Category: Rant

On my portal page, I had a link to CNN.com. I didn’t really want it there, but at the time, no other news site was consistently reliable. CNN displayed nice on Mac browsers, and it’s coverage, while always mediocre, was not too insulting to my intelligence. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t hate it either.
I mean, CNN always did their best to equate bin Laden to Hussein, which caused me to switch over to ABC.com for a time, but that was when ABC had a raw news feed, where news stories came right off the wire, unedited. It was kind of neat, really, but that didn’t last long, and once they got rid of it, they began to wall off much of their content, and I began to feel Disney was busy watching the bottom line. I switched back to CNN, reluctantly, but it was still better than the alternatives.
MSNBC was run by Microsoft. That isn’t horrible in of itself, since I used to read Slate.com, which up until recently was run by MS, but MSNBC was lousy on Mac browsers. Horrible. Almost as bad as my site is on IE for PC, and that’s bad.
CBS was more like an online advertisement for it’s television broadcasts, and FoxNews, of course, I would sooner drown in a bathtub that trust it for actual news. I linked to the BBC for a while, but their coverage was specifically about the big events happening in America, and some smaller, but often more interesting, stories never made it on their site.
So I stayed with CNN. But it was getting worse and worse and worse. Today was it. One of their seven or so top stories, displayed right near the top of the page was “Actress Tiffany Thiessen gets married.” Gee, I care. Why is this worthy of national news? At least, I should have been thankful that this bit of entertainment fluff won out for the prestigious headline spot over “Johansson: Nudity yes, bra no,” which, while still on the front page, was regulated to their entertainment section. I admit, I clicked on the link. It was an advertisement for The Island disguised as an article where Scarlett Johansson expressed dismay at a cheap bra they wanted her to wear during a love scene to keep the PG-13 rating.
At this point, I said goodbye to CNN.
I clicked on over to MSNBC. The page looked good on Safari, my browser, and it has a blog by Keith Olbermann, who is probably the best newscaster in the business, but will never get anywhere because he knows things, and people hate the smart guy. Thiessen’s pending marriage was not to be found within the top stories, for some reason, and Scarlett Johansson and the cheap bra was regulated to the second tier on the Entertainment page, and was not found on the main site.
And so there it is. I’m putting MSNBC on the portal page. I should have ditched CNN a long time ago.

Via Wired News, we learn of a new form of superoxygenated water that destroys single-celled organisms, but is harmless to plants and animals. The stuff is called Microcyn, and it is a perfect example of science at its best. This is why I lament at the Kansas within each of us and worry what effects this anti-scientific culture will have on our future.

At some point in my life, I am going to have to accept that I am not part of the mainstream. It is clear to me that a majority of my countrymen are completely blind and deaf. They gave legitimacy to the worst president, the vilest mindset, and the party of reactionary, knee-jerk politics.

I felt the winds of change, and it turned out to be smog from an oil refinery.

My days of a prognosticator are over, for sure. My logic is so flawed that I predicted that this administration would reap what it had sown, but time and time again, these udder incompetents squeak through, and no justice is served. How does a reelection help the chances of prosecuting those that leaked a CIA operatives name? How does a reelection show the world that the Iraq war was an aberration? Four more years of anti flag-burning amendments! Four more years of anti gay-marriage amendments! Four more years of idiocy from the top down.

There are some who think that maybe Bush will be a bit more restrained in his second term. For those that do, I offer this quote, from CNN on Wednesday, 03 Nov 04:

“President Bush’s decisive margin of victory makes this the first presidential election since 1988 in which the winner received a majority of the popular vote,” said Card, referring to the White House victory by Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush. “And in this election, President Bush received more votes than any presidential candidate in our country’s history.”

We’ve given them a mandate. What was once just ugly has turned malignant.

Goodbye, George. I won’t miss you. I won’t weep at your passing.

Goodbye, George. You represented the worst in us. You pretended your faith was your wisdom, when you had neither. You pandered to your base of religious misanthropics. You pandered to animal fears that fester deep in our society.

