Category Archives: Rage

Reflexive Response

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An hour or so ago Scott told me that a Marine Corps recruitment detachment went to a gay resource center somewhere in Nebraska.

I was immediately upset, sure I was going to hear about gay bashing, or some unfortunate gun-related injuries or fatalities. The first words I said after hearing Scott mention this was “Oh God, they’re hunting” and all I could think of were all the regular citizens about to be victimized by “The Military” out of control.

Turns out, they were just recruiting. After the end of DADT, there apparently wasn’t any ill intent.

I got to thinking about my response, that I assume that if the word “Military” or any of it’s synonyms are used, like any of the branch service names, that innocent citizens are at risk of being hurt or killed. My attitude towards the military is really close to my attitude about police. I have no say in the powers that society has bestowed upon them, but I really distrust both. While the police are a general nuisance, a kind of endurable pervasive threat, the military is somehow worse. Perhaps it’s because of what we ask these people to do for a living, hunt and kill others on our behalf, that when they come home, we can’t shake the feeling that their original mandate to kill hasn’t stopped.

I still really don’t understand why anyone who is gay or lesbian wants to serve in either structure, Police or Military. Why walk into such threat and general unpleasantness if you can help it? You know that they don’t like who and what you are, so why endure it if you don’t have to? The same reason you don’t walk into any southern baptist church on Sunday (technically any church, but I digress). Why expose yourself to risk if you don’t have to?

I think that these attitudes will stay with me, likely because I’ve culturally iconified military and police homophobia and bigotry to such an extent that I can’t think of them as anything but threats to my happiness and safety. It’s very similar to the homophobia, bigotry, and hate pouring out of religions. I wouldn’t be caught dead in spitting (or stoning) distance of a church, just as much as I’d avoid a military recruitment detail. You don’t leap the fence at the zoo to pet the lions, tigers, and bears!

I’m sure this entire post is going to upset the usual suspects who don’t like my attitude about the police, the military, or churches. To them, all I can say is a lifetime of menace has done a number on me, and other people who feel as I do. You may not like it, and that’s too bad. You can’t really undo thirty years of menace and fear just by repealing an unpleasant law. This is going to take a few generations to work itself out. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting…

I never got my wish

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LiveJournal 4/6/2003 –

Well, surprise surprise surprise! It turns out that the US Military can’t find any of the much dreaded Weapons of Mass Destruction after all. So I can’t help but wonder why we are in Iraq? Oh yes, to free the people from their oppressive regime, so we can give them the same benefits of democracy that we’ve become accustomed to -=cough=-. The entire operation is starting to show it’s threadbare bits – why didn’t we just let the Iraqi people lead their own civil war or wait for their despotic leader to simply die of old age? First we beat the shit out of Afghanistan, now we’re bitch-slapping Iraq. I can’t but wonder what sandy oil-rich nation is next? Perhaps Saudi Arabia, they have a monarchy ripe for democracy, since Weapons of Mass Destruction is now a thinly veiled bid for popular re-election (er, re?) I can’t help but wonder what new excuse our proud and upright Misunderestimated Presidentiary will come up with next? We certainly have fallen off the beaten path when it comes to these wars:


Korea
Drugs
Illiteracy
Homelessness
Child Hunger
Terrorism

It’s definitely not manly to leave such wonderful opportunities for bloodshed unexplored Mr. Bush! I hate to state this of course, but wouldn’t the image of American and British troops flooding over your country while you were a small, impressionable little boy, watching your house and local hospital blow up because someone told someone who overheard it from someone else that there might be someone wearing black clothes somewhere in the vicinity of a city block from where you live – and that this psychological trauma, mixed with the notion that the United States needs to legislate Christian prayer during a time of war lead any small Iraqi boy to contact their nearest French or Jordanian weapons dealer, strap as much C4 as one can carry without tipping over and walk into something very fragile, like a fuel depot loaded with US Servicemen? Oh goodness no, our war for the “Hearts and Minds” of Iraq will be utter and complete I’m sure… I’m sure all the dead Iraqi fathers will be sure to tell their sons not to regard a white man in desert kahkis as someone to throw kerosene at… after all, dead fathers raise such balanced children. I just hope that the witless fool which is our esteemed President understands that while concentrating on his buff and raw masculinity in “Dealing with Saddam once and for all” that we’ve let all the other wars we need so very badly to identify us as Americans fall by the wayside and rot:


Kim Jong Il, case in point.

