Category Archives: Humor

That's not where you thought it was…

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Earlier this evening, after dinner, we went to see if Scotts newest find was still open. They closed at 9pm, so that was a little blah. As we were driving away I noticed that right next door was “Partners Ultra-Lounge” and I stopped the car and just gaped. I, for the past year or so thought erroneously that Partners was in =downtown Kalamazoo= not in PORTAGE! As I was gaping it hit me… This apparent “destination” that I now realize that I’ve never really known is part of a strip mall. A gay bar in a strip mall. I’ll just let that sink in.

I’m still quite a-gog about this. What a shock! Still have zero interest in exploring anything more about it, but surprised it was in Portage. Oh well… 🙂

Saying Goodbye to Facebook

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Yesterday, July 19th, 2011 I said my final goodbyes to Facebook and announced my transition over to Google+. I went on Facebook and let everyone who could still see my wall, know that I was leaving that service for good and conducting all my sharing over on Google+. For me it was a matter of who built the better mousetrap. The services provided by Google+ far outweigh the headaches that I’d have to wade through to match on Facebook and I like the cleanliness of Google+ and the lack of baggage that comes with running a service that was at one point built for high school and college age kids to socialize on.

When I made my goodbye status updates on Facebook one of my friends who usually doesn’t say much brought up a valid point. His issue with Google+ is their privacy policy, which he took exception to. The policy is composed of jargon and legalese such as “non-exclusionary rights granted by the … for the perpetual use and non-exclusive publishing rights of the …” and so on and so forth. I am not about to make people who read these policies feel less of themselves by denigrating this legalese as so much meaningless and incomprehensible bibble-babble, but I’m not about to let something like that interfere with the path of my life and the things I want to do. Aren’t I running afoul of a policy that strips me of my rights for what I share and what I post online? Don’t I care about the things I write and the music I share and the photos I share? Doesn’t that bother me?

No. Not in one small bit does it bother me. My life is dull. What I have to share is free for the taking. Why should I license what I photograph, what I record, anything at all, when it comes down to it! What am I protecting? If I were to get all worked up I’d be protecting an endless and mindless stream of inconsequential doggerel and pablum. My social existence is important for me, and the message is important for the people in my life, but ownership of that material? It’s utter dreck. So what if someone comes along and licenses all my photography and lays claim to all that I have written. Someone comes along and asserts ownership over my blog? You are welcome to it! Much like Jazz, the crap that I create comes from an infinite source of unceasing malarkey. Grab as much of it as you want, I’ll just shovel up more. I’ve got a big shovel, boundless energy, and you’re just running garbage detail for me. Knock. Your. Socks. Off.

Really what it comes down to is none of these policies mean anything to people like me because we go ahead and live our lives. These policies exist for people who thrive on the minutiae of life. The only times these policies get dusted off and opened up is when someone tries to be a dick. Society gives us a shorthand when people are being dicks and so, in this social fabric, as long as the howler monkeys aren’t hooting and hollering too loudly the rest of us shrug and graze and go about our plain and dull lives. I haven’t heard anyone get bent about a privacy policy whatever from Google and even when I read the policy bibble-babble, I don’t really care. Non-exclusive, penultimate, pejorative, permissible, persimmons blah blah blah. It’s important to a very small subset of people and if it keeps them happy and shuts them up, why should I care? If the service disappears, so be it. It evaporates with all my writing and all my posted pictures? Uh, fine. I’ll just move on to something else. In the end I don’t care! I don’t care if I win, lose, or whatever. This sort of thing doesn’t interest me and life goes on.

