’t even want to speculate what that something was, and begins to tell me how this is no big deal, “this wont’ effect your drivers license,” like I freaking care about that “and you won’t have to show up for court” …do what???

“I don’t’ have to show up for court?”
“no, you can just send the money to the address at the top of the ticket”
“Oh is that all….”
“yes” big smile “and that will take care of it”
“Yeah I bet it will… how much is the fine”
“Oh, umm I don’t know, but you can call that number and find out” Big smile again.
“I see. So it’s no big deal because you have no idea how much food you just took from my sons mouth…”
“excuse me?”
“nothing.”

“Ok well have a good day”
“I hope you die a slow horrid death”
“Excuse me?”
“have a nice day”

Now tell me, after you got the basic description of my car, do you really think I look like the kind of person a 200ish dollar fine is no big deal to? I mean really and then to smile the whole time like she just did me a favor or saved my cat or something. Geez.

Closing thought;
Cops are great, they save lives and protect those that can’t protect themselves. I understand… but explain to me who that sticker was assaulting exactly? And why was she so happy about making my financial life more difficult than it already is?

Visual Spam

2006-03-03T12:23:00.000-08:00

It’s Friday… wow. You know as much as I understand the weekend being cool, no work, no school, no particularly demanding issues, but why the big hoopla? Its still Friday, and a work day. Anyway I already got 3 emails about “your blog isn’t up, what’s your problem?” I have to work! No really, stop laughing … there was actual stuff that needed to be done today when I got in, so I couldn’t get to this first thing like I usually do. When the readers get together and donate 800 or more dollars a week to the Capt. Obvious Writes Foundation I will quit my job and guaranty an article first thing every morning before 10am, I would even work weekends. Anyway today the only thing on my mind today is some crap happening in my personal life around me, not too me but around me. So I am going to rant on Day Time TV. This should be a good read… don’t change that dial (old TV’s had dials not buttons, can you imagine??) the fun is just about to begin, but first a word from our writer.

Day time TV is getting way out of hand, it has turned into an encouraged stalker in the making situation. All these daytime hosts spend their 40 minutes (after time for commercials) trying to develop a personal relationship with their viewers. This is not an easy thing, you would think, since they don’t know all of their viewers. But this is where the term “Target Audience” comes into play. A target audience is a general psychological profile the given item is attempting to appeal to. The favored Target audience is the lowest common denominator. The lowest common denominator, in pshrynk terms, is any particular interest or trait that can be found and appealed to in the largest number of people. A relative example would be, for daytime TV, people who would want to buy a mop, or a better brand of dish detergent. Before someone rails on me for that; why do you think daytime TV is full of those kinds of commercials? Companies spend good money (and lots of it) to find out when they should air those commercials to appeal to the most people likely to be interested in their product. It’s not exactly rocket science.

So anyway back to my point; the hosts of these shows spend their air time trying to convince people that what they are saying is the correct and accepted way to go about things, or approach issues, or resolve stains in your carpet. What everyone who gets wrapped up in this crap starts to believe is that since there are millions of viewers who like this same show surely it must be correct? Or maybe it’s that thing about people getting told what they want to hear… I am not sure, and I doubt any answer is 100%, but the short and sweet of it is: none of it matters! They are appealing to who ever will consistently watch so they can sell ad space and get a paycheck. Whether or not they believe what they are pushing is not relevant, they are doing it for the money. No amount of good deeds, kindness, nor apparent appeal will ever change the fact that money is the core reason what they are doing is getting done.

I understand they make you believe what they are saying or you would probably stop watching them… who wants to watch bullshit degrade? So the fact that they are being watched just proves they are good at their job (job = doing something for money) if all they wanted was to help people, they wouldn’t have a multimillion dollar anything. Sister Theresa wanted to help people, was well known, and had NOTHING of physical monetary value. I can at least respect her, even though I wouldn’t conceive of doing what she did.

If you find yourself doing any one or more of the following:
1. defending a host
2. getting offended at the possibility that I am talking to you
3. considering hunting me down and vandalizing me, or my property

Get help. This is a rant; my view on a general issue I see in the world as a whole. You are not so special as to warrant an article from me all by yourself. It’s not my fault if you fit in this or any other group I criticize. That translates to if you are sending me hate mail grow a nut and post it to the comments instead… I delete hate mail, as it resembles (in quantity and quality) Spam.

Closing thought; TV is TV! Even reality shows aren’t real, they are sit-coms where people are manipulated, instead of scripted, into issues to drive up ratings. Watching it for a laugh and believing it are two different things.

It’s Meat… In A Can!

2006-03-02T08:26:00.000-08:00

Like everyone else with an email address I receive an abundance of spam emails. Generally I delete them; sometimes I read them for a laugh. Seriously, who orders the “make your penis larger” pills? I tend to read the chain letter types that friends send, again mostly for a laugh. I hope none of my friends think I may alter my perception of something because I got an email with 14,000 forwards associated to it. But I digress; I want to talk about some of the chain-mail emails I have received lately because some of them are just so stupid I can’t help but comment on them. So, reserve the delete key for a few minutes and read on.

So I got this one chain-letter from a friend the other day; my friend stated in the title that it was intended as inspiration for my article. So I am going to use that specific email as an example, because honestly it’s a great example of what I am talking about. Here is an excerpt from the email:

You as a Christian can help!

We are praying for at least 1 million signatures. This would defeat their effort and show that there are many Christians alive, well and concerned about our country. As Christians we must unite on this. Please don't take this lightly.

We ignored this lady once and lost prayer in our school and in offices across the nation.

Please stand up for your religious freedom and let your voice be heard. Together we can make a difference in our country while creating a way for the lost to know the Lord.

Please press "forward", and forward this to everyone that you think should read this. Now, please sign your name at the bottom (you can only add your name after you have pressed the "Forward").

Prior to the “You as a Christian” thing they talk about how some group has worked hard and succeeded in removing prayer from schools and some other crap. The other crap isn’t true however. But I think that’s beside the point for their particular target audience. The target audience being those well meaning paving the road to hell types (for those that aren’t familiar with the phrase it goes: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”)

As you know from reading some of my previous articles I am not a Christian. But that aside how foolish does someone have to be to think that praying will inspire signatures to appear on a document they aren’t handing out in hard copy? Are these people so blatantly ignorant of the laws they are trying to use here that they don’t know that someone typing their name does not qualify as a signature, nor is a collection of names in this manor legally representative of a signed petition? Well apparently they are that ignorant because they also did not include a place to send it back to, and they set it up so your signature can’t be placed until after you forward the email on. This last part insures that any signatures received will not make it onto the form that is being handed around. But hey they mentioned the Lord, Prayer and Christianity, shit we better all sign up so we can get our virgins. Oh wait a minute… that’s a different god.

I am going to write up an all encompassing general statement to start slapping into chain letters. You know, some long winded version of “How stupid do you have to be to buy this crap” that I can slip into the “save the world from starvation” letters and hit “Reply To All”. I know it’s just adding to the problem but if I attach it to enough of them and send them around they are bound to make their way back to the originators eventually right? Maybe even alter or black out enough of the original that it will still be identifiable but completely pointless to read. Yeah … that might be fun.

Closing thought:
I don’t really have a closing thought that would be considered at all original on this one, but just for the sake of personal well being; find out everything and think objectively about it before you consider joining the herd.

If you get a kick out of reading some of those dumb ass emails like I do … keep your eye out for my amended versions… you may get a kick out of it as well.

Kids Today...

2006-03-01T08:41:00.000-08:00

I was reading a blog this morning (FATTY’s blog is linked on the right) that touched on some things that I have been thinking about ranting on for the last couple weeks. After reading her article it got me to thinking about it a bit more seriously, translates to with “rant in mind”. So today I am going to attempt to get into kids and the way adults are forever trying to cushion their dive into life. Where the hell did I put my ruler??

I am getting slightly fed up with people telling me what kids can and can’t be expected to do; this is demeaning to both the adult(s) and the kid(s) in question. To say someone (yes even a child) is incapable of anything (besides unassisted flight) is to assume a degree of incompetence. I understand that the kid won’t be able to solve the space time riddles at age 4, but I bet if you explained the details to them over time they would come up with some answers eventually, right or wrong; some logical (based on the information they have) answers. A 4 year old is more capable of seeing AND stating the truth than most (99%) of the adults I have encountered, to me that says something very important about a child’s ability. Attempting to identify a childs level of ability seems related to peoples want to ease their growing pains, or possibly to make themselves feel superior. To attempt to make yourself feel superior this way is self defeating. To attempt to ease the pains of life for a child is to handicap them to the point of incompetence as an adult.

The first and my favorite example is Competition; there are adults that will tell you that the whole of the class, group, whatever, needs to be slowed down or not rated so as not to effect the self image of the weaker, slower, dumber kids. That is fucking retarded. Let me translate that for you. What that is saying is: Make everyone dumber, slower, weaker, so little Johnny will feel equal to the other more capable kids. Let’s make our future, our hopes and dreams worse since we can’t improve those that are not capable, so those that suck can feel ok about sucking. Some specific examples of this are Dodgeball – there are groups trying to wipe it out, Grades – some groups are trying to eliminate grading in school. There are others but those should get the idea across.

