Google home (search page) serves up an image of birthday cakes, candles and party paraphernalia for me today with the alt. text “Happy Birthday [my acct. name]“ instead of their regular logo. I feel violated in a privacy kind of way, not to mention that the picture and message are auto-generated and not heartfelt at all. Larry and Sergei don’t even know that I exist.This web 2.0 shit is getting out of hand. I’m hoping for someone to invent web 3.0 that puts the user back in the driver’s seat and runs Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Schmumblr, Bumblr and what have you out of fucking business.
Category Archives: Random Observational Thoughts (ROT)
Energy Dependency – A Common Sense Solution
Sitting at my desk I can hear the sweet, sweet sound of leaf blowers from all over the place. Right now, at this very moment, more gasoline is being consumed in America for the single purpose of leaf blowing than the total output of any random mid-sized European democracy. That’s a fact that I just made up and pulled out of my ass.
If everybody dumped their leaf blowers we would immediately see the following benefits:
- We wouldn’t have to listen to the infernal racket of leaf blowers all day, every day throughout the fall season.
- America would attain energy independence overnight.
- An instant, sharp increase in heart attacks resulting from unfit people cleaning up their yards the old fashioned way, thus culling the population and freeing up money for health care for the rest of us.
- On a longer time scale Americans would be more fit and healthy as a result of the exercise derived from manual labor, further easing the burden of healthcare on the national budget.
- The Home Depot and Lowes would probably go out of business, creating a vacuum in the market that would quickly be filled by the very same independent stores they put out of business in the first place. Karma/circle of life.
- All the illegal Mexicans would self deport.
- The sea levels would start retreating.
I’d say that’s killing a flock of seagulls with a single stone. Now where’s my Nobel Prize in something?
Karl Marx vs. Bryan Cranston Comparative Studies
As much as I like Breaking Bad (the final half-season was a bit contrived, I thought) and with no disrespect to Bryan Cranston, Karl Marx’ footprint in history will be much greater than Cranston’s.
Those in the know will know what I’m talking about.
Getting Into Shape
You can’t outrun a fork. You can exercise ’til you’re blue in the face, but you won’t get into shape unless you learn to put the fork down. That’s just the way it is.
Bodybuilding Is A Beauty Contest For Macho Pretty Boys
I just had an epiphany that bodybuilding isn’t a sport, but a pageant in which you have to work hard as an athlete and take a lot of illegal performance enhancing drugs to succeed. How profoundly deep is that?
I know, some of you will probably protest my use of “Macho” and “Boys” in the heading, implying I’m sexist, and you would be right. Girls/women shouldn’t be bodybuilders; it ain’t sexy.
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Each to his own, but this doesn’t rock my boat.
On Man Caves
If you have a room in your house that you refer to as your “man cave” where you watch football on a large flat-screen TV (but you don’t play yourself because you busted your knee in high school and that ruined your chances of a pro career) and porn on your computer, drink beer and do tactical dry-fire (really, you shouldn’t use live ammo in the house) drills with your Glock, it’s not a man cave. And you’re not a man.
Old Jungle Saying
Those of you who read The Phantom comic book series by Lee Falk as a kid will know what I’m talking about. Your age is just a number, but as you get older that number gets bigger and the number of your remaining years smaller. That isn’t the profundity that slipped my mind the other day on Facebook, but still not bad. I made that. Remember Jesus loves you. So much so that he’ll throw you into the fiery pits of hell for eternity if you don’t love him back.
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Making engraved images can get you into trouble. Picture credit: The Internet (clearly the original artist is on his way to hell if he isn’t there already, since he made an engraved image of one 3rd of the deity who expressly forbade it). Burn baby, burn!
Rock Truth #1
Most of the best and most legendary songs in rock history weren’t made by wunderkind instrumentalist wizards and divinely gifted singers, but rather by average-to-good musicians whose sum of combined parts (unsure about grammar/syntax here) where greater their individual talents. That’s when magic happens. There are exceptions.
I’ll admit, though, that this solo by Zakk Wylde is pretty hairy.
Edit: On second thought it is pretty much just noise. While he certainly can play guitar I find his repertoire to be limited. Definitely not top tier. But he does have the sound that Ozzy needs.
The Ways In Which We Depart And The Power Of Our Convictions
If it’s better to burn out than fade away, then why do most of us fade away? And isn’t burning out much the same as fading away anyway? What you really are trying to say (without having given much thought to it) is that it’s better to go out with a bang than with a whimper. And yet most of us still choose the whimper option. It takes guts to put your money where your mouth is. Or douse yourself with gasoline and strike a match just to make a point.
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Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at a busy Saigon road intersection on 11 June 1963. Quang Duc was protesting the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government led by Ngo Dinh Diem. Source: Wikipedia
The Road To Hell – The Fall Of The American Empire
The more I think about it, the more I think America is going in the wrong direction, possibly heading for the proverbial drain. This is not a partisan statement. We’ve been on the wrong track for many decades. Some things have, to be sure, improved significantly. I would for instance rather be a black person in 2013 than in 1913 (that bit still has a ways to go, but at least pseudo dictator Michael Bloomberg of New York got spanked by federal judge Shira Scheindlin over his fascist, racist and glaringly unconstitutional Stop & Frisk program). But other things have taken a dramatically degenerate turn. What’s worse is that it most likely can’t be fixed because our only choices are bad and really bad. We are in the process of giving up nationhood in favor of business incorporationhood. Think Citizens United.
“It must be fun to watch a President [or Congressman, or Senator, or Supreme Court Justice] run, just ask the man who owns [or owns a share] in one.”
~ Steppenwolf from the song Monster.
I’m pretty sure somewhere in our DNA there is a self-destruct gene; it’s just waiting for the right circumstances to kick in and we’ll all go down in a conflagration of thermonuclear war, or release a zombie bug, or devolve over time to render us hairy, knuckle dragging man-like creatures, or we’ll all be employed as greeters at Wal-Mart. I don’t know which would be the worse fate.
If you don’t wake up tomorrow you may take it as confirmation that you died in the apocalypse that took place when you were sleeping. We are like bacteria in a petri dish that flourish as long as it receives nourishment, but eventuality suffocates in its own waste.