And that brings me to another point, one more general than all the others. If everyone uncorked all these very dull and very blah-blah-blah policies and we all decided to dwell in the house of the righteous and mighty we’d quickly find ourselves so wrapped up in legal jargon and rules that we couldn’t do anything. Liability to perform a bowel movement? Nope. How about walking outside in the sunshine? Nope. Eating? Come on. I bet a legal eagle could find a series of policies that outlaw respiration! When you have this amount of text and only a very small segment of the population with enough interest to maintain consciousness when exposed to it, you end up with people who take others statements on-faith. We can’t process the endless stream of legal mumbo-jumbo, so we hire people who we pay and we trust to do it for us and give us a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Truth to be told, once we honor them enough to let them have a say, we forget all about what they said and get on with life! People tell us that we really should have lawyers look at things, and so we do. Not because we understand or actively even care about the lawyers but we understand that lawyers must be fed. Nobody told us why, and it doesn’t directly impact our lives to see to their proper feeding, so we write the right things, we post the right things and we look to the special creatures called lawyers and we look for a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. That’s as far as it goes, kids! Life goes on! Work has to be done! Those agreements and policies are great, they’re done, yes! They were seen by somebody? Yes! Those somebodies were happy? YES! Well, good… WHATEVER. We move on.

Life has to find a way to trudge forward. These policies are meat for lawyers. The only time when you need a lawyer is when people deviate from the Golden Rule. Society pressures each of us to not stray from the Golden Rule, so for a lot of this, once penned, will never see the light of day again. This brings up another point that has bothered me for a long time, and that is the fine-print monsters. There are agreements everywhere and there is fine-print everywhere, you can’t escape it. There is what is written and there is what is understood and the two aren’t necessarily bound together! When someone decides to be a dick, to play the fine-print game, then the lawyers click their mandibles together and there is a feeding frenzy — for the lawyers! For the people in the drama, there is the victim of the dick, the dick, and the fat happy lawyers moaning in ecstasy and having little orgasms when they hear “billable hours”. So afterwards, the victim of the dick and the dick part ways and the victim has learned a lesson. The victim of the dick never approaches the dick again. This used to be the end of it. The dicks never really had anything else to fear from the victim because they were just one little meaningless nobody in a sea of meaningless nobodies. That is, until social media and social networking came to town. Now the victims of the dick can hop up on a soap-box and write about their experiences to all the other potential victims of the dick and warn them. “Dick is here, he’s after you, avoid him.” and so the dick starves and dies because his prey was alerted that he was in the tall grass and fled. This creates a new series of regulatory controls between the victims of the dicks and the dicks. Now that each one of us can instantly publish and amplify our warning hoots to everyone else, the dicks are on the run, scampering left and right looking for victims and finding nothing but pounded earth from the millions of victims that have fled. This is the natural order of things now, and this is why it’s important to not be a dick. The minute you are branded a dick, you are effectively ostracized from society, you are given a Scarlet D to wear and everywhere you go tales of your dickishness proceed you!

So lets get back to where we started… leaving Facebook for Google+. Do I care about the privacy policy? No. Why am I not concerned? Because I value nothing that I create, I WANT TO SHARE IT and because I’m using these systems, isn’t it obvious that I want to GIVE IT AWAY!?! So someone comes along and takes it, well, that’s part of the point. If there is a dick in the tall grass, it might bring down a bit of the storm but it won’t stop the storm from coming and overwhelming it. Even if the dick starts to rampage, it’s now just a matter of pressing a button and walking away, effectively annihilating the dick.

In the end I don’t care. Life goes on. There are more important things to fret over, like whats for dinner tomorrow, did I see the tight little bubble-butt on that twinkie gym-bunny, what are my plans for labor day? These are the pressing things, not “Oooh, Google came in and asserted ownership of my LOLCATZ pics!” There is an order to things, and frankly, bubble-butts trump rampaging company-legalese-dicks. Life goes on.

Bridesmaids

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Since we didn’t have any real supplies in the house and it was 7pm by the time Scott got out of the gym we decided to skip making dinner and just go out. On our way out we picked up Miah and went to Olde Peninsula. After our meal, and some rather dull cider (which was not their fault, but was a matter of trying something new that flopped) we decided to go see a movie. The movie Bridesmaids was playing at Rave and we all were able to catch it at the student rate, which is $5 per person.

