MacPhoenix: WebSpaceKathy and I are taking another trip to Boston. This time, we’re bringing the digital camera (we forgot to last year), which means that some time in the next five years, I’ll post some pictures from there. Catch up with you soon!
I’m on a mailing list at Don’t Amend, a group dedicated to stopping the hijacking of the Constitution by the idiots against same-sex marriage. It’s a fine cause, and all I had to do was sign a petition, not the hardest thing in the world. But the poor folks at Don’t Amend found themselves the target of a malcontent, who hacked into their mail server and opened their bulk email list to anyone. I’m not sure if this caused me, and others on the list, to get more spam, because I get over to two hundred spam emails each day, so another dozen or so in my junk mailbox would go unnoticed by me. What it did noiticably do was spawn one of the most hilarious and goofy responses from several dozen of the users on the list. If I were going to make my own bulk email list of suckers and newbies, today would have made my work far, far easier.
Instead, I just deleted the emails. But not before I read through a quarter of them to get this jist of the responses to a mailing list gone amuck. The innocent response was, “Remove me from your list,” one of which started the whole mess. The first sender of the remove-me email was doing the right thing. S/he clicked a link that opened up a new blank email with the remove-me subject line, and sent it, just like s/he was supposed to do. But, like an avalanche or a mudslide, it only takes one pebble to start the whole thing rolling, and soon there were three needless angry and terse emails telling this first innocent, and everyone else on the list, that they didn’t set up the list, and don’t tell them to take you off the list that they have nothing to do with, and what the hell is a list anyway, and, by the way, go to hell!
Why so tense? These could have been chalked up to before-the-first-caffine-intake email, since they took place so early in the morning, but these same nasty, clueless emails kept coming in. The first one started at 8 a.m. EDT and the last trickled down at noon, when Don’t Amend finally fixed the hole. A few people took it upon themselves to send the nasty, curt response several times throughout the day, along with requests to take themselves off the list. That’s good thinking.
Still, I understand the impulse to try to control things that are out of one’s hands. But spitting against the wind? Not my style. Apparently, though, there are a large portion of the Don’t Amend mailing list that believe themselves to be of a higher authority, because these people “helped” by telling everyone else to stop sending emails to the list, over and over again. I do believe they failed to realize that the greater majority of us on the Don’t Amend mailing list were not, in fact, sending emails to the list, so more than half of the email pollution was coming from these know-it-alls who were telling us to stop replying to all, as they, themselves, were replying to all.
In order to make their point as annoying as possible, they spread as much ALL CAPS and weird typefaces in their emails. This is something that only friends should do to each other in emails, but never, ever to strangers.
A couple of my favorite responses were the one that basically said, “I don’t get that many emails, so this was a lot of fun to read through. Relax and enjoy it people,” which I did, and the other, verbatim, “I have been receiving mass emails from member of Dont Amend with weird “remove me” dialogue….please dont remove me.” Sweetly insecure.
And, yes, YES, all I wanted to do was respond to each of these people and tell them that they were being so stupid. And I wouldn’t have sent the email to the list, either, because I know how to use email, unlike the woman who insisted she has used email a long time and knew how to reply to an individual, as she emailed everyone on the goddammed list! I would have wasted a large amount of time to teach these people a valuable lesson by copying and pasting my rant into several dozen emails. But, but, I thought, that would be pointless. No one learns lessons via email. And, besides, I have a blog! I’ll post it there! Yeah, that’ll learn ’em.
Okay, I can admit when I’m wrong. Janet Jackson’s apparent pastie was, in fact, a giant piece of jewelry that fit around her nipple. Well. Ignore most of what I said, then, because it really is the end of civilization.
And, so far, no heads have rolled in the Plame case. This is okay. A grand jury is looking to indict, and I think out of my three predictions, Cheney will still be off the ticket before November. I was hoping for more. I mean, Karl Rove has got to go, and I thought Condi Rice was going to take a fall. Alas. I’ll have to be satisfied with Bush’s continually falling poll numbers.