Goodbye, George. And to all your bastard handlers, too, Cheney and Rummy and Rove. Goodbye all you Nixonites, still skulking around in the system. You should have been purged 30 years ago. But today, we show you the door.

Goodbye, George. Although you pass into historical footnotes, we still pay the price of your idiocy. Tomorrow, we shall have to face the enormous task of cleaning up after your destruction. And tomorrow we shall, never shrinking from our duty, but today we celebrate the end of your madness.

Goodbye, George. Your only mistake, in your own words, was appointing the wrong people. Can you imagine the hubris? Our only mistake was pretending, wishing, hoping, despite the enormity of the evidence, that you would rise into the honorable position of Leader of the Free World.

Goodbye, George. And to those that spun us ’round. Goodbye Condi Rice. Goodbye Tom Ridge. Goodbye Tommy Thompson. Goodbye Andy Card. Goodbye Scott McClelland. Goodbye John Ashcroft. You all failed us in innumerable ways.

Goodbye, George. The world is safer without you.

Well, let the blame game begin. Me, personally, I’m blaming Joe Torre. I love the guy, reminds me of my late grandfather. He’s the reason that the Yankees got this far, limping by with one, sometimes two, competent starting pitchers all season. But Red Sox manager, Terry Francona, did what Torre just did not do.
He played games 4, 5, and 6 as if they were the last games.

Which, of course, for the Red Sox, they were. Having won the first three, the Yankees seemed willing to play on tomorrow. There was always the next day. So instead of pulling starting pitchers into relief rotation, like Francona did with Arroyo and Wakefield, Torre let the struggling Tom Gordon and the spooked Mariano Rivera blow two potential saved games. (Rivera, bless him, has been rocked by the Sox ever since the All Star game.) Instead of pulling tired, struggling batters in extra innings with fresh pinch hitters from the bench, Torre lets Tony Clark bat.

Feh. I’m a timid arm-chair coach at best, and the only team I ever watch is the Yankees, so I can’t even attempt to pretend that I know anything about the mechanics of baseball managing. But I do know this, I’ve seen less crucial games where Torre pulled out a lot more stops in order for a win. And when he made some moves in this last game 7, we were already behind 10 to 3. What took him so long to wake up?

Game 4 was ours to lose, and game 5 was well within our grasp. It never should have come to a game 7, and, when it did, the Sox were, far more than the Yanks, ready to win.

Fast Food Patron: I’d like the fish sandwich value meal, please.

Voice in Ordering Box: That’ll be $5.43. Drive up to the first window, please.

FFP: Okay.

(Fast Food Patron drives up to First Window and hands Cashier at First Window a $20 and a $1.)

Cashier at First Window: That’ll be $4.99, please.

FFP: (confused) What about tax?

CaFW: Yeah… (pauses) What?

FFP: What about sales tax? You said $4.99. There’s tax, too.

CaFW: Yeah. (studies register, then nods) Yeah. That’s $4.99.

FFP: (resignedly) Okay!

(Fast Food Patron reaches through First Window and grabs the single out of the Cashier at Front Window’s hand, to avoid further confusion.)

There was an ad for I, Robot that, mercifully, hasn’t been shown in this market for a couple of days. The voice-over said, ominously, “We designed them to be trusted with our children, our families, and our homes, but did we design them to be trusted?”

The annoying sound you hear is the venting of my eternal frustration at copywriters that are that dumb. And that entry is my vote for the second dumbest thing ever written for an advertisement.

The first, and I hope you don’t ever see this commercial, is for a company called Vital Basics, which is a stupid miracle vitamin that boosts your metabolism, keeps you alert and awake, and cures dropsy. These guys are so confident you’ll love their product that they are giving it away for free. And so says an unscripted man-on-the-street testimonial from a woman with the shrillest voice imaginable. She shrieks, “They’re giving it away FREE? It must be good.” When she cackles the word “free” it sours milk and causes grown men to weep. It breaks teevee tubes and my glasses. It keeps me up at night with cold shivers. But besides all that: What type of logic is that? Surely I could ask, “They charge thousands of dollars for that? It must be good.” Or even, “They charge $5.95 for shipping and handling? That must be how they make their money.”

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.

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.

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.