Do That In Your Own Bathtub, Kid

So I saved a kid at my pool today.

Do You Like Eating Shit?

You ever read or watch a news report about something you already have knowledge of? You ever notice how the reporter/writer gets facts wrong? If you've never had this experience, then congratulations. Apparently, you know nothing. About anything. Until you wiki/google it. Then you come back a fucking expert, don't cha?

There are only three words that are correct in this image.

Selling Me My Own Shit

The idea for this post has been kicking around for a while. Unfortunately, I now run the risk of offending/saddening D-girl and Z-girl because they have since gifted me with these T-shirts.
No offense to you guys, really! I mean it! 
[For once. So feel special, damn it. <(￣◡￣)>]
<= They saw this one in stores, separately, and they both thought of me and got it before meeting up and realizing they'd chosen the same gift idea! I'm so flattered by the sentiment, haha. I love those two. (o^__^o)

HOWEVER. Now comes the bad. No one should shell out money to buy these products from a store.

When I got the shirt(s) this train of thought didn't cross my mind in the moment. As it should be. I think...

FYI: North Carolina

Being a guy who's generally apathetic about politics (yes, it's true) I didn't even hear about this until the same time I heard about Obama's declaration.

N. Carolina's state legislature voted to amend their state constitution, banning gay marriage. Here's are some layouts of the precinct voting totals.

So, what do the precincts that stood against bigotry have in common?

Yep, that's right. Those are all places where institutions of higher learning are located. Fancy that correlation!

And I'm sure all the rednecks are thinking, "Daggum liberal yuppies. All dat fancy learnin's twisted dey heads with all kinds'a foolish, high-falootin' nonsense like logic and science til' they don't know what's what."

"All these years, momma was right. School is the devil!"

9gag Fucking Sucks Now

I made a few posts a while back mentioning the site 9gag. Here, here, and here.

We used to have a joke there. Scrolling through that site was so fun and addictive we'd say we "lost our souls to 9gag". If we introduced it to a friend and s/he ended up becoming addicted, well, another soul just got lost.

Well, fuck that. I have my soul back, such as it was.

9gag fucking sucks now.

Pages upon pages of crappy MS Paint cut-copy-paste images telling stale jokes. And it gets worse. The Comments section, integrated into Facebook, is ALSO filled with stale jokes. Every single post.


Used to be, 9gag had funny material. Original material. No longer.

Too Much PC Is Bad For Your Health

I think it's stupid to use 'African American' as a substitute for 'black'. Why? Because not all Africans are black. Yeah. Surprising, isn't it? Welcome to the present.

Also, it's really long to type every time. I first noticed that when writing a paper in high school at some point. I started shortening it to 'AA' but I use those initials for something else these days.

Unlike, say, Asians, blacks in the U.S. don't have deep cultural connections to their motherlands. For example, Chinese immigrants, they and their children and grandchildren will know they're from Chinese stock.
I hope. ABC's these days.... I dunno...
Same for Japanese, Korean, Filipino, etc. But black people whose ancestors were slaves? They don't know where. Sadly, that kind of thing didn't get passed down to the current generation. It's ironically parallel to how most white Americans are just 'white' even in their own minds. They feel little to no connection at all to wherever their ancestors came from. Polish, Greek, Irish, British? Nope, just American. Hell, they definitely don't speak anything but, that's for sure.

Annoyance #3: Ignorant Grammar

Incorrectly using 'of' as in "shouldn't of done that" or "I would of done that if I'd remembered".

I know why people think that's how it's written. Because that's what it sounds like. Granted, 'shouldn't've' is a double contraction, which is considered non-standard. But that's no excuse. That just means you shouldn't use it when writing in the first place. 'Would've' has no such excuse. The person who gets that wrong didn't pay attention in English class or they never learned it in the first place.

When I see this I really feel like there just isn't enough attention given to education in the U.S. And I'm not even just talking about money. I'm talking about respect. Lack of funding is just a symptom, not the disease itself. The disease is how little Americans care of learning. They like to keep it real instead. There's this attitude here of "Too much book learning will make you lose sight of how the real world works."

SOPA/PIPA

I considered doing one of the "go dark" things but I think my little blog here would better serve the cause with some information.



Here are some good links for more. Since you're here visiting my blog I'm going to make the assumption that, unlike most Americans, you read things you don't have to and might even like reading things.

http://www.fark.com/2012/sopapipa/
http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41911.pdf

If you don't live in the U.S. just know this: if you frequent sites with domain names of .com or .org your virtual "neighborhood" falls within our grasp.

I don't know about you but I look across my Bookmarks toolbar and I see this.

http://chadrocco.deviantart.com/art/SOPA-PIPA-Executive-E-Motions-280090484

The big companies backing SOPA/PIPA didn't want "their" money going to the artists then and they aren't concerned about any money going or not going to artists now.

You know what? I don't think anyone really believes the propaganda these big organizations are putting out. Really, they just want you to do nothing. They win that way, too.

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Over the past few days I've become more and more cognizant of the fact that things weren't simpler when I was a kid, I was just ignorant and blind. That's not self-deprecation, by the way. Honestly, I believe that at that age it isn't good to have all kinds of heavy issues laid on an undeveloped mind. A part of growing up is discovering that reality isn't so simple after all. Yeah, now that I'm on this side of 20 I can see that a lot of these "adults" never grew up when they were supposed to.

An Overheard Conversation

At the local library renewing a book and I overheard this one.

"I don't have a computer at home."
Oh, you're so lucky. I prefer to come here and get things done, like that. *snaps fingers*
"It got a virus..."
Oh..... too bad.

What a dumb fuck.... True 1st-world idiot right there. Oh, you're so lucky you don't have this evil time-wasting diversion called a personal computer.

Annoyance #1: Stale Joke

I present to you a new series of things that annoy me. A list of pet peeves if you like. That is to say, certain things of no real consequence that evoke a disproportionate amount of dissatisfaction on my part. There exist a great many wrongs of significance that urk me but these do not rank among them. This I will grudgingly admit.
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When people with birthdays that land on leap years say they're only 1/4 of their age, e.g. "I'm only 5 years old." This is retarded. Regardless of the infrequent occurrance of the day of February the 29th, another cycle of 365 days has passed since your birth. People born on leap days merely have their birthdays fall on March 1st in common years, if they so choose. They can properly say, "I've only had 5 birthdays" perhaps, but they better have forfeited those intervening common year celebrations to earn this privilege. The absence of a 4/29 date on which to celebrate does not magically keep your age in stasis. Celebrate it or not, you've gotten older, punk.