Another example is general trial and error; if a kid is attempting to figure out a way to get to something they want, an adult will usually come along and get the item for them. This is also retarded. I don’t mean that you can’t help kids, what I do mean is let them try and work it out, hell give them a couple options if they get stumped. But just doing it for them outright only teaches them if they wait a few minutes someone will do it for them. Do you want your IV attendant having that mentality? How about your oxygen tech or the person that has to empty your bedpan? yeah that puts a new light on it doesn’t it.

I hear “these kids today” from time to time referring to teenagers and young adults, and usually is a remark about their inability to work something out or make something happen or be in some way competent in their task. Well seniors you did it to yourself, your shortsighted concerns crippled your lineage, good job. Without difficulty and obstacles there is no character. To say something like that (these kids…) is to comment on the job you and your generation has done with regard to the generation that is to fill your position when you are gone.

I want to clarify a few things before I close this out; I do not believe that anyone can rest on the “well I wasn’t taught better” concept. After 18 it’s all you, regardless of how you were raised you have the choice to make it better or to do it different. All I am saying here is someone can’t comment on the outcome they helped produce. Take responsibility for your actions but don’t let someone use your responsibility as their crutch.

Closing thought; the world needs ditch diggers too. If someone isn’t able to be a rocket scientist, don’t hold back the ones that are. There is no shame in being what you are, do the best you can and make your way with what you have. Eliminating the non-suck doesn’t make the suck factor go away… it just makes it more prevalent.

Fence Theft

2006-02-28T06:30:00.000-08:00

So my opinion offends you? Gee, I am sorry to hear that. What is it with people? Are they really so insecure that someone else can’t have an opinion without it being a personal affront to the core of their belief system and/or being? To me that is a personal issue and to think I care, whether my personal opinion offends or not, is to be wrong. So here comes one of the more offensive directed commentaries I have done (in a couple days anyway).

Insecurity must be a real bitch to deal with, I wouldn’t know from personal experience but it seems that way to me. It appears to me that people have become so soft that they can’t stand up to criticism, commentary or plain old relevant conversation. Conversation being the key word really, as it means to communicate relevant, but not necessarily the same, ideas about a particular topic. In recent months it has become apparent to me that people don’t want to have conversation, what they want is to be accepted and told “Golly, your so smart, wish I could be like you.” Now I know that is going to come under heavy fire as people stand up and say “Not ME!” Grats, I am sure you aren’t like anyone else I am sure you are easy to talk with and capable of inserting your opinion without regard for someone’s personal issues. Good job, that would explain why you keep coming back to read this article; we communicate in relevant, but not the same, ways. Those who actually are the “Not ME!”s, can probably think of at least 40 people they have talked to in the last month that fit the description of what I am talking about. More importantly they do not feel that urge to stand up and say so. And those that aren’t well if you are reading this maybe you are trying. Kudos.

It seems to me that people who can’t handle criticism or commentary should probably concern themselves less with others opinions and more with fixing what ever it is they are so insecure about. Molested as a child? Get a pshrynk. Mom dint love you? Get a pshrynk. Mom and Dad were first cousins? Get a bullet. Whatever it is, get over it deal with it then come to me and tell me what an asshole I am for my views, but try and refrain from being offended by the opinions of others. It’s theirs they are allowed to have it; to think otherwise is to make yourself wrong for having one as well, moron.

Some people seem to think that having an opinion is a right, it’s not… having an opinion is a reality, everyone has one. Opinions can’t be taken away; they can be muffled but not eliminated. Voicing an opinion, however, is a right, and in some countries that right isn’t present. You want people to nod and smile and keep their opinions to themselves? Move to one of those countries. Around here people can say theirs as much as you can say yours, and you don’t have to like it any more than them, but don’t bother trying to stop it. You should not be afraid of any ones opinion of you, someones opinion will not change your ability nor will it change the truth. Perhaps people should develop a better understanding of their actual self, and worry less about anyone elses opinion of them.

Closing thought; Don’t like it? Don’t listen to it. Have a different perspective? Speak up. The goal is rarely to change someone’s mind, in my experience the goal is generally to be heard and to potentially find similar minded people you can converse with more often. Perhaps I am just weird… yeah that’s probably it.

Step Out Please...

2006-02-27T07:20:00.000-08:00

TABC = Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. Just thought I would translate that before I get started, since I am sure not all the readers are from Texas and wouldn’t know what TABC is. They are the liquor cops, and they are trying to justify their income same as anyone else. So now that I have that out of the way let’s pour a round and discuss.

So my preferred neighborhood establishment (the bar) was raided earlier this month by TABC. This isn’t a really big deal in and of itself, but the way the officers went about it is completely screwed up and illegal. Let me set the scene for you; you have an establishment that according to the fire marshal can be occupied by about 85 people, and generally only has about 20 people in it. At this establishment, being a local place, you have a number of regulars (15 of the usual 20). Not one of those places that are real high on the TABCs “Let’s raid it and get in the newspaper” list. But they did and they got in the newspaper, but not in a good way for them.

TABC along with a number of local police walked into the bar and began to request that the patrons step outside, of course being police types people did (dumb in my opinion) get up and move out to the front of the bar, where they were promptly tested and arrested for public intoxication. This, for those that are not familiar, is known as entrapment and is quite illegal in this country. Being in a bar people are, of course, drinking alcohol as is the purpose of being a licensed alcohol serving establishment. What the hell is going on that even in our over taxed, tired, trying to relax moments (not bothering anyone), there is some organization coming in to just completely fuck up your day? I mean I understand there is a purpose to TABC; they enforce things like “Don’t sell to minors”, but arresting a group of consenting hard working adults on a Friday for no particular reason except to justify income just seems wrong.

Well anyway it got in the paper; the city, county and State had to drop the charges “based on poor translation of intent” or some such shit. Basically they screwed up and can’t say it out loud. Grow a nut guys, say “I fucked up” and do better next time or get fired, whatever, as long as you are accountable for your actions instead of dodging the truth. Must be tough being a coward.

I don’t know… I don’t have much to say today, been a bad weekend (no I was not in the bar when that happened). As a closing thought, how about; Do your job and it will justify your income by its nature, you won’t have to generate an issue. If it doesn't then get a new job.

Everybody is Doin' It!

2006-02-24T06:56:00.000-08:00

I was thinking this morning about stupid people, I seem to waste a lot of my time giving stupid people consideration, and thought “you know… we are all just one group event away from being stupid.” And of course that bothered me. I don’t think I am stupid (but then again who does?) however I know I do stupid things from time to time. Back to point though, what is it about being around 5 or more people that seems to make stupid things seem like a good idea? I’m not sure yet but let’s rally the mob and see.

Tommy would never think burning down a school or the local liquor store was a good idea, until 4000 of his closest friends got together and rampaged the town. Something in Tommy said “Dude this would be sooo cool!” Why, you ask? Perhaps it’s Tommy deep seeded need to be accepted in a group of strangers. Or perhaps Tommy has some serious underlying issue with the buildings in his neighborhood. Perhaps the architect molested Tommy as a child… I don’t know but what is worse is I bet Tommy doesn’t know either. It has been reasoned that being in a group gives a sense of anonymity to a persons actions and we all know how that can be in a batch of the lowest common denominator. Is there something within us all that gets inflated by being around a large group of people doing stupid things? I think so; I believe that people tend to get a little ahead of themselves when acting spontaneously and doing things that appear to fuel the drive of a large group of people. Perhaps it gives them a momentary feeling of Alpha Position, like a rush of adrenaline but better.

I can think of a few examples in my lifetime that have displayed instances of pure mass stupidity, The LA riots where the entirety of south Los Angeles was set ablaze or vandalized to the point of non-recognition. In this case it was their own neighborhoods they were tearing up, later to be followed up with “someone come clean this up for us please.” More recently there were the French riots in Paris where college kids decided that burning schools and a few stores was a good idea. There have been riots in pretty much every country at some point or another in history so we can’t say “these darn kids today” or “those stupid Americans” it has to be something in the core of our being that allows this behavior. That to me is disconcerting.

I guess what I am getting at is don’t be sheep! When you have something to say, “Baaaah” shouldn’t be what people get from it. Individuality is an awesome thing and more people will tend to listen longer if you are saying something they don’t already know. Oh, and don’t burn schools.

Spare Time?

2006-02-23T07:46:00.000-08:00

And I thought I had too much time on my hands.....

I am hung over today, so this is as good as it's going to get till tomorrow. Have a good day, thank you please drive through.

The Ends...

2006-02-22T08:05:00.000-08:00

I was going to write about nothing at all today, but it got twisted and completely nonsensical, so instead I am going to write about something that isn’t literal but the general idea is real. Culling the fields, there are far too many stupid people in this world and they keep reproducing. So here is a Jonathan Swift sort of proposal/solution.

