Unintelligentsia

Bored as fuuuuuukkkk.

I wish I was in front of my computer the moment inspiration strikes. It comes quickly and unexpectedly. A sudden desire to shout something at the world. But it passes quickly also. Lost in the ennui of the day to day. Nullified out by some opposing outrage, like two tidal forces canceling each other out.

The other day I was watching CNBC and some idiot mouthpiece made a comment about the economy, that I can’t even recall now but at the time it made me furious, and before I could sit at my computer and hammer out an article about my theory on “age based communism”, I decided to make a cup of tea, then Charlie Rose came on, then I thought I saw a naked breast on Google news, and the article I was going to write was finished before it ever began.

I’m home all day thinking of interesting things to write about, and not doing a damn thing about it. This excitable and fairly creative mind of mine is the force that allows me to come up with all this dumb shit, and it is the same force that prevents me from doing anything productive about it. And now I am writing about not writing. I’ve become a monster!

Although, I recently, as in, five seconds ago, took a huge leap forward when I finally figured out how to disable my laptops touchpad in Vista. That will at least lower the frustration level when trying to type down to “Elevated: Significant Risk of Irritation”.

P-I-M-P spells pimp!

I decided to move my blog to a new domain name because having it associated directly with my name increasingly seemed like an unnecessary risk to be taking since I’m ya know, unemployed. Google’s a bitch, what can I say?

Anywho, bear with me for a while cause I did a half assed job of porting this bitch over to the new domain, so if shit blows up on you, be patient.

QUIT RIDING ME MAN!!

Steve Guttenburg. Never. Ever. Funny.

On the way into work this morning I heard this story about the kid pretending to be a cop in Chicago, then I read it again in my RSS reader, then I saw it on digg, then it was emailed to me, then I stumbled it twice, therefore I decided this story was serious, serious news. Dire in fact. I mean, the kid was fourteen, and he pretended to be a cop. Can you see the seriousness of that? Can you!?

A 14-year-old aspiring police officer donned a uniform, walked into a Chicago police station and managed to get an assignment – patrolling in a squad car for five hours before he was detected, police said Sunday.

Dugan said the boy looks older than 14

Interesting, so the Chicago police department was unable to tell that a 14 year old kid was underage just by looking at him? If only his voice didn’t keep cracking he might have made it to retirement. Well, I hope this sparks some debate about how easy it is to mistake a minor for being 18. At the very least Dateline should take stock of this, because the “she looked older” argument just gained a helluva lot of credence.

Who gave the indians bronser???

National Geographic has listed it’s top ten most viewed images of 2008, and numero ten was an image of an uncontacted Amazon tribe firing arrows at an airplane above the rain forest borderlands of Peru and Brazil. It’s pretty sweet that there’s people left on the earth who have no idea life exists outside of the remote jungle they live in.

This tribe should remain uncontacted forever, not because I respect their tribal values or culture, but because the image of this tribe terrify me.

First of all, why is the image so small and grainy? This is National Geographic we’re talking about, you know, the guys who put cameras in dead animals to get high resolution images of animals eating the corpse, so why is the first image of this strange and ancient tribe in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest a grainy 600 by 600 pixel image that looks like a cross between the Zapruder film, and images taken of Sasquatch? It’s almost like they had to rush the shot because they felt the arrows those tribesmen were firing could actually bring down the plane.

Secondly, why are they so tan? Did the last expedition happen to leave a bottle of bronzer behind? I can’t imagine the benefit of having orange skin in the jungle. My guess is its some form of primitive hunting outfit to avoid being mistaken for a leopard and getting a poison arrow in the ass. Anyways, the fact that this undiscovered tribe looks a like a bunch of New Jersey guidos is a tad disconcerting.

And finally, I think this tribe has allied itself with the evil forces of Sauron, because that dude in the back looks a helluva lot like the Urukai, those black orcs that love the taste of “man flesh” from Lord of the Rings. Creepy.

Indian? Orc? Or hobo?

So in short, anthropology a dark science which will eventually destroy us all, and this tribe should be nuked from space. It’s the only way to be sure.

Anything but the grease!

Reading police blotters is hit or miss. Most times it’s dumb stuff like a kid kicking a recycling bin down the street, (a crime I once made the Kenmore police blotter for w00t!), or your more run of the mill murders, rapes, etc. But every so often you get the rare story that is epic in it’s hilarity, like for example, this beauty.

A Buffalo man told police two men, including his manager, forced him from his home Friday evening and drove him to the restaurant where he works and told him to clean grease off a Dumpster. The man, who lives off Hertel Avenue, said the pair forced their way into his bedroom by kicking open the door.

He also told police when he was done the manager gave him his paycheck and instructed him not to go to the police or “he would end up dead somewhere.”