Speaking of idiots, I created my first Garage Band masterpiece. (Hey! I just insulted myself!) It’s called, wait for it…, “The Idiot (Peeance Freeance).” It has a couple of samples of Bushpeak. These were found on DubyaSpeak.com. My thanks to them, and Apple. Every instrument was found as a loop. It took no skill whatsoever to create. When I eventually attach a keyboard and learn to play guitar, the possibilities will be boundless. Much fun.
Anyway, here is “The Idiot (Peeance Freeance)” in all its amateurish glory. The MP3 is around 2 MB, so if you’re still on dial-up, it will not be worth it to download. Wait for the remix by The Dust Brothers.
As both readers of my blog know (Hi Mom! Hi Uncle Frank!), I try to stay away from current events, because by the time I write about it and post the article, the event has all but faded from the public view. But when breasts are involved, I try to keep timely. Of course, I refer to the shocking and civilization-collapsing baring of Janet Jackson’s right breast on national television.
I didn’t see the actual live performance, for the same reason that I do not gawk at traffic accidents—I find no pleasure in watching other people’s pain. That sums up halftime shows, beauty pageants, and other reality-based television. I just don’t care. So I missed what is being billed as the most-replayed event on television. I have the Internet, however, home of twelve-billion boobies, and Janet’s shame was on display before the Monday morning news-cycle. I laughed and laughed and laughed, when I first read the news on CNN shortly after midnight after the Super Bowl. CBS, MTV, the NFL, Justin Timberlake, and thousands of others were denying any responsibility. The breast was not meant to be exposed! There was red-lace under there that was meant to stay on. Oh, the humanity!
I thought, that night, naively, that this was a non-story, because she quite obviously had a pastie on her breast, a silvery, star-shaped pastie. (Initially, I thought that the photo was being censored, because the pastie is so big and doofy-looking!) I thought that the pastie kind of proved that the stunt was carried out as planned. Why wear a pastie at all, if not to hide the real indecent part of the breast, the scary and evil nipple? And that’s where I was so wrong. See, the floppy flesh around the nipple is just as bad. I didn’t realize this. Apparently, the bad part of the breast is the outside, the part that faces the arms of a woman. Because the inside, where Wonderbras and silicon have pushed them up to the chins of the women in television and magazines all accessible to minors, the cleavage, that’s just fine. The outside part? Only a suckling child should be able to get that view.
Sensibly, no one is offended by the young White male molesting and ripping the clothes off an older, shorter Black woman. Sensibly, no one is upset that women are used as commodities by the recording industry and Hollywood. Sensibly, no one cares that the talented Janet Jackson has to sex herself up in order to move CDs, because her talent has nothing to do with her marketability. Thank God, we’re all so fucking uptight that we can’t deal with a perfectly fine boob because it was shown to tens of million children who were watching a pro-football game, where advertisers spent hundreds of million dollars on telling American men that they have erectile disfunction and are not pleasing their American women. Hey kids! Buy beer! Don’t smoke pot! Drink beer! Trade stocks with this company! Get a stiffy! And drink more beer! And then back to the game where men are men, son.
Still, it was a stupid stunt, and I have no sympathy for the puppets that were strung along and will be hung out when the Inquisition is over. It is just a shame that real destroyers of our culture and community, MTV and the morally outraged, will both win, and the poor, maligned boob will lose.
I’ve been keeping score: Vanilla Coke sucks, Pepsi Blue is even worse, but Dr Pepper Red Fusion is pretty good.
Vanilla Pepsi is surprisingly okay. It kind of tastes like a sweeter, if one could imagine, version of regular Pepsi. There is actually a vanilla flavor to it, and, unlike the citrus flavor inherent in Coke, Pepsi’s flavor complements the vanilla.
I’ve read that they’re going to make a Lime Coke. I like this idea. I love lime. It’ll certainly make a good ingredient in a Cuba Libre. However, if the lime is only added to Diet Coke, like the lemon flavor, I’ll never try it. I don’t ever drink diet sodas.
On the subject of things I don’t drink, I tried Sam Adams Light, which tastes a lot like Becks, with a bit of that oak-y flavor that is a trademark of Sam Adams Lager. It isn’t something that I would ever order by itself (it was included in the Winter Classic 12 pack, which has a variety of brews), but it’s not evil-incarnate as I thought it might be. One thing I noted was the Sam Adams Light is 120 calories, which is more than the standard 90 or so of most light beers. It’s thirty calories of flavor, for sure, since most light beer tastes like the can that it came in.