It has become abundantly clear that there are far too many Stupid people wandering around today, this is a problem that has been addressed with underfunded education, Government Aid, and occasionally a shot gun. To me these are not efficient solutions, the education system is a good idea but the money has to be there and well, we are too busy dropping LCD displays in cabinet member’s dashboards and building planes that will never fly to seriously take on the issues of public education funds. I have an idea that will help with both parts of that issue; For the price of the already existing school zone speed limit signs we could effectively weed out the stupid people before they become a reproducing burden on our society as a whole. If you haven’t guessed yet, I am talking about raising the speed limit in school zones to 75MPH (roughly 90Km/h). I know this sounds ridiculous but seriously what is the fastest way to spot stupidity? Make them cross a street. If someone isn’t smart enough to not step in front of a speeding vehicle, do we really want them to reproduce?

This concept has many benefits, and not just me getting to work sooner. One of them being the funding issues schools face, with fewer attendees you need fewer books, teachers, desks, and rooms, all of which cost money. With smarter average attendees you can teach higher level material, decreasing the time required to get to a 12th grade education level, because little Johnny is no longer present and slowing down the rest of the class with his complete inability to comprehend that 2+2 does in fact equal 4, and that yes, "Stupid" actually is spelled with a U. Imagine public schools that operated like private schools, what kind of Einsteins would we be producing on a yearly basis, can you even conceive of particulate physics by 7th grade? Going to college by 16? Being a productive member of society by 20?

I would wager to say that some of the side effects of this would include; no more bums begging for money at every traffic signal, no more need for Social Security and Medicaid (government funding for people that won’t work), a work force that knows you don’t stand at the apex of an eight foot ladder (no more workers comp). What a wonderful way it could be inside of 30 years. Another side effect would be lower property taxes, I mean who can’t get behind that idea? And how about lower population levels which would bring about lower gas prices, less traffic, more jobs, better pay, the list is quite long. Virtual Utopia and all for the low cost of some signs we already have locations for.

The Ends Justifies the Means! While we are at it lets talk about IQ testing for sterilization candidates…..

Closing thought;
Yes this is completely far fetched and outlandish, not to mention insane, but the reality remains we are supporting far too many stupid, incompetent, or just plain lazy people. I really think it’s time to review our placement of sympathy and compassion.

Dating Games

2006-02-21T06:31:00.000-08:00

I was having lunch at a fast food place with some friends from work, and I noticed one of the guys must be pretty damn picky; he had like 6 stickers on his burger wrapper:
Bacon
No Lettuce
Dry
No Onions
Extra Pickle
And something like, Spit on Me Please.

Then it occurred to me; wouldn’t dating be easier if people had labels that were this obvious?

You’re at your favorite meet and greet location (the bar) and some one walks up to say “Hey!” Right, now you have to sit and talk to them for about 20 minutes (an hour if you are drunk or slow… or both) to determine whether or not you want to have anything to do with this person and exactly how much you want to have to do with them. Imagine if they had fluorescent stickers across their forehead reading:
5 kids
5 x’s
No job
Over one billion served

You would know right away, “No I will not buy you a drink." " Yes that seat is taken." "Could you move? Your blocking my view.” Your dismissal of choice...

As you can tell I am single, which to me translates to “Happy”. Having been married and in a few other relationships with varying degrees of success (depends on the outcome you were looking for) I believe these labels could be used to alleviate the stress of the “getting to know you” period. Hell we could just skip the conversation all together and get to the good parts right? I mean it’s the conversation that always ends up being the issue generator anyway.

My labels would read:
Cynical
Sarcastic
Blunt
1 kid

Hmmm I don’t like this idea anymore…..

"Next I shall pull a bunny from your ass”
*quiet mumbling*
“Huh?!?”
*quiet mumbling*
“Oh.”

“From this hat… this hat… yeah…”

Closing thought; I don’t really know, this was half a thought when it started and became less and less of one as it went on…. So everyone is allowed a bad day right?

Judgement Day Cometh

2006-02-17T06:22:00.000-08:00

“Jesus Christ – who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death and rose bodily into the heavens – can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad? Rather, is there any doubt that he would be mad? The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?”

This is a quote from a book I am reading right now. ~Before you form your criticism of my reading habits I have also read 3 versions of the Christian book (you know the Bible) as well as the Muslim book (the Quran), the Tao, most (but not all – it’s pretty redundant) of the Dhammapada, as well as the “satanic bible” (don’t waste your time with this one, it’s an egomaniacs delusion). That’s just the relative to religion list. ~ This excerpt says something I have been trying to find a way to say correctly for a long time. More importantly it says it well; if religious acts were not performed by so many people they would be considered completely irrational. Which leads me to the rest of what I wanted to get off my chest.

People have developed sensible answers for most of the questions religion was formed to help alleviate. Amongst those questions are “why is the whole village suffering from a plague?” and “what manner of trickery has befallen my child to make him seem so similar to the milkman?” Now we know the plagues were carried by vermin and filthy habits, and your kid has the milkman’s eyes because your wife is a whore. The only question that has not been answered unequivocally is “what happens after we die?” everything else can be explained and I dare say a lot better than “God did it.”

But I digress let’s get back to “what happens after we die?” I think it’s safe to say we are asking about the consciousness that we believe ourselves to be, since we know the body decays and becomes worm/plant food. Well that seems to be the primary driving force behind religion today so let’s try both sides of this question; rational and religious.

Rational possibilities include:
- Nothing, you fall into oblivion, that same state you were/weren’t in prior to birth.
- The energy that makes up your being is converted and spreads into the ether (Einsteinian theories hint at this possibility)

Those are the only two rational outcomes I can think of so now for the religious possibilities.

Religious Possibilities include:
- Purgatory – awaiting the day of judgment (in the bible souls wait for a single all at once event that is known as Judgment Day, at which time all those dead and alive are judged and sorted into the next two possibilities)
- You wake up in Heaven (where everything is peachy)
- You wake up in Hell (where everything is not peachy)

I include purgatory as a term I am familiar with that the bible doesn’t actually name, but it does state that all souls alive and dead will be judged all at once on Judgment day (not days), although most Christians, Muslims, and Jews (all 3 books are based on the same story(s)) sort of avoid that particular part. I think it’s the lack of instant gratification but who knows.

Now with those lists in mind if you discount the self proving books and think rationally, you would most likely think anyone that believes the second list is living with false hopes. Where as if you discount rationality you would think anyone subscribing to the first list was living in either denial or depression. Now as a rational thinker myself (not necessarily right but at least rational) I tend to think “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true”. Not to mention the fantastical possibility of an all powerful eternal being formatted with human emotion and generalities having a place all set up for a bunch of underlings (relative to his greatness). In short I am curious; how much of what people believe about religion is because they were told it was true by other believers, and how many actually formed their own belief without the “push”? I could go on for a lot longer but have reached my page and a half mark (in Word) and should stop before it turns into a diatribe of tangents.

Closing thought; The moderate view of so many religious individuals indicates the trend of getting away from religion as a whole, already followers discount entire statements and fundamental practices prescribed by the book they claim has been written by an omniscient (because they know better?) being. It is only a matter of time till there will only be a rational list of possibilities. That is if the zealots don’t kill us all on the way.

Credit:
The quote is from “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris. If you have an interest in rational perspectives I recommend it. If you have no tolerance for “heresy” and/or are a member of the local book burning club, you may want to read it and burn it.

Alms... Alms for the Poor

2006-02-16T06:40:00.000-08:00

When did life become; Those who are able to take care of themselves need to take care of everyone who can’t while they are at it? How is it that some people can make their way and be ok but others who couldn’t seem to steer clear of the hazards in life expect… no, demand to be hand held? How did those that succeed begin to except that responsibility? I really, honestly, Scouts honor don’t understand how this became an acceptable practice. Let me explain (you had to know this was coming)….

Let’s set the stage…

Joe: A loser who can’t find his ass with both hands and could wind up in jail for stealing a stick of gum, because not only is he stupid enough to steal gum, but he is stupid enough to mouth off relentlessly until he winds up in jail over it. Wash Rinse Repeat under most circumstances.

Mark: Has managed to get through the stealing gum stage of his life relatively intact, and in fact has determined that not only was it smarter to say “I am sorry it won’t happen again” and deal with whatever came of it, but also determined it was more intelligent to actually use money to get gum.

Joe: has had 14 jobs over the last year and has to mooch a place to stay because McDonalds only pays enough to afford beer, and occasionally a pack of smokes.

Mark: Has managed to keep a job for 5 years, may one day get promoted to head lettuce cutter, thereby increasing his odds of upgrading his place of residence.

Ok now that you have a very simplistic version of the types of people Mark and Joe are let’s set up a situation.

Mark having grown up with Joe encountered the same problems to overcome as Joe, and while getting ahead managed to get things that Joe thinks Joe deserves. So Joe Bitches and Moans about how he has nothing and can’t believe the “Luck” Mark seems to enjoy. Joe starts saying “you know you have it so good and should help me out.”

Now here is where my confusion comes in:

Mark, being socially minded and a conscientious person, thinks to himself “you know Mark has had it hard, and I should help him.”

Where the hell did that come from?!? SHOULD??!? Why should Mark help Joe who has done nothing to help himself, and in fact consistently impedes his own progress? I could see it if Joe had done something to alter the habits that have gotten him to the point he is at now, but for the sake of this conversation Joe has not done, and has no intention of doing, anything any different. My question is why does it seem to be the moral obligation, of someone that has worked hard to do what needs to be done, to help someone that will just drag them down? In this case Mark and Joe apparently grew up in the same area, have had very similar issues confronting them through the course of their life, so Why!?!