We got to the theater and found seats, the previews came on and they were mostly forgettable. Then the movie started. On the whole the movie Bridesmaids has some very funny and touching moments, but underneath those moments there is a undercurrent of depression. Along with that darkness there is also a kind of black dread that fogs the movie, all the characters are like velveteen rabbits that have been soiled and left in a dumpster to be pecked to pieces by wildlife. It appears as though a movie these days cannot be considered hilarious unless the actors make complete social buffoons of themselves. Many of the sequences felt like elaborate jokes where the writers wanted to set-up the characters like dominoes and tip one over and watch the entire set collapse for the merriment of the audience. To make any of this believable you have to imagine that the people in this movie are at best contrived playthings and at worst, caricatures of truly horrible broken human beings. I laughed at many of the situations depicted in the movie, but afterwards I felt bad about what I laughed at. It felt a lot like standing in a mob and laughing at some poor wounded creature that was struggling for the side of the road so it wouldn’t be run over again. Nobody could put this movie out of it’s misery and so we had to sit through it. While I laughed at parts of this movie, I felt like I had been fleeced. The $5 per ticket price was actually too high for a movie as reprehensible as this one. The primary engine of “Bridesmaids” is the comedy of misery and it leaves you less of a person after you see it than you were when you walked in. The only saving grace is that the movie was a contrivance, that the actors really aren’t this way, that people aren’t trapped in misery that deep.

Bridesmaids is connected to Apatow, and so was The Anchorman, which had a very similar feel. Both movies are soiled productions that rely on the most piquant social awkwardness possible to jam the audience into a very uncomfortable position and then whip a gag out on them to make them laugh. People come away smiling and laughing but also hurt in the exchange.

After watching Bridesmaids, I am done with Mr. Judd Apatow. Much like I am done with “The Anchorman” Will Ferrell. I will not see any other movies with either of their names on it. I’m tired of being entertained in one move and abused in another.

Bridesmaids, Zero out of Ten Stars.

Family Recommendation: Avoid at all costs. Do not view, stream, or rent.

Winning

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Today was our first walk at Carousel Mall and the grumpy old men were in fine form. They started asking the usual bait questions and I pretty much skipped to the end thanks to both the debt-cieling problem in August and the potential for the world oil reserve currency to no longer be the US Dollar. If neither side can possibly have any hope of winning, there is nothing to argue against. Instead of some “despicable liberal plot” I just met their arguments with economic disaster and that pretty much shut them up. They switched their talk to metal and wood shaping and the auctions they were looking forward to.

Once we finished the walk and the grumpy old men got their coffee at Taco Bell we all sat down. The talk went to their show-and-tell. Near the end the conversation turned to social security and medicare and one of the grumpy old men, Lee, brought up that I should be contributing at least 10% of my income to my retirement plan. I was gracious and thanked him for his advice and explained that as my life stands currently something like that, while a good idea, isn’t feasible currently that really upset him. He ended with “That’s a really defeatist attitude” and I shrugged and said “In my world, it’s the best that I can do.” and that was pretty much all there was to that.

I don’t think the walks will have any more political overtones to them as I have very clearly indicated that I will not be arguing with them. After the walk, Dad and I went to Cracker Barrel and he tried to get my goat again and I pretty much shut him down with “People are just looking for the status quo, to go about their lives without being upset. They are looking for their normal.” and I got the classic response “That’s the talk of the moderates, that is.” and I countered with “It works, people are happy, why should everyone else get upset? If life goes on, why meddle with things?” and that pretty much nipped that line of arguments in the bud.

If there is one lesson that I have learned for all of this is that just like at work, a big jagged stone eventually gets worn down to a smooth one after it’s been bombarded by water over enough time. Just like I have ceased entertaining turkeys at work, I have also ceased entertaining turkeys in my personal life as well.