Back to soda, Dr Pepper Red Fusion is getting harder to come by, but when it first came out, I thought it would make a good mix with rum, because it was very sweet and very fruity. So for Halloween, I bought a few bottles of Red Fusion and a couple bottles of rum and made up a drink called Redrum. It’s very easy to make: Cup of ice, 1 part rum to 5 parts Red Fusion. In a 16oz cup, that tends to be about 12oz of Red Fusion with 2oz of rum. It’s a very easy drink, as in people who don’t like to taste alcohol in their alcoholic drinks will like this, but the combination of high caffeine from the soda and the intoxicating effects of the rum make it a drink that is dangerous. You can drink 3 or 4 without feeling a thing, and then, WHAM! you’re slurring and generally making an ass out of yourself. Good times.
Coconut rum and spiced rum give nice overtones to Redrum. With coconut rum, you have a Redrum Tunococ, and spiced rum is a Redrum Decips. I haven’t tried it, but I suspect you can make a Redrum with regular Dr Pepper and maybe an ounce of Grenadine.
So what’s a Cuba Libre? Well, it’s a Rum and Coke, but with a slice of lime instead of lemon. And it isn’t a drink I made up. It surprises me how few people, including bartenders, have heard of a Cuba Libre. I tend to tell people that Cuba Libres are made with Pepsi, instead of Coke, because it tastes better, and in this way it becomes more of a revolutionary drink, going against the bourgeoisie, Capitalist-Imperialist Coca-cola Corporation. Or something.
It’s been quiet on my blog for a while, so I’ll fill in some space with my favorite jokes, and you can decide whether or not I am worth reading again in the future, or, if you know me personally, whether or not you actually want to speak to me again.
I like jokes that set the listener up for something and then fail to deliver. My favorite:
What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back?
A stick.
How easy is that? It’s not necessarily laugh out-loud funny, but I like the set up and ease of delivery. In the same vein:
Why don’t cannibals eat clowns?
They taste funny.
And a light-bulb joke I learned from Cheers:
How many Surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
Fish
Oh, so dry. They’re all fine examples of the ironic, post-modern wit that I find myself drawn to. I understand if they’re not your cup of tea.
Don’t get me wrong. With the exception of not finding flatulence jokes funny, I find humor in most dumb comedies. Whenever I see Will Ferrell, I begin to snicker. His very presence is enough to get me to start laughing. I laugh at pratfalls and broad humor, but twists and failed expectations are bits that I relish. I may not laugh out loud at them, but I feel satisfied being in on the joke. Of course, I think, a stick! They taste funny! Fish! It all makes sense in a devious way, but we were set up for something different.
Which leads me to my all time favorite joke, the White Elephant. There are a lot of variations to this one, but this is how I first heard it (from my father, no less). By the way, before you read, there are no white elephants in this particular version, but it is still a White Elephant joke:
A son graduates from high school as a Valedictorian of his class. His father is extremely proud of him, and offers to get him a graduation gift that he’ll never forget.
The father says, “Son, you were Valedictorian, you were top in track, and you’ve earned a four-year scholarship to Yale. I am so proud. What can I get you for your graduation? A car? Top of the line computer system? What? Anything you want.”
The son considers this for a bit, and says, “Dad. Thank you. What I really want is a truck full of ping pong balls.”
“What?” the father asks.
“Yeah, Dad. You said anything. And what I want is a truck full of ping pong balls.”
The father doesn’t know what to make of this, but a promise is a promise, so he gets his son a truck full of ping pong balls. Four years later, the son is graduating Magna cum Laude at Yale and has signed up for Harvard Medical School. Again, his father couldn’t be more proud, and tells his son, “Son, I want to get you anything you want. New car. Down payment on a new house. A boat. Anything. What do you want?”
“Well, Dad. I’ve been thinking about this, and I want a truck full of ping pong balls.”
“Again?” his father screams. “What do you…? Okay. Okay. I said anything you want, and you want a truck full of ping pong balls again. Why mess with success?” So the father gets him another truck full of ping pong balls.