For the sake of clarity:
I have had people help me in the past and still from time to time I get help from folks I know. However I always repay debts, and always respect the help I get by improving my methods, or altering the issue that got me in a position to need help. I am not boasting, it’s just the way I go about my business I try not to get in a bad spot, if I do I work to get out of it and make sure I don’t get into it again. I have helped folks out too, and I have to tell you it has been, 95% of the time, a major disappointment that I wind up looking like an asshole over. Sidebar; I aid, I do not carry, and when it appears to be turning to a carry situation I cut it off. To those that have helped me and are reading this; Thank you, I hope you feel I have done right by the assistance you have given me.

Closing thought; Help those that deserve help, not those that just need it. If you find yourself caught up in helping someone that does not deserve it cut them off and don’t feel bad about it. You did not put them in the position they are in.

A Good Start

2006-02-15T06:37:00.000-08:00

Woot! I feel better glad I took a break yesterday I feel ready to turn on the rant and go to town now. While I was outside talking to some friends some funny stuff came up and I want to share some of the comments we were shooting around, much to the chagrin of the bystanders. Don’t you hate it when you want to laugh but you know it’s just not socially acceptable to laugh at the topic? I love being me; I don’t worry too much about social acceptability.

So, Cheney shot a lawyer…. We should have more VPs just like him. I hear there is an uproar in the media about the White House not notifying the press of this incident and I think to myself “the obituaries need attention too” and “yeah they agree with me”. If I were Cheney I would have replied with “I didn’t tell you guys because it’s not time to campaign yet”. Do we have a medal for the actions of a Good Samaritan? We should, and he should get one. So this is a cold view of the situation, *shrug* I just don’t see the issue here. To take this a step further, and make myself look even more like a cold hearted bastard, he (the guy that got shot) was not that bright. I mean come on, really; if you are out with 6+ guys all carrying and shooting guns wouldn’t you make sure you weren’t between them and whatever they are shooting at? As I understand it he was returning from retrieving a bird he apparently shot, now you have to realize that if the bird fell out that way obviously someone may be shooting in that same direction (he had apparently shot that direction right?), and it may, at least, be a good idea to announce your presence if you are in that general vicinity. “But hey we all make mistakes” you say? Well when guns and hunters are involved that is the result of a mistake like that… you get shot. I say “Good Job Cheney!” One less dumb-ass, and a lawyer to boot, to worry about, you can’t beat the 2 birds with one stone aspect of this.

What do you call 1000 lawyers at the bottom of a lake?

A good start.

But seriously… accidents happen and politicians are not infallible… what world are you living in that you can even conceive such a thing (politician=infallible?!?!)? People do stupid things and politicians… well I don’t have a very high opinion of politicians; they are near the bottom of my “people I want to associate with” list right above lawyers. Do I wish them or lawyers dead? No of course not. Do I mourn their personal tragedies? Nope.

Closing though; cut the man some slack, the court of public opinion is fickle, one minute we make a mistake the next we are ridiculing someone else’s error in judgment. I don’t like politicians and I can rant on their conscious efforts all day, but damn get just a little realistic, shit happens.

Forums - To Be or Not To Be

2006-02-14T07:46:00.000-08:00

Today I am not going to rant, but I wanted to take a minute to get some feedback, I know there aren’t a whole lot of readers, but the ones that have taken to the site so far have made some good points worthy of discussion, and to tell the truth it’s hard to keep up with the comments on back postings, so I was thinking about starting a forum since I really enjoy the alternate input from the readers of these rants.

To outline what I have in mind:
A forum that will allow replies but not topic creation except by me, these topics would all be titled after the rant they relate to, there by allowing easier discussion and counter ranting to be read by me and other potential commentators over time.

Each posting would have its relative Rant link as the first post for ease of reference.

I would of course post the backlog rants and comments with any additional statements I want to add for potential discussion on those rant topics.

The only bad thing I see about it is one more login step.

So for comments today I would like a yea or nay vote and any comments you may want to add to the thought. So I can figure out if it’s worth the time and effort to set up.

Thanks in advance. Sorry for the lack of a rant today. (my head really isn’t in it today).

Imposition

2006-02-13T06:41:00.000-08:00

Some people have a compulsive need to get involved in things that do not affect them directly, and only effects then indirectly because they get themselves involved. I don’t understand why someone would go around getting their panties in a knot over someone else’s personal habits or beliefs. So let’s take the wake up call. I really need to turn down the ringer on that phone…

I am sick of organizations telling people, “you are [insert negative connotation here] because you won’t support the fight for the green bellied jackamawhatsit.” You know what I don’t care if that whatever the hell it’s called stops breathing and reproducing as a species… something will slip into it’s place and thrive. It’s called evolution, oh wait my bad… god wasn’t omnipotent enough to generate a self sustaining ecology, well in that case if he wants it around so bad let him save it. Either way; leave the rest of us with a life alone. And how about the idiots making laws based on a 12 person, with a proclaimed 4000 person following, lobby (if it’s a Florida lobby… how many of those people are dead?). I mean really how is it that 4012 people get to “encourage” laws for the other 250 million of us? Screw those narrow minded simpletons. That’s right I do want to be able to smoke in My Car, that I paid for with My Money, and maintain with My Time. You know what else if someone wants to get laid so bad they are willing to pay for it… whose fucking business is that anyway? Or how about 2 men getting married (or 2 women for that matter) what fucking difference does that make to me or anyone but those 2? I mean really are they pitching a tent in your living room and getting it on all night in your house? Oh it’s against the tenants of your imaginary friend? Well shit, don’t marry someone of your own gender. Your children may take it as accepted? Don’t raise sheep! It’s not the fags’ problem what you believe. How about if I am dieing of some horribly painful disease and someone comes along and says hey, I can help you with that… you know what, I defy anyone to tell me I am wrong for wanting out of the pain. If you want to be in pain 24/7 for days or years on end… come on over, I have a hammer right here and will be happy to help you out with that goal. We have more compassion for a dog than each other.

Ok now that I got my Dennis Leary moment out of my system (maybe), lets be “rational”. So drugs are illegal and cost the entire country money (yep those are your dollars they are spending). I ask you why? I understand it destroys families, and lives. But it’s a self resolving problem. If someone is so messed up they need drugs to help them get through it great! Let them, and when they die of an overdose, or exposure because they couldn’t afford the rent and the crack habit, we won’t have to worry about their stupid ass anymore. Why do I want to give my money up so we can try and rehabilitate a junkie? If they can’t see that they are killing themselves and hurting those around them, then I really don’t think they need to be taking their fair share of the oxygen anyway, didn’t you hear the rain forests, where a lot of our oxygen comes from, are shrinking? Why do we care about someone that is so self-destructive and oblivious to their effect on the rest of us? That’s just foolish. You want a real solution to the problem? Take 100 dollars and test suspected fiends for drugs, if they test positive, have kids and/or a family, extradite the family and let the fiends kill themselves getting high. What do we do with the kids? Hand them over to an alternate (sober) family member with irrevocable guardianship, to some degree or another it was their issue to prevent/resolve at some point anyway, that is it started in their “House” (will make more sense in a couple paragraphs). Do we really want kids raised by someone that thinks taking drugs for entertainment is “Ok”? While I am at it, those of you that want to throw me in jail for disciplining my child; you can cough up the bail money when he grows up to be a freaking loser. Did I hit your kid? No. Then go blow. If I broke his arm, or burned him, or went on a rampage on his ass, I could see getting involved… but my spanking him with 1-3 swipes of my hand does not qualify as child abuse, mind your own fucking business and maybe attend to your own brat while your at it, the next time he kicks my shin and smiles I just might.

Get a life, I mean really there are plenty of things you could be doing with your time, take a class, take a drive, jump out of an airplane, without a parachute for all I care (don’t land on my house/car/son), SOMETHING, but let me live this little bit of a life I have. For those that believe in reincarnation; more power to you, perhaps you will get another chance to actually enjoy it. But for those of us who are pretty sure this is it; let us be. I don’t even care if I am laughed at for my actions, as long as I can partake in them. Stating your opinion and attempting to enforce it are two different things.

Closing thought; Get out of my pocket, clean your own house and let others take care of theirs. If they’re not kicking your door in let them be. If they are, it becomes your business; take care of your business. If you want to worship the pile of dog shit shaped like Spongebob Square Pants™ in the middle of your living room it’s your business don’t bother trying to get me to join in.

Side note: this is aimed at and for adults, anyone under 18 (21 in my opinion) is subject to the authority of their parents, and is considered part of the parents’ “House” or “Business”.

Square Peg Round Hole

2006-02-10T06:33:00.000-08:00

So the week is finally at an end, I have to say I hated doing the series, and I probably won’t do another planned series. It got far too serious for my liking (my own fault) and completely got away from what I had intended of this blog in general. So let’s get this chapter done and move on….