That’s got to be a pretty intense situation right there. I can easily see why weapons weren’t necessary for this crime, since their criminal genius alone must have been intimidating enough. Thankfully it wasn’t worse than it was, I mean they could have made him clean the grease trap or something. Those things are gross!

When I was a kid I used to walk to school everyday. Even during the harsh winter months. With my sensitive eyes, the combination of cold, wind, and forward momentum would make my eyes tear up and run down my face. Inevitably during my walk I would run into some kids that I knew, and seeing my teary face they would ask me, “Hey man, are you crying? What’s wrong pussy, why are you crying?” And I would respond, “No! My eyes are just sensitive! I’m not crying!” Except, then I would be, because their comments were so hurtful you see. True story.

Ahhh! Kill it with fire!!

A Korean woman addicted to plastic surgery has been left unrecognizable after her obsession led her to inject cooking oil into her face. You read that correctly, she injected cooking oil, like say, Crisco, into her goddamn face.

From the Times:

Eventually the surgeons she visited refused to carry out any more work on her and one suggested that her obsession could be a sign of a psychological disorder. After realizing that the girl with the grossly swollen face was indeed their daughter her horrified parents took her to a doctor. Once again the possibility that Hang had a mental disorder was raised and she started treatment.

However, this treatment was too expensive for her to keep up and she soon fell back into old ways. Amazingly, she found a doctor who was willing to give her silicone injects and, what’s more, he then gave her a syringe and silicone of her own so she could self-inject. When her supply of silicone ran out Hang resorted to injecting cooking oil into her face.

Apparently plastic surgery addictions have nothing to do with looks, since she now looks like leatherface. Still, I can’t be to hard on her, after all, not everyone can be as gorgeous as I am. The pressure of trying to keep up with my looks can be a lot for some people to bear. I sympathize really.

UPDATE – I have obtained before and after pics!

Before…

Before...

Annnnddd… after!!!

After!

I actually think she looked better before they tried to remove the cooking oil from her face. They should have just let it ride. Now she looks like a sad clown with runny makeup whereas before she just looked like a fatty.

A real American hero! Not like those phony ones you see in the movies!

As a kid I used to watch G.I. Joe with a fervor bordering on the insane. I would announce to the entire house that come five o’clock I would be in sole possession of the living room television, (a HUGE Sylvania CRT with a faux wood theme, truly an epic television set which is alas, now relegated to technology heaven…) “no matter what”. The show pitted the good guys, America’s daring, highly-trained “Special Mission force”, G.I. Joe, against the bad guys, COBRA, a ruthless terrorist organization bent on ruling the world. Sound familiar?

It was like the shows creators had a crystal ball which saw into the future and predicted America’s “war on terror”. America has always had some “us versus them” cultural battle of capitalist versus occidentalist raging, but this most recent iteration with Cobra being played by Al Queda, is by far the best and most strikingly accurate yet.

Anywho, like most young, idealistic, dumb, kids, I wanted good to triumph over evil, therefore, I wanted the Joe team to win. But, slowly, surely, my enthusiasm for the Joe’s began to erode. I began to ask myself, was Cobra really so bad? The Joe team tells me they are, and sure they are pretty aggressive, and I trust Flint more than I trust my own father, but what does Cobra really stand for?

If you take the movie as the basis for Cobra’s rather ambiguous motives, then they were simply fighting for the sake of their lizard people. That seemed like a valid cause. So were the Joe’s scared that the lizard men might wrest control of the planet from them?

It felt like the Joe’s were fighting against the possibility of lizard men usurping humanities place as the dominant species. Would the multi-ethnic, and yet singularly American, Joe team, be willing to fight for fucking Lizard men? I had my doubts. They never even tried to reason or compromise with Cobra, which seemed like a recipe for never ending conflict, and unless that is exactly what the Joe’s wanted, it was counter intuitive to their mission. I could understand not dealing with Cobra if Cobra’s demands were insane, but how would you know that unless you tried to negotiate? Was lizard man equality even a possibility?

It was becoming increasingly clear that the Joe team was a bunch of fucking meatheaded bullies, responding with overwhelming force to every and any situation they deemed a threat regardless of the circumstances surrounding it. And that, coupled with a growing feeling that Cobra was never going to win, the best they could hope for was maybe a two part series that scared the Joe’s real bad or killed a main character, and a feeling that the Joe’s moral high ground was dubious at best, made me begin to root for Cobra.

Cobra had cooler uniforms, cooler logos, they had a feeling of unity and equality, and they had an invigorating philosophy of change, how could I not cheer for them?