The son does his internship at a very prestigious hospital and opens his new practice. He serves his patience with care and quality. He becomes an asset to his neighborhood and is written about in the local paper. His father beams with pride whenever he talks about his hard-working, compassionate son. Again, the father offers to buy his son anything he wants, this time for his thirtieth birthday. When his son asks him once again to buy him a truck full of ping pong balls, the father sighs, but makes no complaints.
One day, the father and son are out walking around his son’s quiet suburban neighborhood when they hear the screech of a car braking right behind them. In a split second, the out-of-control car hops the curb and hits the son, hurtling him thirty feet in the air. The father, unscratched, rushes to his son’s side, and can tell he is very injured. The son is bleeding from his mouth and is pale and shivering. “Dad,” he says weakly, “I’m sorry.”
The father has tears streaming down his face. “Hang on, son. Hang on. Help is on the way,” he says.
“No, Dad. I’m not going to make it.”
Weird thoughts pop up in times of stress, and the father can’t think of anything else right now but one question. “Son, I don’t know why, but I have to ask you. What was with those trucks full of ping pong balls?”
The son smiles weakly and says, “It’s okay, Dad. I’ll tell you. The ping pong balls were for… urk!” And his tongue rolls out, his eyes cross, and he dies.
And that, my friends, is my favorite joke of all time.
Offered as Peoples’ Exhibit A, your Honor. Upon visiting China for the 2003 Miss World Contest, Miss United States, 20-year old, Kim Harlan, had this to say, “I thought everyone would be wearing, you know, little Asian outfits, but they’re perfectly normal, you know, just the way we dress up.”
Emphasis added. Quote from Marketplace on NPR.
This CNN article notes that the City of Los Angeles has decided that the terms, “Master” and “Slave,” are inappropriate and insensitive labels on computer and electronic equipment. For those of you unskilled in Geek-speak, a master drive in a computer is the primary drive, while a slave drive is secondary. It doesn’t really mean anything other than the master drive is where your computer will first look for booting instructions.
But we are now too sensitive to use the word “slave” anymore, unless you’re into bondage, in which case you’ve got a lot more to hide from polite society anyway. I’m not a big fan of this type of soft censorship. It leads rise to charges of racism when someone uses perfectly appropriate words that sound a bit like the verboten words. It changes the way language is used, and it makes people believe that Liberals have run amok.
Except Political Correctness is not a liberal disease. Even though many people on the left blanch at insulting words, the idea that we shouldn’t offend anyone ever is a very conservative trait. I try not to use words that are offensive or insulting because, as a writer, I want to get my thoughts across to the reader, and throwing a big, bad word in the middle of something is like a traffic light on the Autobahn. I use any word as a tool, and most of the time a racial or sexual incentive isn’t needed… you jerk.
Back to the issue. Calling a computer peripheral “slave” doesn’t diminish or make light of the horrible history that America had with slavery. It isn’t a racial slur. It isn’t even meant to be provocative. It is simply one more sexual euphemism that computer scientists labeled every part of the computer with. Do you want your disk hard or floppy? How much RAM do you have? Have you upgraded your firmware? Attach that dongle or the software will not load. Please, show me the racist engineer that decided that a slave drive was a sneaky way of sticking it to African-Americans, and I’ll show you a thousand engineers that snicker every time the computer prompts them to insert their disk into any drive.
I am sometimes surprised at what society picks next to be the dread word. English is loaded with words that don’t have the noblest roots. So we still “hysterical,” despite its extremely sexist origins. If “slave” is indeed going to be a false target for White guilt, what will we call that group of people in our history books? The shackled class? It’s too silly to even joke about it. But it is one more example of how we can’t seem to focus our attention on the things that make racism and sexism prevalent in any society.
They call it “The Kingdom.” It sits behind the building where you’d go and get your food. You’d never even know it was there, but it’s larger and vaster than the main building. It is where they store their dry goods, like flour and corn meal. They also have a huge, two-story freezer in the Kingdom, which they turn on during the holidays.