After a little bashing and a little attempted justification I thought I would take a stab at a meaningful (relative term) article today. Men and Women both are at fault to some degree or other for the miscommunication and difficulties of any relationship involving both parties. This is to say that it takes two to tango (have sex) otherwise you are just alone in a room doing something you hope no one sees. In the end all of the complaints people have about the opposite gender have gone from being something to say to your friends as conversation pieces (kind of like “you think that’s bad….”) to reasons for bailing out on a commitment. At least that’s the way it seems to me; just another example of the lazy attitudes of ours and our parents generation. There are as many divorces today as there are marriages and it’s accepted as ok, because we are just too inclined to find something easier instead of working on something present. This is not to say it’s never necessary, again it takes two to accomplish a working relationship. If one member won’t work on it then the other has to eventually give it up and find someone that will. Here is a hint: stop pointing the finger and start fixing you first, then try and fix the relationship. That goes for both parties. If after you have become content with who you are, where you are and the relationship still won’t work, then it’s time to find one that will.

If that paragraph makes you say “there he goes again, bashing [insert gender here]” or “oh so it’s all on me huh?” then you are missing the point and obviously have issues you need to work on, get a Therapist! I am not a doctor, I didn’t even go to college, I am wrong as often (probably more often) as I am right. Anything I write here is my opinion and whether you agree or disagree with what is being said I only hope it sparks thought and maybe even conversation, because to me that is the road to truth and functionality.

Closing thought; have a little tolerance and a lot of patience, things will go smoother and you will find you understand the situation better. If you have a question, ask it, if you have a perception state it, these are the foundations of communication.

com·mu·ni·ca·tion
Function: noun
1. a technique for expressing ideas effectively (as in speech).
2. a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior.

Slot B ... What the Deuce?!

2006-02-09T07:30:00.000-08:00

Ok as everyone saw yesterday, guys (in this case me) do stupid things, but I started something and I have a habit of finishing it, even when it goes bad. So, for my next trick I shall attempt to explain female patterns…. Uh, yeah.

Let’s see I think the most common point of interest in what has been said this week about women is they have a tendency to not be able to find the point in their own statements, so I want to give a few reasons why this could be. I personally believe it’s because women believe men don’t get what they are saying so they start to try and explain what it is they are trying to get across. Honestly I have seen some of the apparently dumbfounded looks on guys faces when listening to someone explain things, and I can’t blame women for taking it as a cue to explain with more detail. Where this seemingly good hearted effort seems to go a little astray is true of most people, women will quickly go to examples to try and make what they are saying clearer. The problem with examples is they tend to become the topic, and a tangent conversation is born. Guys being the focused (on sex) types of course lose track of what the real point was and decide that the analogy on how a flower needs sunlight and water to grow somehow translates to “buy flowers on my way home from work tomorrow” (to get sex). In reality this is the guys fault mostly because although he was aware of the original issue and knew what she was saying he could not seem to convey that during the original statement (tip to guys: look at her actual eyes when she speaks, it will help… oh and close your mouth unless you are speaking). All in all I don’t blame girls for going into tangents and losing track of the initial point, I do it from time to time when talking to slow people too.

Hmm I noticed through email and comments that the female readers (at least the outspoken ones) of this article seem to be more attuned to the fact that guys don’t listen than anything else I have said this week. So I am left to my own devices to find what they are covering for…you know chix are slick right? I am going to go with the compromise thing, you know the inability to realize what compromise really is. I blame parents for this, I really do. During a little girl’s development Daddies everywhere refer to them as “Princess” and will basically crumble to the upward stare of their daughter, “Of course, Princess, I will rob the bank to get you a pony…” I honestly don’t see where, during the formative years, a woman would have ever learned what compromise is. Kudos to those few I know are out there that do.

Closing thought; there is a reason why anyone does anything, if you pay attention it will become clear. Give a little to get a little (sex).

Tab A Squared

2006-02-08T08:09:00.000-08:00

Ok so we have torn both parties down to some basic issues. Now let’s provide reasons for why they do some of the things they do. I had originally intended to keep on criticizing but after a few emails and comments I believe it would be more in line with the series to go into the “Why” of things. Bear in mind I am a little biased, I will try and keep that bias aside for this article but I am sure it will slip in from time to time. So buckle your seatbelts, grab the dangling oxygen mask, and remember your seat doubles as a floatation device; we are about to nose dive.

So we know men do some seemingly irrational things, all the time thinking it’s what should be done. One thing I mentioned in the previous article was the workaholic issue. In men’s defense they do this for a number of reasons; one being that their personal worth, in their mind, is directly equivalent to what they are able to purchase. Now that seems really dumb but it’s a view that is encouraged by society on the whole, yes women encourage it too. How is this encouraged? Well I am glad you asked, look at how men are perceived, “hey nice car!” and “will you buy me a drink?” and “Dude let’s go to Vegas!” and my favorite “the difference between a man and a boy is the price of his toys.” Now tell me, does any of that allude to real character or personality? Anything there strike you as insightful or nurturing of anything besides purchase power? Another is that men have never been shown it is ok to have feelings, told maybe but not shown. When a man gets angry it’s not ok, because he is wrong, or is exaggerating the issue. When a man cries he is a sissy, and women that say “NO! It’s ok to cry” are lying to yourself and us. At first you get that nurturing thing going on, but later something deep down changes in a negative way about your perception of that man. ~ damn, you know I have some kind of issue with this, I can’t think of a single sarcastic thing to say here, Bad author… bad!~ Crap here is that stupid bias thing; I digress because I agree men shouldn’t cry they should solve. But to the point; should men cave to the social expectation? Hell no! Grow a nut man, look them in the eyes and ask yourself do you really give a shit what they think? Live to be happy and keep your family happy. Oh, and don’t forget to pay the bills.

So next up, men don’t listen (by request); Men don’t listen in some instances because whatever is being said has either been said a thousand times and when he responded or acted in accordance to the previous discussion nothing changed, and no appreciation was found. And behold the birth of the nod and smile, also known as screen saver face. Other times discussion appears to have no point in sight and once the point comes to light he forgot to start listening again or didn’t notice it as it was camouflaged in all the excess tangents and meaningless crap. Women also do this when discussing things with other women, I have video footage. Now, this is not attempting to say that some men are not a lost cause and don’t freaking care what is being said, nor if there is a point. But on the whole those are probably the two most consistent reasons men don’t listen. If that doesn’t seem accurate, next time you talk to a man about something important to you; listen to what you are saying and how you are going about saying it.

Lets see what other stupid shit gets pulled by guys, well whatever it is I bet it can be related back to sex, a guy in America has to compete for sex, and I don’t mean he has to look cuter than the guy next to him (although it helps). A guy has to have wittier repartee a seemingly healthier bank account and a … you know I don’t know what else he has to have maybe that’s why I am single. And these things are what developed pick up lines. Men have found they don’t have to be honest to get laid… just convincing. If he can tell a girl what she wants to hear and convince her it may be true, he will get laid. It’s that simple. A guy will do just about anything long enough to get laid. And it works or they would find another way. Generally speaking men on the whole are no more intelligent or stupid than women, contrary to popular belief, they are just a bit more focused (on sex).

Closing though; It’s stupid of me to try and justify actions of any group, I should stick to criticizing, I am better at it. People are people male, female, cross-dressers…..all still people we all have wants and will conform to the requirements to get what we want. When that doesn’t work we ignore them and find ways to get it. By the way in regards to men the “IT” is sex. It may not be right that minute but it’s the overall goal.

Slot B

2006-02-07T06:44:00.000-08:00

So now that the Man Bashing has begun I want to give the other half something to snicker about before I tear them down again, today is the counter part to yesterday; Women, Females, Ladies, Grrrrlies, chix, well you know plenty of others I am sure. As with men I am going with the 80 20 rule here, that is it's true 80% of the time.

So ladies, you are pretty content with yourselves after yesterdays article I assume, you have the whole; “See that’s what I have been talking about all this time” going on right? No? That’s ok it leads me right to the first point I want to hit on about women’s short comings. Women want whatever it is they don’t have. Now before the Nay saying begins let me explain what I mean. Women say they want a man who is [insert list here], now what she doesn’t ever seem to realize is that, this man they are describing is the same guy they have just, or at least previously had, left behind cause he was [insert complaint here] which is always part of the package. A female generally doesn’t understand the concept of “Good with the bad” and can’t get passed her own wants long enough to realize what the word compromise really means. Here let me help… it does not mean; if he wants sex [insert situation here] will be handled this way. In short women rarely know what it is they really want. Dispute it all you want but look back and consider the choices you have made so far.

Compromise; when you have a problem you sit and you pout, and you complain about everything from “I feel trapped” to “why haven’t you mowed the yard yet?” All of which is rarely the issue at hand. By the way mind reading is not a guys thing, if you want him to understand what the problem is sit down, turn off the TV (that part is crucial), and tell him flat out minus the “but” and the “if”. Just say it like it is, if you hurt his feelings tell him to suck it up and work with you on fixing it. I hate to break it to you but guys feel trapped all the time with or without a partner, we have to work, we have to maintain, and we have to carry on. Just because there are things that have to be done it does not constitute an escape plan. I realize Daddy let that stuff happen but Daddy isn’t here, it is a partnership. Speak up spit it out, if he doesn’t attempt to work things out in a decent manor, then you should consider finding someone else. Bitching about it isn’t fixing it.