How many of your friends are hooked on something easily obtainable and dangerous?

Ask a random American to find two places on a globe: America and Iraq, then spin the globe and ask them to find China as quick as they can.

Our stunning Economic Boom has relieved us of the terror of unemployment and potential homelessness. The men and women walking around downtown with everything they possess in a shopping cart stolen from a supermarket are merely actors put on stage to remind people just how lucky we are to have such a caring and effective President when it comes to matters of Domestic Policy.

It’s been forever since a caring and well-educated Mother asked to trade her WIC and USDA food-stamp payments for Cigarettes while her svelt child looked on with pride and happiness.

By scarring the people of Iraq with the experience of War, we have saved them from the long drawn out agony of some sort of lengthy and dull diplomatic solution to the question of Weapons of Mass Destruction that, heh, might not really be there. I’m sure the proud and stalwart citizens of Iraq will have a good belly laugh about this whole thing once the US has established that we have won and that it is over Vietnam, and quite like the Vietnamese, welcome us with open arms and endeavor not to randomly explode busloads of Christian missonaries and the random US Embassy on accident.

Mr. Dubya Bush, YOU THE MAN!

I look forward to ANYONE ELSE in 2005! 🙂

Screws in the Past

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LiveJournal 3/5/2003 –

While reading the New York Times online, I came across an article relating to the upcoming war in Iraq, about how shocking Iraq may lead to a short war. This quote caught my eye: “He said disarming Iraq would define victory, not capturing or killing President Saddam Hussein.” Allright, so, simply disarming Iraq is what we are after, then is this a war or is it just mopping up after what we tried to do in 1991? Won’t this be just like a can of worms, sure, we can clip, nip, and tuck Saddam’s forces here and there because all of a sudden they threaten us with their WOMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction, which by the way is nearing complete hyphenation because it’s quickly becoming a cliche phrase) but wouldn’t that be rather silly? I mean, if we’re just after weapons then technically Iraq becomes a unwilling manufacturer of WOMD, selling their wares to us by trading expensive WOMD for aerial bombing? I get this intense feeling that we aren’t going to actually listen to anyone else, ie, the United Nations, but we’re going to forge ahead like the brainless oxen we are, missing out on dealing with the reason *why* Iraq makes WOMD and doesn’t want to play fair like all the other disarmed lands out there, like Angola, France, and North Dakota. That by simply bombing Iraq we can “spook” them into behaving properly, ie, the way we want them to. How likely will the Iraqi’s be in finding agreement with the United States out of fear of some future bombing attack? And how do we feel if Iraq suddenly turns on terrorist organizations and fights the “War on Terror”, will we ignore their WOMD just like Donald Rumsfeld did in 1983 when Iraq was at war with Iran? Curious…

Yesterday I was talking with my mother and another thought occurred to me, that The Gulf War was just like Vietnam. We didn’t really win anything, we just declared it was won, declared our intent to be finished with it, and left. If proper wars are to have an ignition, a duration, and some definite conclusion then we haven’t had one of those in quite some time. We apparently have another kind of war, one with ignition, building, and lame-duck wobbling away. Another thing just now, if there is a definite and clear winner, doesn’t that make the loser feel like post WWI Germany, wouldn’t that lead to the contributing factor of WWII, ie, make the loser so sore they have no choice but to pursue some grander scheme?

And we’re still ignoring North Korea. Gah… we’ll treat the Koreans with diplomacy yet we’ll bully Iraq when the clear and present threat is just the opposite! 

It’s a good thing that presidents have terms and those terms are limited. I wonder how close George Washington would be to considering forming a militia and taking that boat ride across the Patomac River… Dubya is the best thing to happen to the GOP in years, I hope they reap everything they’ve sown.

