No comment.
I am NOT in my happy place
Cindy and I and the Horsemen all had a wonderful Christmas this year. Many, many thanks to all the Bratzels and my parents for adding to the joy.
However, I have a major beef with the Crayola company.
When you see this box on a store shelf
you naturally make the assumption that it contains 120 Crayola crayons–120 different-colored Crayola crayons. There are no other descriptions on the outside of the container. My fiance bought it for me; I love getting the really big boxes of them.
However, what I got was this:
And of course the box was sealed in clear wrap so no one can inspect the contents.
This is a deliberate, malicious rip-off. It gets consumers to buy something other than what they expect or want. It is some marketing moron’s “keen idea” to unload product that doesn’t move very well.
I am going to give the manager of the store where it was bought a small-sized hard time about this, but I am writing a major letter to the Crayola company about it.
Why should I make such a big fuss about a seemingly small thing? If you don’t bitch mightily about such things, you end up with
- melomine in baby formula
- large amounts of “spices” (code for MSG) in the packaged food you buy
- toxic chemicals in the drywall you use in your home
- Black Friday come-0ns from Best Buy that are blatantly fraudulent (turns out those that bitched loudly in BB’s forums miraculously got what they’d ordered)
- usurious interest rates on credit cards (28.9% in some cases)
Time to bleach my eyeballs
Fox News (“fair and balanced”).
An article called How to Spot a Single Woman.
Contained in the “Men’s Health” department.
Gah.
One ring to rule them all
I took three of the Four Horsemen (my stepsons) to see movies yesterday.
All three of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies. All in one day. Major butt numb-ery.
Like most children, I had heroes as I was growing up. Two of them were comic-book characters–Captain America (who always did the morally correct thing, even when it hurt) and the Batman (who essentially did the same thing).
The third was Professor J.R.R. Tolkien’s characters in LotR. I would visualize the scenes from the books every time I read them, which has been so often that I couldn’t possibly count them now. It made me sad to see that the Hobbit heroes weren’t recognized as such by their own people, especially Sam. (As Rick Emerson once remarked, “Samwise Gamgee never quite got the credit he deserved.”)
When the Jackson movies were announced, I so badly wanted them to be good, and faithful to the story, and not some badly-hacked Hollywood contrivance.
I was not disappointed.
Watching those movies again with me on Sunday, all of my children can now testify how I gasp in wonder at the Great Hall of Khazad-Dûm, celebrate just how well the Balrog 0f Moria was made, and shout in joy when Merry and Eowyn kill the Lord of the Nazgûl.
And I am always surprised by my tears as Frodo says goodbye to his friends and sails over the sea to Valinor and to rest.
It figures…
A very good friend did a kindness to me and the family on Thanksgiving day.
He discovered that the desktop computer we intended to buy at Best Buy (got it? BEST BUY!) on Black Friday at 5 a.m. (yeah, we got swept up in the consumer frenzy) was actually available for sale early Thanksgiving morning online.
(Sweet machine–HP Pavillion, quad-core, 1TB hard disk, 3GB RAM, 20″ monitor, printer, etc.–for $599.)
Friend put one in his online shopping cart and called us to see if we wanted to him to go ahead with the purchase and ship it to us. I said, “Great! Do that, and I’ll send you a check.”
He gave BB his credit card number. Here’s the receipt he got:
Then he waited. And waited.
After 10 days, he got the monitor and printer. A few days later he called to see how the rest of the order was coming.
It wasn’t.
“Oversold” was the excuse. Friend asked what to do about the monitor and printer he got. “Oh, well, if you got those then you will get your computer,” he was told.
He waited a few more days before calling again. “Oversold”, he was told, and before he could mention the monitor and printer again, he was told his credit card had been credited back for the full price of the package, and that was that.
At that point, Friend decided that discretion was the better part of valor.
So–Friend ends up with free monitor and printer for his trouble, we don’t get our desktop computer, and Best Buy shows ONCE AGAIN that their doorbuster Black Friday deals are not much more than a scam.
(That’s all right, in a way. I kinda wanted to build a new machine on our own anyway.)
A blast from the past
You’ll never guess who wrote this.
“In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad], the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth.
“Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE [author's emphasis]….
“Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant…While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.”
The author? John Quincy Adams.
Talk about your living, breathing hate crime
This is Lynne Torgerson. She is planning a political campaign to unseat…
…Representative Keith Ellison, America’s first Muslim member of Congress. (He’s the guy that took his Congressional oath of office using Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Koran.)
Got it? Now read this. And this.
I’m particularly appalled Torgerson’s fallacious attempts at creating an Aristotelian syllogism:
“And, what do I know of Islam? Well, I know of 9/11. Nineteen (19) men from Saudi Arabia, all Muslim, hi-jacked planes, and flew into the two (2) World Trade Towers murdering thousands of people, and tried to fly into our Pentagon, and some believe they also tried to fly an airplane into our White House. From this, what I perceive is Islam conducting an act of war against my country.”
combined with
“Who is Keith Ellison? He is my opposing candidate for the Fifth Congressional District seat. Keith Ellison is a Muslim, a person who was raised Christian and converted to Islam.”
By the same extension, Ms. Torgerson, it was a crew of brown-eyed men that committed the 9/11 atrocities, and it was a brown-eyed man who shot and killed at Ford Hood. Does that mean that Keith Ellison, like other brown-eyed men, is not qualified to hold Congressional office?