Self importance; this drives me nuts and although I wonder if most guys can put their finger on it I bet it drives all men nuts too. Yes whatever it is you are doing is important, let’s use the house wife example (classic is best to start with); Keeping the house and raising the kids and all that comes with that is extremely important. But you know, having a house to keep and food to give those kids is equally important, you say that being the house wife is a 24 hour a day job, yes it is, but if a man has a 24 hour a day job you would leave him because he wouldn’t be home to appreciate all that you do or to see those lovely children. So when he comes home, bitching about having to keep going isn’t really the way to make him want to come home. Sure tell him how the day went, how much it sucks to have to always be doing things (Oprah hour is not mandatory by the way), but it’s not exactly all his fault, just like it’s not your fault his boss is an asshole, so don’t act like it is. I don’t know about every man but I know I get tired of hearing how tough it is to keep that Huge Expensive house in order. Get a smaller house if you are so inclined. Since I know you are thinking “you don’t understand you never had to …” whatever, I am a single father, I work and I take care of my son and house. And this is because she altered her decision to do the family thing after the fact, not my doing. So really think before you tear your other half down for being tired after work. Things could be worse. For you working women, welcome to hell, it only gets more complicated from there, cause guess what the kids are being raised by Day Care and (in most cases) Public School. Yeah it was a brilliant trade you made, screw the kids everyone else is doing it, they will be fine. Has anyone noticed the rise in prison populations, I primarily blame mothers for this although not entirely. Face it you don’t want a man to stay home and take care of the house and kids (if you do, email me I would be happy to chill long enough for you to change your mind), he is classified by you and your friends (male and female) as a freeloader, double standard anyone?.

Ok that got longer than I meant to let it get… I bet it doesn’t make a lot of sense either, it’s ok I will proof it later and try to work it out as well as I can without changing the meaning of it. What’s worse I didn’t get to a lot of what I intended… but I think it will be a good start till part two on Thursday, tomorrow is Men part 2.

Closing thought; The article wanders a bit, but I kept it because reading it is like talking to a woman (80 20 rule). Back to the closing thought; Figure out what you want before you settle on something that seems Fun, Cool, Special, amazing, etc. etc. etc. It is rarely that same adjective a year or two later particularly if kids become part of the picture. Not everything has to happen instantly.

Tab A

2006-02-06T06:48:00.000-08:00

This week I wanted to do a series of articles with a culmination of the spewage on Friday. And you know what? It’s my article so that’s exactly what is going to happen. The series will be on everyones favorite subject: Sex. Not that kind you pervert I am referring to gender. You know; Male, Female, Boy, Girl, TabA and SlotB? Anyway if you don’t get it yet you will by the end of the week, I hope, or you may end up a topic in this column one day.

Let us begin; I want to start off with men, I am feeling hypocritical today so this one is for the ladies, and men that can laugh at themselves. Last week I received a joke email that made me laugh out loud, literally. Some guy bought his wife a Tazer™ and after some inspection concluded, “How bad can it be?” after all it was only 5” long and operated by a couple AAA batteries. Yes, that’s right folks the fact that it is designed to knock a charging bull on its ass didn’t occur to this guy until after he tested it on himself, needless to say it’s an error a guy would only make once unless he develops a major twitch and didn’t put it down fast enough. But the point is a Guy will try this and feel perfectly rational all the way up to the point where he places it to his bare flesh and pushes the little button. As stupid as it sounds I bet 90% of men would at least seriously consider doing the same thing, the whole time thinking, “I am tough I can take it.” Yes we are stupid creatures.

Men will go to work, occasionally pick up second jobs to maintain a lifestyle he believes will impress his significant other, and in a lot of cases to impress other potential significant others. The whole time not understanding why his girlie is sleeping with the pool boy… it’s because he is available Stupid! If you aren’t there to appeal to the companionship part of a relationship all you are providing is money, and let me tell you; females will happily spend it for you. Sometimes with a vengeance (we will get into why this part is messed up when I get to females). All in all though, it serves us right for relating our personal value directly to our bank account, and BMW. You reap what you sew. The worst part of this aspect of men is that they really won’t understand why she left and took half of his stuff with them… the stuff is all they knew of you, fool! So now you are out a lot of money, a lot of stuff, and thanking Rosie Palm for not leaving you too. Grats.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I know to attract a partner you have to appeal to them, and most of the time it seems they are attracted to kewl stuff, well yeah aren’t we all? But let me tell you if a girl goes home with you because you have a nice car, take her home… hit that … then tell her to leave, oh and did I mention wrap that rascal? Yeah she may give you something that a brillopad won’t scrub off. Otherwise the above paragraph is where you will land I promise. Not that I think you will take that advice but I would feel really bad if I withheld it. Much like Directions, men won’t take advice from a stranger. Which leads nicely to the next point of ridicule, Stereo typing. Men are labeled this way because it’s true 80% of the time and why is it true 80% of the time? Because, guys don’t learn until they do it themselves… usually more than once. Ever seen that guy with only 3 fingers on his left hand? Yeah he couldn’t believe there wasn’t a way to stop that Skilsaw™ blade with his bare hand, even after the first attempt. If we are driving down the road and can’t seem to find the place we are looking for by turning left on the particular street, we won’t look to the other side of the road nor take the right turn instead, until we have driven down the same street 2 or 3 times. Oh, and asking someone? COMPLETELY out of the question, it’s a cliché for good reason, because it’s true 8 out of 10 times (the other 2 times he found it the first try).

A lot of guys will stop reading this, which brings me to another target. We don’t like to be told we are 1.Wrong 2.Stupid 3.lost 4.Less than Well Endowed (you guys know what I mean). However we can say any of those things about ourselves in drunken moments of truth. In our defense pretty much anything else is fair game though. These are all very deep seated insecurity issues men have, at least 80% of us and most likely 99.9% of us. The .01% being monks and what’s-his-name Bobbit, after his experience, I don’t blame him for not caring what anyone says. Telling a guy he is wrong or stupid is like telling a dog not to pee on the floor; they look at you with that “what the hell are you babbling about?” look on their face and then go about their day when you are done. And, Lost? Well that just makes a guy suddenly get real irritable, swearing he has been there before and/or knows what he is doing. And, last but most important; Endowment… Do Not Ever comment on his lower region girth unless it is to say anything from “it’s just right” to “damn that’s huge”, lest you will have a weeping child for days. And no one likes a crying man… not even those that can relate.

Closing thought;
Come on guys we are making all of us look bad, suck it up… work it out and get over the insecurity. Just tell her “We can’t afford it right now”, “I’m wrong as often as anyone else”, and “honey, could you ask this person how to get to the bake sale?” Go ahead and keep the “It’s not small, it’s underappreciated” though, cause I plan to.

Can I Get a Coherent Thought?

2006-02-03T06:56:00.000-08:00

Well today was supposed to be about stupid people but to be honest I am just too tired. So I am going to do a lazy post instead. Hmmm how about … umm well how about customers since I already covered companies earlier this week and it’s not far from the original intended target….

Customers, now here is a topic I have wanted to do since I was doing phone support for a now defunct company (no it wasn’t my fault, or at least my bank account wasn’t padded with the “lost” funds) too bad I am tired and probably won’t do it justice. Let’s find out shall we?

Customers hunt for the lowest possible price on anything, and then when they buy that cheap ass, made in Idun Givashet (located just outside of any orphanage in any given 3rd world country), piece of equipment they can’t understand why it doesn’t have that cool, bad ass, Joe’s next door will do it, feature. Upon discovery of this missing feature, the customer immediately calls the company support line and begins to rail on the representative (whom, if you read the T-n-A article you know, had nothing to do with it) until there is an “Upgrade” or some other apparent benefit (like 2 more months of warranty woo hoo!) offered to appease the now ego inflated self important individual that couldn’t see passed that extra 10 bucks to purchase the feature they were certain this item should have had. Yeah I know genius how they get what they wanted through yelling and fits instead of money huh? I see the wisdom in these maneuvers really I do, but I have better things to do, 6 hours a day for up to 2 months, than save 10 bucks. Yep you guessed it … things like playing Freecell and Spider Solitaire, or setting my head on fire.

A-end thayit’s all I have to-oo say ah-bout thayit. I think I will go lye da-own na-ow. (say it out loud.. you’ll get it) I am tired and just can’t do better than this today… try and find the humor and get over the fact that we (yes I have money and buy stuff too…) are all customers.

Thought for the day…
Don’t try creative writing (yep, also translates to “Rant”) on 2 hours of sleep. More specifically; sleep more drink less.

Finding Bliss...

2006-02-02T06:38:00.000-08:00

They say ignorance is bliss, and I am inclined to believe that, as long as you are ignorant to the point of not even knowing there is an alternative. Religion strikes me this same way. I have been told I am wrong but my, deep down in my tiny little heart, personal belief is religions popularity is generated by making people believe that there is more to life after life has ended… you know the after life… no real death. That there is “someone” that cares no matter what kind of jackass you are, and that we are not all just victims of circumstance, it’s all part of some grand plan that “I” am an important part of. Who doesn’t want to be important? Religion appeals to peoples wants kind of like nicotine appeals to a smoker. I can’t buy it though, and I attribute a lot of my cynicism to that. So today I thought I would grind the religion nerve for a little bit. Keep in mind the title of this ‘blog.