Blessings

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I read a lot online. Mostly material curated by my friends and acquaintances. Sometimes I run into a thick vein of feel-good affirmations. About the nature of happiness and how to cultivate it in your life. All of this is good and wonderful and I value those friends that bring those things to light because they really do deserve saying and sharing.

One thing does get me though, and this came up with the notion that happiness is not bound by external situations. Are you sure? I think about all the people I read who are very loving, very expressive, and very positive people… how much of that output is supported by a comfortable life? What happens if you don’t have the blessings that come with a first world existence? What if the water that surrounds you is toxic and if you drank any of it would lead to a slow agonizing death? What if you were homeless? What if you were starving? What if life arranged to punish you at every turn and you could never catch a single break? How fluffy and positive would that poor person be?

Don’t get me wrong here, I think that these people are vital and what they share is wonderful and I’m glad they do so, but, all the advice in the world, all the love and fluffy feelings and rah-rah aphorisms, when they land on the ears of someone who is struggling for the most basic things in life – how is that person supposed to react? Do they react with anger? Upset that people who are blessed with comfort feel compelled to export super-fluff are somehow not getting the big picture?

I think quite often on the poor soul who can’t scrape together a meal today, who has no reliable potable water to rely upon for survival and has no idea if someone or something will end up trying to kill or nibble on them in the night. How would they react to being told that everyone is suffused with love and true happiness is all in your mind and how you perceive and approach the world? When I imagine myself in that condition the last thing I want to hear is someone expounding on the fluffy. I’d really like something to drink, something to eat, and maybe someone to watch over me as I collapse.

It isn’t until you get to writing how you feel that you find yourself tripping over the very core reason why your political views are formed the way they are. I think it’s this, this poor soul, a nameless faceless sufferer that compels me to be a liberal. To share what I have, (with hope that we share what we have) in order to ensure that this one poor soul never has to face such an empty existence. And I think it’s this poor person that I always think about when I walk into the voting booth, and when I look upon my paycheck and note how much FICA I’m paying, just to start. It’s something I cannot understand, and probably never ever will. Why people can be so cold and unfeeling, so unimaginative that they cannot comprehend someone to be in this suffering state. I think that’s one of the core reasons why I am filled with boiling waves of rage when I hear conservatives railing against social programs. How corrupt and alien would be our world if any one of us fell through the cracks and died while others did nothing. If you want to know evil, I think that’s the core of it. Not being violent or malicious, but being indifferent to suffering. By being indifferent, in some ways you are actively collaborating with suffering itself. It makes me feel wretched.

So, getting back to where we started, the central question remains. Is happiness bound by external things? I think it most certainly can be. People should not lose sight of that.

Not going to pay a lot for that muffler!

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When I first brought Verizon networks to my workplace and selected them for our mobile technology carrier (remember, I care for the carrier about as much as I care for a particular rib of celery) we discovered pretty early on that we were getting hosed on MMS messaging. There is a difference between MMS and SMS. Of course nobody knows what either of these are and so we have to melt this all down into obnoxiously simple terms like “photo-texting” and “texting”. People would prefer “texting” to “Short Message Service”… whatever.

So we had MMS on these phones on accident. Sending any MMS traffic with Verizon unless you have a plan for it (bullshit carrier moneymaking cash-grab) costs about a dollar a shot. MMS can do a lot, including a pretty nifty “Multiple SMS MMS Message” format so you can address one SMS message to many targets and they’ll all get the message at the same time. In order to keep our Verizon bill from becoming poisoned with MMS bullshit we had to turn on MMS Block on each line. This blocks MMS traffic as well as this pretty neat multiple-destination SMS feature, which I find rather stupid, that it should be tossed out with MMS. Of course, like most things that irritate me in my life, I found a way around my bullshit carriers issues and filthy money-grubbing ways with an app and one single change to my iPhones options.