Really so far, I’m having a very good time and I’m doing quite well at not playing this particular Kobayashi Maru.

Home owner beats would-be robber with frying pan, robber listed in critical condition | MLive.com

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Home owner beats would-be robber with frying pan, robber listed in critical condition | MLive.com.

This brought me great joy, reading how a homeowner defended his home with a cast-iron frying pan. Now I know the weapon of choice to have under my bed when I feel vulnerable. *PONG* YAY! *PONG* *PONG* *PONG* *PNGSMUSH*

This Friday

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Today was brought to you by these lines from Airplane!

00:24:46 – Flight 209er – clear for takeoff. – Roger.

00:24:50 – LA departure frequency 123.9er. – Roger.

00:24:54 – Request vector. Over. – What?

00:24:57 Flight 209er, clear for vector 324.

00:24:59 – We have clearance, Clarence. – Roger, Roger.

00:25:01 What’s our vector, Victor?

00:25:03 – l want radio clearance. Over. – That’s Clarence Oveur. Over.

00:25:07 – Roger. – Huh?

00:25:09 – Roger. Over. – Huh? Who?

Enjoy. 🙂


Whither LTE?

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I just got a notice that Verizon is going to be expanding their LTE service in the lower peninsula of Michigan and covering Flint, Detroit, Lansing, and Grand Rapids. That Kalamazoo isn’t on that list is only sauce for the goose of course, but it’s a particular bittersweet sauce.

What’s the problem with really fast mobile broadband traffic? The problem is twofold, and it’s partially a problem with the consumer group and partially with the carrier. First, what is the consumer going to do with 5 to 12 mbps downlink and 2 to 5 mbps uplink? It comes down to applications and the speeds at which they are most well suited. Mobile data currently is composed of streaming traffic such as XM and Pandora, PIM data such as BES traffic, email, CalDAV and CardDAV traffic, and small application data such as navigation apps and other social media applications. Currently all of these applications work well on 3G networks, and moving to LTE, well, what would that get you? The applications themselves aren’t really going to benefit from the increase in network speed, but there is one network application that will benefit and that is video. Video uplink and video downlink. Much like what drove VHS development in the eighties and nineties, it is going to be pornography that will flow over these fast circuits. It’s not productivity anymore, that putters along at 3G speeds, now it’s going to be prurient content that dominates the airwaves once LTE traffic is established. This of course is a trap. The next problem is the carrier itself. LTE traffic is going to encourage people to consume more network traffic over their mobile device and porn is just the tip of the iceberg. Verizon is going to establish data caps, if they haven’t already, and this is going to be a cash cow for any carrier. If you give a busy male executive “Broadband in your pocket” then he’s going to most likely end up trying to seek out “Broads in your pocket”. They’ll be pounding down the gigabytes. After that, the only other application that is best suited for really fast networks is BitTorrent traffic. So people will be consuming porn and illegal movies on their mobile devices and generally making both a biochemical and legal mess of themselves.

Of course we can’t discount the why behind LTE. Verizon, along with all the other carriers are pressured to always enhance their services that they provide. So much like the insipid megapixel battles when digital cameras were first being developed we’ll now have a “G” battle over ever-increasing speeds. A network that is super-fast, built for porn and huge carrier bills. This has your average white male shareholders pants filling with reproductive fluids just at the thought of the profits-to-come.

So I call bullshit on LTE. It’s bullshit because it’s core application is fapping. If that’s all there is, then LTE is just that, just so much fapping. It’s bullshit because it’s a money trap for fools dumb enough to subscribe to it. Once the population gets this mobile broadband experience they are going to blithely blow right past their data caps and land smack dab in wireless-bill-bankruptcy. I can’t wait until the wife opens the bill and sees a $1600 charge for a massive use of data and ask her husband, who told her that the reason his right arm was so much bigger than his left was because of his handedness in Tennis. Of course. Sure it is. The only people who will benefit from LTE will be the carriers. They’ll be raking in the cash and laughing their way to the bank. Mark my words.