So let’s break it all down; what brings about religion? Earlier religions were based around ignorance, “Oh No! The mountain is spewing fire and really hot rocks at us… what do we do???” Instead of telling people to run like hell or at least dodge the hot rocks, responses resembling, “We must have pissed someone with power off!” and “Huddle in groups and apologize to various names until it stops!” where very logical conclusions… and hey if they were far enough away from the volcano, and apologized long enough it would stop while they were still alive. So of course it must have been heard and effective right? And so deities were “Born”. Now after several millennia of various names being prayed to, someone decided he really wanted that kick ass flint tipped spear that Jim Bob made the other day, and said “Hey that’s a nice spear…you know, *insert deity of the period here* talks to me and said you should give me that spear or else.” And so the Priest profession was born. This seems silly or misguided to you? Heard of tithing? Not at all the same you say? Mm hmm…

So now that we understand how it all got started, even though those are not actual events I bet they are “based on actual events”, let’s see where it took us. After a really long time of keeping up with 14 (random number) of their own deities and 200 of the other surrounding cultures deities, someone sat down and said “Shit! This is confusing, I wonder if we can accomplish the same thing with only one Supreme Fear… err entity?” Monotheism was born. And after a long struggle (ie killing any encountered non-believers) a following took root and grew. Ok now that we have over simplified the ignorance of man let’s get on with the Article (yep you guessed it, that’s pronounced Rant also).

The first thing I have to ask is, if you give it some honest thought how much of your religious belief is actually yours? What I mean by that is we are raised to believe things, Mommy and Daddy love us, the world is a sphere (happens to be true), and god is watching. How much of god do you believe because you objectively looked into it as opposed to it being what you were always told was true? I mean how much would it suck if mommy and daddy didn’t love you? Yeah it would suck a lot?

With that in mind let me pose a thought I am sure you have heard before, and if you know me I know you have heard before; Religion is the opiate of the masses. By opiate I don’t mean zombification (I know it’s not a word but you get the idea) I mean control. Religions have been used for as long as there have been religions to keep people from doing stupid anti-productive things like sleeping with the neighbors spouse, and shooting the neighbor for sleeping with your spouse, and all that other stuff people aren’t supposed to do for the sake of successful propagation of the species. To me to think otherwise is a fool’s errand. But hey I am sure it’s nice to believe (I mean really believe) that when you die there will be more. Truth hurts, which by the way makes me think there is no god even more, because it sucks to believe only oblivion awaits us.

Wow that sure was close… I almost went very tangent again *sigh*. So anyway, religion tells us what we want to hear “I am special” someone with infinite knowledge loves me and likes me and wants me. Well isn’t that just peachy. Why would an entity with all that going for him/her/it waste time on a bunch of clumsy self serving creatures such as us? Lets move on to some more religious reference for consideration; so we have an entity that knows all, can be anywhere, is everywhere, but still has some unfulfilled need to be worshiped? That is about as human a trait as I have ever heard, and is completely contrary to the definition of benevolent. How can you say god is not human, is omnipotent then try to apply human traits and ego to him/her/it? You can’t… at least not and survive any close inspection. While I am on the point of omnipotent, why would an omnipotent being have a book of its rules inserted to the masses then allow it to be altered to the point of non-recognition? I mean look at the King James Bible, the Catholic Bible (by the way although Catholicism is the largest Christian denomination, it is not following the original text either, don’t believe me? Look it up… “origins of Catholicism”), the book of Mormons, Jehovah’s witness (can’t remember what it is called), etc. etc. etc… aside from orthodox Jews, pick a group and look into the origin. Then for a real kick in the ass try and see why it was altered, adjusted, “Fixed”, “Improved”, as though we can improve on omnipotence. This particular quest does require objectivity, good luck. Hopefully it will re-affirm what works for you, it didn’t for me.

I don’t want to pick on any one organized religion so I am going to stop here before I get into my preferred rant on Christianity specifically. All of what I have said so far with only one exception (see if you can find it :p) relates to most modern religions worshipping a single entity as the supreme being, bearing in mind that the word god is not just a proper noun.

Closing thought:
You know every culture has believed in a god or gods with the same heartfelt “it’s true whether you believe in it or not”, and still we being the superior “we know better than you” types have come along and forcibly altered their perception to suit our personal comfort zone. Meanwhile the whole time telling people not to ridicule or doubt our beliefs… cause… well we have guns and a Flag! How is it our (in this case I mean European decent races) imaginary friend is more real than theirs? I mean really we have just as much proof as they (non-European decent races) did, less actually… A book is not proof, if it were then where is my Ray Gun™, and my Space Ship, and Dragons I want Dragons damn it!

When in Rome...

2006-02-01T08:02:00.000-08:00

That is to say; we are going the way of Rome. Rome was burning we are decaying from the inside out, and from the public reaction to a statement like that it’s like having scars but no mirror, we know something is wrong but we can’t tell anyone what it looks like. So today I want to try and tell everyone what it looks like, I will probably fail miserably but at least the effort is there. The road to hell and all that, so slap that mule and let’s get to the embers.

I look around these days and realize so many of the people I see, not necessarily know but encounter none the less, strike me as living in a whole other world. A world of oblivious selfishness, as long as they have what they want (not need but want) then the world must be doing fine. We as a nation have become insanely decadent we think that if we want to do it, then it must be ok. If it’s defined somewhere as not ok, well we will re-translate it to suit our wants. I am not a religious person but my favorite example, because it is so glaringly obvious is; Gays trying to make being gay ok in the eyes of “god” (which ever god it is that individual chooses to want to hang with post-mortem). I saw in a magazine or on the news, or possibly even passing a church one day who knows, where some Gay folks were saying that God does not hate Gays, that he would forgive the lifestyle and accept it, and further more that the rest of the sheep of that religion should accept it as well. Well I can only agree with the last part… people should accept it, it is not their place to judge according to their own belief structure (you know, that book that proclaims whatever rules apply to which ever religion?). Well I hate to break this to you but (and I am not judging here I don’t care who’s ass you stick what into as long as you leave mine alone) there was at least one city ( I think 2 actually) in the Christian “history” that was annihilated, every man woman and child minus one I think, for the acts of homosexuality and other “sins”. I would have to say it’s a clear cut, no room for argument, statement in black and white that the Christian “God” does not appreciate the lifestyle. Let it go, if you want to live a gay lifestyle accept that Christianity will not be a part of it. This is far too much focus on Gays… someone might think I blame them for our national degradation, I don’t… that is I do NOT. Back to the point; Decadence is rampant gays are an example, but not even close to being alone. If you want some other examples… open your fucking eyes.

Capitalism is an awesome forward moving economic structure, notice the word economic? Yeah, as a government it sucks. The government should not be trying to see if it can win the “I have more money than you” race. It should be taxing for the money it requires to achieve the needed tasks that are its reason for existing. As a side note; income tax is stupid… you don’t tax a persons efforts you tax their luxuries, there is more to that but it’s a topic for another time.

Rights, we have grown so accustomed to having these rights that we as Americans assume they are “God” given and built into the nature and mechanics of everything around us, this is stupid. Rights are achieved through effort, not by being born. Do you have the right to an opinion? Yes I this country you do but not because you were born. You have rights because someone before you gave up something precious (usually a life, or limb, or sanity) so you can enjoy what they wanted. Appreciating that has become; buy a 2 dollar sticker, put it on your car bumper and then go on assuming moment to moment that it’s your right because you said so. Stupid. True appreciation is shown in actions from second to second, slipping is allowed but not when slipping is all you do.

America is decaying; do you smell the decay yet? I doubt it, if you finish reading this you will go back to watching Jerry Springer, Oprah, and the shopping network attempting to achieve your dream of owning that whole set of dust magnet porcelain figurines. What a eulogy that will be. not that mine will be better, heh.

Education, where do I begin? Let’s see public education is a joke, we don’t want to make the kids feel bad about being stupid so we slow down the intelligent kids (take your Ritalin brat.) to save the self esteem and to build confidence. Who the hell thought that was a good idea? Do you really want that kid that can’t add 3+2 to work with your Social Security Check when you are old and they are running the world? What? Didn’t think about that? Well as long as Johnny Dumbass feels ok about himself its okay. At least he will be able to say with Confidence and an air of superiority that 3+2 does in fact equal 12. If not for the taxes for education, we could probably afford private school. While I am on the tax aspect of this; what happened to all that money we give our local governments to pay for the books, teachers and schools maintenance? Administrators need to get paid too you say? Which is worth more to you (and your children), the Admin that sits around thinking up ways to enforce the blue blazer dress code or the computers that could be filling the class rooms? Yeah I thought so. But hell not our problem right… answer that after you land in a retirement home and your aide can’t figure out what a milligram is. Ok I have to stop on this part… I hope it’s enough to encourage some thought.