First, you download an app called “Groups” which allows you to manipulate address book groups in your iPhone, it also allows you to select multiple people for inclusion on an SMS message. Then on your iPhone, you go to Settings, then Messages, and turn off MMS Messaging. When you do this, and use Groups, and send one SMS to multiple people the phone behaves as it should. It makes a duplicate of your message and sends the message out one-at-a-time queue-like to all your SMS targets. Because SMS with our particular plan is complimentary (makes you wonder why they used to charge for it, filthy cash-grubbers) this path is a snap. It takes a bit longer to send out your messages, but at least they do get sent out to people en-masse. So you can get your lost MMS feature back without having to spend more money on the black hole that is your carrier.

If I could whack all the carriers with a shovel and bury them in shallow unmarked graves I would. I’m not particular, I hate them all. It’s not a customer relationship, it’s a battle of wills against a filthy tentacled monster bent on doing whatever it takes to ruin your day and your life. They are all the same, it’s just the flavor of bullshit changes from one to the other. I quite enjoy it when I find an option that lets me stick it to them, at least in a little way.

P.S. If you work for a carrier, I heartily recommend that you not read my blog, not follow me on twitter, or on facebook. And if you do, I invite you to stop. Your absence from my life will not make me unhappy. All of these relationships are unpleasant ones. Lets save each other the agony, okay?

Zooroona's June 3rd 2011

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Earlier tonight I decided that making dinner was too much trouble and we decided to try Zooroona’s again, at least for me, and Scott’s first time. I enjoyed the first time I went despite the botch in the appetizer order the first time, I figured it was just a simple omission.

After this subsequent time going to Zooroona’s on West Main in Kalamazoo we discovered some pretty obnoxious errors. After we were greeted and seated by the host we looked over the menu. I selected a Chicken Schwarmah as my choice. The menu indicated that it came with a complimentary salad. I selected the Tabbouleh. Scott tried to select a combo plate with half Chicken Schwarmah and half Biryani with the first salad on the menu for his side. The waiter informed us that the combo plates were only valid for the leftmost column of dish choices, but neither of us noticed on the menu whether or not that was how it was supposed to actually be, so Scott changed his selection. It wasn’t what he wanted, it’s what Zooroona forced him to select after rejecting his initial order! If you are going to do these things, here’s a hint: Design your !@#$ menu properly!

We waited for our first dishes to arrive and Scott got his salad, for which he enjoyed and I got the Tabbouleh. I didn’t know what to expect. What I got was probably one of the single most unpleasant thing-on-a-plate that I’ve ever had to endure. It was a shot in the dark, so I didn’t complain and because the ingredients were technically good for me I grimaced and tried my hardest to swallow without tasting. The Tabbouleh was just a plate of coarsely minced parsley with very small bits of onion and tomato topped with two un-unpitted Kalamata Olives. I took one bite and a part of me deep down declared that it was utterly inedible. The social monitor in me forced me to squeeze the slice of lemon out onto the salad thinking that perhaps rough-green-sour had a missing something that lemon could bring and it would transform the dish into something edible. Turns out, no. But I was good, I didn’t complain, I sent what I was given down to my stomach as quickly as I possibly could. Each bite was a cringing body-wracking “Oh God please not another bite” but to be a good guest I endured it. When it was over I squinted my eyes, thanked my stars that *that* was over and tried to wash the unpleasant everything downstream with water.

We got our meal and that came out reasonably well. The sauce for the Schwarma wasn’t as good as the last time I was at Zooroona’s and that was a disappointment. I can only assume that the Tabbouleh I endured must have set my palate off so badly that *that* is the reason why the rest of the meal was somewhere between meh and blah. Oh, and one thing else to mention, the Batata, which we got as an appetizer was a different experience as well. There is a particularly strong component to classic chicken wing sauce that you get when you order them from Duff’s in Buffalo, New York. This component is the hot sour stinging of the hot sauce that goes into that preparation. The Batata was just that. Little chunks of potato covered in this hot, sour, monotonous sauce. The only thing that helped, and only very sparingly was the thin-as-water yogurt sauce that was the accompaniment to the Batata. It’s something I won’t eat again.