Torgerson is also anti-choice, anti-gay marriage, an anti-technology Luddite, and would make a nice matching book-end to Michelle Bachmann. Where the hell does Minnesota gets these whack-jobs, anyway?
BTW, Lynne, PLO stands for Palestine Liberation Organization.
What’s the hardest thing about being a male prostitute?
The state of Nevada has approved a method of quickly determining the presence of STDs in men, and now brothel owners of that fine state want to offer both men and women for sexual services.
George Flint, a minister turned lobbyist for brothel owners, thinks this is repugnant.
Why, George? Are you saying that it is all right for women to sell their bodies, but not men? Do you think that customers who want the sexual services of women are less icky than those who seek men?
…or can you say homophobia?
March of the (high school) falsettos
Peter Atlas, teacher and director of theatrical productions at Concord-Carlisle Regional High School, in Concord MA, decided to stage a production of “Falsettos”, a musical play that contains the following themes:
1. a man who abandons his family for his gay lover
2. lesbian neighbors
3. a “healthy dose of profanity and pornography” (per these wingnuts)
The godbag asshats at Massresistance can’t stand the fact that a high school wanted to stage a play that deals with issues that happen in the real world. I bet they’d much rather see traditional musicals like Carousel, Sweet Charity, Cabaret, Guys and Dolls, Godspell, Little Shop of Horrors, Mame, Grease, The Fantasticks, Gypsy, or West Side Story.
Oh, wait!
- Carousel (domestic violence)
- Sweet Charity (prostitution)
- Cabaret (abortion, homosexuality, anti-semitism)
- Guys and Dolls (gambling, drinking, premarital sex)
- Godspell (dirty hippies, blasphemy)
- Little Shop of Horrors (sadism, murder)
- Mame (sex, binge drinking, non-traditional families)
- Grease (sex, smoking, drinking)
- The Fantasticks (rape)
- Gypsy (child labor, stripping)
- West Side Story (gang violence, rape, murder)
Send a note to Mr. Atlas and his school principal Peter Badalament and let them know that ignoring the “what about the children!” godbags was the right thing to do.
(a great BIG tip o’ the hat to Dan Savage for this one)
An open letter to the Huffington Post
I love the Huffington Post. It’s one of the first 4 or 5 webpages I first open, in fact.
That said, I’m rapidly losing my will to open the page. The false medical stories you spread are dangerous, at best. Today, there was a homeopathy article claiming the same tired scam lies that have made the “alternative medicine” snake-oil salespeople billions this year. You want to rail against wasteful spending? THAT’S where you go. The anti-vaccination, alternative medicine, and homeopathy communities kill people while callously preying on the public’s gullible nature about all things “natural”.
Please show more skepticism when posting those stories.
For more information, check out What’s the Harm.
I am also posting this letter at http://www.givesgoodemail.com.
Thank you for your attention.
(This letter came from here.)
–
GGE
AT&T–meet Apple. Apple–meet AT&T.
There has been a lot of kerfluffle in the media about how sucky AT&T’s wireless network has become since AT&T signed an exclusive agreement with Apple to carry the iPhone.
In particular, Consumer Report’s annual report on wireless service shows AT&T’s network to be dead last in terms of service and support.
However, AT&T apparently handled a 4000% increase in volume in the last three years rather handily. It may be that the whole affair may be a matter of condemning the messenger.
(Apologies. Some dipwads at YouTube have disabled embedding for the 300 clips. Click on the picture itself and you can see the video.)
“You have not experienced Shakespeare until you hear it in the original Klingon”
I just couldn’t pass this one up.
For the foot fetishist doormats among us
A quote from one of Dan Savage’s Letters of the Day:
…I didn’t advise SFF to dump his girlfriend merely because she won’t allow him to touch her feet. Her refusal to indulge him in a sexual pleasure that requires so little from her—he’s not asking her to learn to tie complicated knots or lay in a tube of ice for 45 minutes before coming to bed—points to more trouble down the road. That kind of selfishness and inconsideration rarely manifests itself in just one area; if this is how she’s treating him where his fetish is concerned…odds are good that she will treat him just as shabbily in other areas (if she isn’t already). Also factored into my advice for SFF: he’s only 23-years-old and he’s been with this woman for four years. Settling down requires settling for, yes, but 19 is awfully young to settle for someone with so little regard for your sexual needs and fulfillment.
Preach, sir, preach.
Fox News continues its fine tradition of making stupid mistakes
You can’t buy this quality of comedy:
Too bad this doesn’t count as “on-air mistakes“.
(tip o’ the hat to Wonkette)
A dissertation to end all dissertations
(tip o’ the hat to Pharyngula)
Kent Hovind, a godbag whackjob currently doing 10 years in the federal resort in Edgefield, South Carolina, for tax-related mopery-dopery, wrote a doctoral dissertation.
No, really.
He wrote a dissertation that was accepted by Patriot University, where “Dr.” Hovind got himself diploma-mill master’s and doctor’s “degrees”. The dissertation puts forth Hovind’s beliefs (and he calls them beliefs) that the earth is only 6,000 years old.
Here is an image of the beginning of the first page:
Heart-burning. Touched. Completely inappropriate. Ungrammatical. Written at a junior-high-school level of composition. No footnotes. No endnotes. Full of typos. Citations on the level of:
Whew! Back-breaking research and top-notch sources. Not.
“Dr.” Hovind also built Dinosaur Adventure Land (closed now), and he claims that the “New World Order” is being plotted by, among others, Jane Fonda and the British royal family.