So where are we… oh yeah… politicians; Wait a sec… I need to stop laughing or I won’t be able to type. . . . Okay here we go. Politicians, how did we get so lazy we started putting whoever had the nicest smile in a position to decide what is best for the population? These are people who couldn’t tell you an honest personal opinion if you strapped them to a chair and performed electroshock therapy for a year (I don’t know about you but I would like to test that theory). What the hell is wrong with us? Are we so bored with these Rights that we will do anything to fuck them up? I know it’s not intentional but as much shit as we pull to screw ourselves I have to wonder; what is the intent? Is there any? Do we care?

Last time I was at an airport I stood behind some woman in line that felt completely inconvenienced by the whole security process because, you know, she dint have a bomb. Hell she made me want to have at least a gun, one less stupid person in the world right? We give a shit that someone blew up our buildings but we still don’t to wait in line at the airport security points…. It’s a package deal moron, either you can get on a plane that won’t be flown into the statue of liberty or you can get to the plane 10 minutes faster, but not both. Enjoy your flight.

We are so conceited but I guess with the feeling of having the right to be an asshole come the cluster of assholes. What can you do? Well I rant (you know.. this twisted myriad of rambling crap you just read). How about you?

Not much of a closing thought today:
Work it out. Get over yourself. All of this applies to me too. Round them up and shoot them. Beam me up Scotty there appears to be no intelligent life here…Scotty? Scotty? Crap.

T-n-A

2006-01-31T07:28:00.000-08:00

I had told all my friends yesterday that today’s entry would be about Truth in Advertising, that is to say it’s an oxymoron… there is almost no truth in advertising with the exception of the price, the name, and the fact the company really wants you to buy it. So on my way into the office this morning a friend tells me about a particular gas company’s profits last year. Holy Shit…I knew they were all full of shit about how the gas price had to go up due to supply and cost of production, but DAMN… they set a national all time record for a single company’s real dollar profits over one year. Look out Bill someone (besides me, apparently) wants your title for richest person in the US. That is almost not at all relevant to what I plan to write, but an interesting side note none the less.

So on to the commentary (that’s pronounced “Rant”). Let’s start with how a product is brought to be available for public consumption. A group of developers (for existing companies, not going into the Garage based Inventor today) get assigned, or come up with, an idea for a product and get to work putting together something they would want to take home to the spouse and rug rats and be able to smile and say “I made this!” So the labor of designing a well made, long lasting, 100% functional thing-a-ma-whacker begins. Months, sometimes years, later they have a product sometimes known as an Alpha Model (presumably “alpha” because they know it is far superior to anything that will spawn from its design, but publicly because it’s the first one) that is ready for “Improvement”. Side note: Improvement is a relative term, no really it is read on and see.

And now the Committee of “we don’t know jack about this thing” gets together and decides, after 6 months of pre-meeting meetings and two rounds of “business golf” sessions, to move it on to phase B (I don’t think that actually relates to Beta, but it may if only by coincidence). At which time they proceed to celebrate a job well done with a business lunch at the nearest “live entertainment” establishment (that’s strip club to you and me). And so enters the Marketing Group.

Now this is where it gets “Cool”, Marketing Gurus A-G come on the scene and ask, “how much will this cost to manufacture?” Of course this, even after 50 previous runs at this same process, never occurred to the development group who responds with something like “well it cost us 10 thousand to make this one.” For obvious reasons this is not an acceptable figure for a thing-a-ma-whacker. Marketing Gurus A-G roll up their sleeves (mostly to make it look like it’s hard work) and start to “Improve” the thing-a-ma-whacker, generally with a result of a theeng-a-ma-wakr, that is; it’s only about 60% functional and costs about 10% as much to manufacture. They then decide on a marketable price, force approval of production from the developers, and hand this proud achievement back over to the Committee of “we don’t know jack about this thing”, and they call it a day. The committee nods, smiles and decides to again celebrate on the company dollar, after of course sending the plans on to manufacturing as Phase C (could be C for complete.. but it’s not).

Manufacturing, what a concept that is… I will have to get into this all by itself one day. But back to the article at hand; Manufacturing takes the theeng-a-ma-wakr and determines it’s not completely feasible and gets approval for a few alterations for “Efficiency” purposes, resulting in a thag-a-ma-wkr. And so begins the production for public consumption.

Now after a brief stay in a warehouse, on a boat, in a truck, and on a shelf; this lovely piece of life altering, even makes your coffee in the morning, product now known as a Whatcha-ma-doodle (because when advertised it sounds better) lands in the customers hands for an unbelievably low price of $9,999.99. That’s right! Under 10 thousand dollars (plus tax).

Enter the company safety net, the one group in all this time that has had no say, no consideration, almost no funding, and whose job is about to be shipped to a foreign country without them; Support. Support gets the blame for all the problems that arise, and justifiably of course, because they never spoke up to let anyone know the theeng-a-ma-wakr wouldn’t work without a power cord. When the customer calls for help, Support is left with answers like “I am sorry.”, “I understand.”, and “That part is on back order until Christmas of 3010.”

Closing thought:
This is obviously riddled with sarcasm, exaggeration, and lacking in some important steps but I hope that anyone that bothered to read this far can determine the gist of what I am getting at, the reality is companies want your money just like we want consumables; they aren’t in it for charitable reasons any more than we are. They try to get you what you want at a price you and they can afford. Think before you buy and if it isn’t right take it back. Let the company know when you didn’t get what you feel you paid for the only way you really can, by getting what they want from you back from them.

Oh and just in case anyone missed how it was "improved"; in a company's view; cheaper to make means more profitability and therefore is improved.

Misnomers

2006-01-30T08:20:00.000-08:00

During a conversation about juries and popular reaction this morning something occurred to me that is fairly obvious and so prevalent that I had never noticed it at all; any time the word Racist is applied it is instantly assumed that the person or people being referred to is/are white/Caucasian. How is it that in order to be a bigot someone must be white?

The KKK is to blame I think, and the Aryan Nation, and to a larger degree Adolf Hitler. However in most ethnicities there are equivalent, although addressed by the media less often, “organizations”, I won’t get into those organizations as I believe they are equally as stupid and pointless as the previously mentioned “organizations”. So on to the point.

Even though it is out of the order that I began with I want to start with Hitler; here is a man (an insane man) that publicly criticized just about anyone that wasn’t German. Now Hitler was a racist in the extreme, he had a self loathing going on that I am sure there have been studies, but I don’t care enough about them to get into or even read. Although he felt anyone that wasn’t blonde haired, blue eyed 6 foot plus was less than perfect, he was indiscriminant in that statement. Yep that’s right it included whites as part of his less than perfect group. This is not to mention that Judaism is not a race but a religion, mostly populated by white people. We won’t even get into the part where a white dominated society along with pretty much everyone’s support, excluding Japan, hunted him and his followers (the German military and majority population) down at great cost. So he is one misnomer (and was a very confused individual in my opinion). So what I mean by all this rambling is that he is not what I would call a good example of white culture.

The KKK, oh boy… where should I start? Here is a bunch of white, insecure, idiotic sheep that couldn’t tie their own shoes without a guide (the grand dragon maybe?). Although I believe they should be able to state their opinion (it’s a right that comes with being American) I don’t think they should be assumed to be representative of the entire white race. This is possibly the single largest collective of idiots I have ever encountered. It saddens me that the other 90% of the white race is too timid to stand up and say “Shut Up! We don’t’ want to hear it” because although they are allowed to have their opinion the rest of us are allowed to have and state ours too. Mine happens to be (and I dare say a large majority of whites share this) Sit down, Shut up, and Get a Real Freaking Job. Anyhow I could sit and trash on the KKK all day but I won’t, I think you get the idea.

The Aryan Nation, this one is simple, and so are its members. It’s a defensive mechanism established in Prisons primarily. In the absolute worst community of any culture you will get the absolute worst outcomes. Prison is good for keeping these things away from the general public except that eventually those idiots get out and find other free roaming similar minded individuals and spread the stupidity. Memes work that way unfortunately. As a whole I consider the Aryan Nation in the same light as I consider the KKK. I will leave this as is because I like to think you get the idea here too.

Now on to the bigger picture; how is it that the word Racist has somehow become a white thing? Is the Hispanic that hates blacks and whites not racist? Or the Black that hates Asians? Or the Asian that hates *insert culture here*? Although I sound hypocritical in those statements I am not saying that all Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Indians, Whites, etc. hate any particular group, or anyone for that matter, just that there are individuals in those cultures (and others that I am not mentioning) that do have those particular feelings. Somehow their image is never rendered when the word racist is thrown around.

Racism~
Function: noun
1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination.

I don’t see anywhere in that definition a particular culture being mentioned as the sole bearer of the title.

Just for the sake of clarity I don’t foresee this issue ever changing. In all of our minds we have words like this that draw certain assumptions and those instances are not excluded from helping to define us all as at least a little racist and/or prejudiced. As long as we (yes all of us whites too) continue to reactively assume a racist to be white, or a crack dealer to be Black, or an immigrant to be Hispanic, there is a little racism in all of us.

Closing thought:
There are two kinds of people in the world; Assholes and Non-Assholes. Everything else about a person defines them as well, but I think that rounded out quality defines how much we choose to interact with that person. And I haven’t noticed a color (skin, eyes nor hair) qualifier to that particular personality trait.