So throughout the meal we soldiered on diligently, trying to be good guests. It became really awkward when there was a huge crash near the bar and someone became so enraged that they screamed several very inappropriate phrases as clear as a bell. For the customers in the restaurant we turned and all we noticed was one of the people near the bar get up and just stand hulking and stoic quite near where the loud crashing sound came from. It came across to me as “There is nothing to see here, pay no attention to what you just heard, everything is fine.” I turned to Scott and we both said pretty much at the same time “What do you want to bet that was our waiter and he just snapped?” Which lead us to our other big problem with Zooroona’s. Beverage service. We both had accepted the complimentary water and Scott had exhausted his cup about 5 minutes into the meal. These cups are smaller than a collins glass but bigger than a wine glass and I’d estimate they hold anywhere from six to eight ounces of water. Our waiter ignored us pretty much up until we asked for water and even still we didn’t get any. It wasn’t until right before he dropped off the bill that he came around with a water pitcher and refilled our glasses. Now I don’t want to be a pain in the ass about this, but this is one of the most basic elements of running a restaurant. If you do nothing else correctly, at least make sure your customers have an adequate supply of drinking water! Come on!

After we were done and he hauled all the plates away he dropped off the bill. I was expecting two dishes and an appetizer, somewhere in the high twenties to low thirties for the total. I was apparently charged $2.50 extra for the Tabbouleh! It wasn’t enough to throw a fit about, but it did vex me strongly. It would have been nice for the waiter to have INFORMED ME that my salad selection carried an extended price! The menu was mute about it as well! So it’s a trap. Not only did I have to suffer through the awfulness of that Tabbouleh but I had to pay $2.50 for the … pleasure… of it. I still cringe when remembering it! So when we cashed out I was pretty much done with Zooroona’s. Terrible menu with zero guidance in it, a waiter who was just there to occupy space and treat his host role as a boring chore, food that was not consistent and a salad that was a crime against humanity. I paid my bill, I gave the waiter a 10% tip. He earned a minimal tip for being minimally effective, at least at the start.

It’s going to take a very long time, if at all, that I will return to Zooroona’s. The first time the waiter completely botched our appetizer order, the second time, well, that’s above… even if I were to give them another shot, and they aced that one, that’s only an overall success of 33%! I would have been better served by simply skipping dinner altogether. Not enduring that experience is preferable to enduring it. Going to bed without dinner actually may have been better for me in the long run. Because of these experiences I cannot recommend Zooroona’s to anyone else and my advice is to skip it and go somewhere else. Really, my advice is to skip going out altogether and cook at home, but if you *must* go out, there are better experiences elsewhere. What’s the scope of elsewhere? Paw Paw is a good start, but to really be honest, it’s best to skip the entire state of Michigan and try somewhere else, like Illinois or New York. Really.

Calling out the Licensing Bullshit

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A very good friend of mine on Twitter had this to say:

maybe if we all were told up front that we don’t actually own the tech we purchased, we’re just buying a license to use it, we’d be happier

And this brought up an old straw-man that I am fond to beat up every once in a while. It comes down to purchasing software or hardware from a company that hides this sneaky shit in their End User License Agreement. For much of it, you don’t even get a chance to read the EULA until you’ve opened the package and forfeited your rights to get your money back. Then you read the EULA and find out that you didn’t buy chattel, you bought a license. That you don’t own anything but the right to use whatever it is that you purchased. Anyone with a shred of common sense knows this entire affair is composed of nothing but the most rarefied load of bullshit ever perpetrated on mankind. The courts have upheld this obnoxiousness and so it’s legally binding.