Genesee Cream Ale

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Driving through Kalamazoo I can’t help but notice the billboards that creep around town and breed. They spawn clusters of baby billboards and before you know it every square inch of boring natural imagery is obliterated by a billboard. On these billboards is a new ad campaign for of all things, now, hold on to your butts… Genesee Beer.

For those that aren’t laughing right now, you have no idea the inside joke that is Genesee Beer. I grew up in Upstate New York and one of the little breweries nearby was one in Rochester. The plant was located on the Genesee River and sucked up water, brewed beer, and just a touch downriver it would dump its waste back into the river. Genesee is cheap beer. What’s more, it’s got a funny “Andy” story attached to it. When I was very very young I used to retain gas and end up crying a lot and being rather fussy about it. My father, who at the time enjoyed Genesee Beer was trying to rock me to sleep and I was just having none of it. So he gave me just a little sip of Genesee Cream Ale. Down it went. The massive quantity of bubbles (for a little babies body, it did the trick) helped bring on a burp, and then that was that. Problem solved. Now every time I see an ad or a case of Genesee Beer I’m half tempted to buy some and enjoy it.

Now, for you Michiganders who might waddle into Genesee Beer, you should know, it’s profoundly low-brow. If you are okay with that, knock your socks off.

Genesee Beer. Indeed. 🙂

Read Carefully, Read To The End…

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Our local rag pushed a tweet out about a new traffic/intersection control called a Roundabout. They went on and on, just the same as MDOT did about all the studies indicating that these new traffic control systems were safer than anything else currently in use on the roads. I remember that when MDOT was pushing roundabouts and opened up for public comment I threw in my two cents. I maintain that while roundabouts are most certainly safer, they are only that way when everyone is properly educated on how to use them. Another point I made is if people have a problem with classic intersections, how will they cope with these wholly new experiences?

From the rag:

“…Like this email from reader, Katrina, who wrote:

I was wondering if you could please tell people how to use a roundabout! I have, on more than one occasion, watched someone go in circles again and again, trying to figure out how to get out! Please explain this to people! Thank you!

Or this email from reader, Connie, who wrote:

Who has the right of way in our new turn abouts? I have been told the person to your left has the right of way. Is it possible to post a sign saying who has the right of way? Sometimes both of you sit and wait until someone gives the OK to keep moving.”

So we have a state where the driving acumen is already deeply suspect: outrageous speeds, total ignorance of directionals, and starvation-until-death at a locked 4-way stop intersection. We are asking these people, who are already pushed to their limits by simple things like the odd thing on the left of their driving column that they never touch to the aforementioned “everyone died because they were locked solid at a 4-way” to somehow just be thrown headlong into a roundabout! Now instead of a simple 4-way lock we’ll have an internal roundabout lock joined to a accessway/exit lock on top of that!

What I’m getting at is that MDOT and these studies never took into account that people are grossly untrained for using roundabouts. Yes, they may be safer, and proven such when studies are conducted in places where people were trained on how to successfully navigate a roundabout, but this is Michigan! I am terrified of roundabouts and I try to avoid them if at all possible, not because I doubt my own wits or knowledge of how to use them, but because I’m surrounded by people who haven’t a clue how roundabouts work!

In the end all of this is meaningless. MDOT pushed hard and got permission to introduce these new car-destroying traps to this state, and now we have to cope with the ramifications of their actions. MDOT has a website that has educational material on roundabouts, but after working in academia, and seeing the things I’ve seen, even looking out my office window, people aren’t going to visit that website, and even if they do, I doubt they’ll learn anything.

At least we all were safer when Michiganders were trapped in their cars and starved to death at 4-way intersections. Nobody was hurt, they just died of natural causes. In roundabouts, now we can add fiery maelstroms of destruction to the body count.

“I don’t drive, the people on the roads are lunatics.” 🙂