I think it’s ironic, perhaps, that you’re in the front, buying your chicken that’s been disemboweled, split-through with a spear, and slow roasted, or you’re buying your chicken that’s been torn apart, tendon from bone, and batter-dipped for frying. I think it’s ironic that the front is dedicated to humanity’s position on the food chain, but the Kingdom, in back, is run by the birds.
Starling and chickadee and sparrow and crow and sea gull, at any time, you’ll see more of them than there are people in the Kingdom. And when I walked into the vastness of it, I could hear the smaller ones, the stowaways from Great Britain, chirping and flittering around in the rafters in the near darkness. They quieted down when I reached the shelves that held cans and bags and sacks. One such sack was in the wrong place, sitting upon a square pack of 16 cans. The sack, once protected by plastic, was eviscerated, spilling its guts of bleached flour onto the cans beneath it, and the floor below. There were little peace-signs imprinted in the fine powder at random intervals. These were bird tracks. The birds found a way to get into the flour.
Oh, I thought, the processed, bleached flour must be like crack cocaine to these little birds. They probably get no real nutrition from this, just energy.
And so, I didn’t think it was the best thing to have the flour exposed. I covered up the ripped part of the sack with a large piece of the torn plastic, and held it down with a large can. Then I walked away.
In the empty vastness of the Kingdom, I could hear the echo of beating wings. Far enough away to not spook the birds, I turned around to see seven small brown and black birds looking at the plastic cover and the can holding it down. A few of the birds flew at the can, to frighten it I suppose. They were all twittering and chattering, and the frustration in the noises they made was evident and growing, until I heard, “TWEEET!”
It was loud and echoed through the Kingdom. It was a high, shrill noise that could not have come from a bird any larger than my hand, but it demanded attention be paid. The other birds and I froze for a moment, and they flew back into the rafters.
“TWEEEET!” knocked around the walls and vaulted ceiling again. I couldn’t make out the source of the sound. It shook all around me. There was more flapping in the rafters, and little tricks of shadow and light made it look like there were several dozen birds up there. Then there was silence.
Slowly, deliberately, I walked towards the exit, towards daylight and open air, until I was stopped in my tracks by,
“TWEEEEET!”
The sound surrounded me and was nowhere in particular. It was an angry chirp, a desperate whistle. Just steps away from the doorway, it stopped me. Thinking for just a moment, I turned around again, and quickened my pace back towards the shelves. I threw down the can and ripped away the plastic. Flour dust danced all around me. I swiveled and made for the exit again, pausing only briefly, once out the door, to peek back into the darkness of the Kingdom, where the birds ruled. Two or three little birds pecked and scratched in the white flour, flittering in excitement, content, for now.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a kid on bike get hit by a car on Sunrise Highway. I thought for sure the kid was going to be seriously, seriously injured, but he actually got up and limped to the median before anyone could reach him and tell him not to move. The impact sounded bad… horn, screech, dull thud, shattered glass; although, that was just the headlight smashed by the petal of the bike. It was a sporty car with a low front, so he slid right up the hood. I was in a parking lot when I heard the horn and screeching. I saw the actual impact, and dialed 911 after shouting “Holy Shit!” about four times.
Another guy, who apparently saw the car run a red light, had also called the police and reached an ambulance dispatcher before me, so, by the time I had hung up with the police, we could hear an ambulance siren down the road. I told the police what I saw, which was just the accident itself, not the causes, and they told me they didn’t need my statement. The other guy, meanwhile, filled out a form. The kid who got hit was obviously dazed, possibly in shock, but didn’t seem seriously wounded. As I left, they were checking out his legs, which has some abrasions, but that was about it. He was very lucky.
It bothered the hell out of me, though, for the next couple of hours. My empathy was not only for the kid, but for the driver of the car, who did pull over, did the right thing, and waited for the police to arrive. But she was getting yelled at by people as soon as she got out of the car, and she broke down crying as soon as a cop went over to talk to her. She was just a kid, too. It would not be something I would want to have in my memory, the day I hit someone.
The witness guy said to me, “Man, when I was that young,” gesturing over to the young driver of the car, “I did things that I’m ashamed of now. But I never hurt anyone but myself. You don’t realize that running a red light can kill someone.”