So we have to swallow this pure bullshit. But what I think would be fair is to have these facts printed prominently on the box before you plunk down your hard-earned money to buy whatever it is. I’m sure it would only enhance the bottom line of the sales department if the big shiny box prominently had printed on it “By buying this box, you own a revocable license to use the contents, but you do not own the contents of this box. You cannot resell the contents or transfer it to anyone else legally.” Then whip that out on consumers and see how they react. I know I wouldn’t buy it. My work might buy it, but that’s not my money and not really my concern. Life goes on without buying something like that and these companies that insist (along with the courts that support them) that this legal bullshit is binding should starve and die when nobody buys their product. If these companies want to push products that you don’t own but only hold rights-to-a-license, then I say we should just stop buying those products outright. It used to be that if you tried that you couldn’t get anywhere or do anything, but nowadays that isn’t the case. There is a huge collection of software that exists that is licensed under the GPL. It’s all free for the taking, it costs nothing, it works arguably better than the alternatives and you don’t have to spend your hard-earned money and have nothing but a revocable license to show for it.

That’s how we progress. This “buying a license” bullshit has to stop. We can progress by starving these bullshit peddlers and encouraging and supporting the GPL. It’s enough to start a socialist revolution I say. Y’arrrrrg! 😉

Marine Survives Two Tours in Iraq, SWAT Kills Him – Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

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Marine Survives Two Tours in Iraq, SWAT Kills Him – Hit & Run : Reason Magazine.

He was safer facing IED’s and Terrorists than coming home. This story just boggles my mind. The Sheriff’s Department and SWAT team fired 71 bullets, killed a veteran, detained paramedics and destroyed a family. All of this in Arizona.

So how exactly are we supposed to feel about all of this? God bless the USA? Really? Honestly? Do you feel safer as a citizen to know that a “Soldier/Hero” gets technically turned into human hamburger in front of his family? The police in this case are really quite honestly out of control. How do you punish such a transgression? It’s a crime, at least you’ve got manslaughter here, you’ve also got quite a few violations of the Bill of Rights, 4th Amendment, and by the severity of the action I’d say it pushes the buttons of Posse Comitatus. The SWAT team operated more like a military unit under siege than POLICE who are supposed to “Protect and Serve”. After reading this article I don’t feel safer, in fact, I feel revolted. I also feel slightly terrorized that something like this can happen in our country. It’s one of the many things that happen that make me want to grab people by their shoulders and shake them very hard, hoping to wake them up from their stupor. This is not supposed to happen! This is not right! But it will most likely be swept under the rug and the monsters responsible will be slapped on the wrist and get a firm tut-tut-tut and that will be it. They’ll just go on to kill more citizens and terrorize the rest of us.

And people wonder why I despise the police. Show me a good cop and I’ll show you a blood-soaked murder-fetishisizing thug.

Blackest Night and Brightest Day

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Just finished off Brightest Day #24 from DC Comics over lunch with Scott. My experience with this twin comic book event started out strong. Blackest Night was done quite well and was a pleasure to read, kept you on the edge of your seat for many issues and was easy to follow.

Then the opposite came out, in the guise of Brightest Day. The entire series of Brightest Day was very complex with many players and their sub-stories felt more like meaningless chores than actual meaningful events that I could really get myself wrapped up in. There were a group of incidental characters featured throughout that primarily appeared in the theme of “use ’em or lose ’em” and I couldn’t really form a good emotional bond with any of them. The best thread in the story was how Boston Brand learned how to live again, but that was pretty much squandered in the finale of the story. Many of these second-string characters underwent life-changing events and I couldn’t really care one way or another. The entire series ended with each of the characters setting out on their own separate paths, as if the events of Brightest Day were just a dalliance. I was very excited at the end of Blackest Night, and I was really quite concerned after a few of the first issues of Brightest Day, it felt like the excitement-craft was parked on the tarmac and the engines were very slowly winding up. The entire series felt a lot like that, a kind of regressive, perpetually tripping-on-itself story that always was just on the lead up to the excitement curve but once it started to climb it trembled and fell back away from actual payoff.