Parallels can be drawn everywhere from this simplistic childrens show to real life. A real life in which, much like the show, the winners write the history. When faced down with black and white situations of good and evil, capitalism vs. communism, axis vs. allies, I find myself reverting back to my eight year old self, trying to discern an individual truth from in between the shades of gray.

Jim "Dickface" Kramer. Nickname mine.

The governments proposed financial bailout of wall street hit a little snafu today when it failed to pass in the House of Representatives, which of course touched off the biggest one day loss in wall street history as everyone “in the know” collectively shit their pants upon the realization that this mess may force them to actually have to work for a living.

Anywho, on Mad Money this evening, Jim Kramer was in a real funk and I just don’t think any amount of Boo-Ya’s are going to snap him out of it. See, Kramer prides himself on being a friend to the little guy trying to make it in the investment game. He considers himself a man of integrity who does the best he can to try to protect small time investors from bad investments, and yet, he had the CEO of Wachovia bank on his show a scant few months ago, talking about how rad the company was doing. Whoops! I suppose it was an honorable move for him to apologize on air, and I give him props for doing it, but I still think he’s a complete dick face. Why? For being pro bailout.

The media pundits, like Kramer, claim that this bailout is to prevent a complete economic collapse. That the inability or unwillingness of banks to loan money will make it harder for people to _get_ loans for cars, houses, school, utilities, what have you, and this lack of financial turn around will eventually grind the economy to a complete halt, causing massive job losses, and turmoil for everyone. Fair enough. Except, these same experts are the people that didn’t see this coming. The same people that had CEO’s on their shows touting how amazing their companies were right before they blew the fuck up. These are the same people who pushed for Ben “helicopter” Bernanke to fight inflation by lowering interest rates while ignoring the deflation happening in homes all across America. The same people who told us all that greed is a wonderful thing, even as investors were getting eviscerated by bullshit financial schemes and outright motherfucking lies.

Things ARE already hard for “regular” people, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to separate rich people, like Kramer, and the fat fucking windbag assholes on MSNBC and their ilk, from the idea that these fucks are scared to death that they and their corporate asshole buddies are going to lose everything. Because that’s what rich people fear the most, losing their money. Losing their, “investments”. To hear Maria Bartiromo talk about how it’s going to be harder for kids to get student loans, when you know that bitch just popped a couple Xanax in the bathroom as she watched her millions in Wachovia stock fucking plummet, makes me fucking insane with fury.

No one, with any certainty can say where, or how, this will end, bailout or no bailout, so why are we scrambling like fish in a rapidly evaporating pond to bail these assholes out? A good economy, a good system, should be able to weather crisis’s like this without totally collapsing, and capitalism is supposedly the best we have, so why not let it ride? Why do I have to continually, as a tax payer, pay for the sins of the rich? Must I always be at their mercy?

Now I hate to sound like a subversive here, sure I have money invested, my 401K will probably be worth dick in a few weeks, hell, I may even lose my job, but it would all be worth it to see Maria Bartiromo lose everything or Jim Kramer hang himself with a shoelace from the chandelier in his dining room.

Fuck it, I’m tired of getting pushed around. Let the rich fucks stand on their own bullshit philosophy they’ve worked so hard to ram down our fucking throats. I say, reset everything to zero and let the chips fall where they may.

UPDATE - Well here are at least two representatives that agree with me…

Dude had a boa contrictor, and it was a surprise he was all coked up?

So I guess 53-year-old Jack “The Snake” Roberts, former WWF superstar, is doing pretty rad. Last week he was found passed out backstage before a scheduled live wrestling match, or rather, wrastlin’ match, after apparently downing twelve airplane sized bottles of vodka.

After being woken up Roberts became aggressive and asked for an “8-ball”. He then spent the next fifteen minutes stumbling around the ring rambling and struggling to form a coherent sentence while trying to address the crowd.

During the match, Roberts was clearly unable to perform, barely responding to the barrage of fake blows he received from the other wrestler, J.T. Lightning. About a minute into the match, Roberts’ opponent, clearly frustrated with the situation, asked the referee to end the fight, he then grabbed the mic and told Roberts, “I’ve wrestled drug addicts, you are a piece of shit, Snake. You gypped these people. Fuck you.”

After the verbal assault, Jake responded in perhaps the only reasonable fashion imaginable, by pulling down the front of his pants and exposing his penis to the crowd. Backstage, the madness continued. Snake broke his hand punching a wall, then ran into the street crying.

All in all it sounds like a pretty awesome night of wrastlin’. I couldn’t imagine ever going to a wrestling match and enjoying it, but if there were whacked out former wrestling star drug addicts having epic meltdowns at every match, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t miss a single one.

I think the real bad guy here is J.T. Lightning. What kind of asshole beats up a drug addict and then belittles them in front of thousands of people? He should be ashamed of himself!