The entire two-part story borrowed a lot of creative energy from much of the work that Alan Moore dropped off on DC’s front-steps when he wrote some stories for the Green Lantern series of comic books. The Blackest Night prophesies were the start and at the end of Brightest Day you discover that the major player is “The Green” which is another batch of Alan Moore-inspired material that was injected into DC. I know a lot of professionals regard Alan Moore as a fundamental power in comicdom and I’m sure they would be upset if anyone, let alone little old me, were to tread on any of his hallowed works. In light of that, I can only PRAY TO GOD that we are done with the Alan Moore-inspired stories and we can move on to really creative new stories yet to be told. No more Blackest Night bits, no more Brightest Day “The Green” / “Parliament of Trees” material and get to something, anything else.

Then there is the biggest gyp of the entire series, which comes at the end of Brightest Day. They trot out Swamp Thing, then Alec Holland. There’s some retcon tomfoolery under the covers and a surprising failure of potency in the power of The White. All of a sudden we have to accept Swamp Thing and all the odd “It came from left field” oddity that lays at the core of how this story ended. I never read Swamp Thing, I have no emotional connection to Swamp Thing and the last time I spent any time thinking about that character was after I watched the Swamp Thing B-Movie/80’s rendition of it on VHS tape. I had a dim recollection of Swamp Thing and couldn’t really get into the ending of Brightest Day because all the “momentous” revelations at the end meant very little if anything to me. I still don’t really get what The Green is all about and frankly I don’t care enough to look it up. The crowning moment to Brightest Day was at the very end, they drew a character smoking a cigarette with only one thing to say: “Bollocks”. I had no idea who this character was. As it turns out, Scott knew and let me in on it. It was Constantine, AKA Hellblazer. I didn’t even know that Constantine was even connected with DC, let alone big enough to be the crowning climax of Brightest Day. So this guy is back and he smokes and he swears in an adorable british way. The only thing I have in my memory about Constantine is a rather awful portrayal of the character hacked off by Keanu Reeves. I don’t remember anything about the movie other than he was alive, or dead, or something – that he smoked and had something clever to do with housecats.

So here I sit. I’ve spent a lot of time congratulating Geoff Johns, who was the writer for both of these comic book events and here I sit feeling the opposite of how I did for Blackest Night for Brightest Day. I feel like much of the Brightest Day story was telephoned-in half-heartedly and I fear that Geoff was given too many projects and too much to do and that Brightest Day suffered for it. I don’t want my money back, DC can keep it. I don’t know if I’m going to follow DC anymore with the Flashpoint event. I’m a little leery that we’ll be back to the same feeling of ‘we’re just revving the engines, it’s gonna be cool! just wait for it!” feeling that marked the beginning of Brightest Day. I’m pretty much sitting right on the fence between writing Flashpoint off completely or following it. I suppose I will defer that decision until I read The Flash #11. I have to admit that the way DC has treated their one Flash character, Wally West isn’t helping retain me as a reader. The cagey no-information/why-did-I-sit-through-this feeling I got during C2E2 has me thinking that I could save a lot of time and money pulling away from DC Comics. I don’t really feel a lot of interest for any of Marvel’s projects since I got burned so badly with all the inane Deadpool titles and fell off the event wagon back in Civil War. My weekly take for comic books is right around five bucks and perhaps walking away from them is the best for me. Seeing Geoff Johns’s name as lead writer used to excite me, now I’m filled with wariness and trepidation.

The Postman Always Rings… Oddly.

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I received a parcel in the mail today at work:

I wasn’t expecting anything in the mail. For a brief moment I thought it might contain a bomb or perhaps Anthrax or something equally as dramatic and sexy. But no… I turned it over:

And discovered, after pulling the contents out, that what I had was exactly the opposite of something that I’d want:

It’s a PROMOTIONAL MAILER for the Blackberry PlayBook! But it’s not just a piece of paper, oh no! It’s a silicone bumper!

So now I have a promotional mailer I didn’t want, for a product I really could care less about, but now I have a bumper for it! So, I’m thinking I could sell it on eBay maybe or throw it out. What an incredible waste of resources this is. This doesn’t sell a device. Now I hate the Blackberry PlayBook and I despise anyone who sells it. Before I was ambivalent, now they’ve earned my ire. This is now how to market a new device! This is wasteful bullshit.