Unhelpful

In the Era of the 5.25″ Floppy, data storage was a much more fragile endeavor than it is today when every typical home system has anywhere from 1-50 gigabytes of hard drive storage.

On the back of most disk jackets were warnings in many different languages about exactly what not to put your poor floppies through.

The floppy is all but irrelevant for most home users now, and the venerable 5.25″ lingers on only in the basement of your grandfather who, despite having enough money to travel on vacation every summer simply will not spend $500 or less for a brand new computer. He’s still got that 286 downstairs, and keeping it running, what with his WordPerfect 3.41 and DesqView, is some sort of strange badge of honor.

Read more »

My wife and I were out shopping, and as we passed a pet store, we were sucked by powers unknown.

I was looking at something and my wife calls me over. She’s looking at guinea pigs. I’m somewhat confused, as neither of us are what you would call “rodent people”. She pokes me in the ribs and tells me to watch.

I watch.

One of the little guinea pigs is looking for tail. I’ll call him “Action Jackson”. Action Jackson’s running around the cage, trying to score with the other little guinea pigs. The tiny rabbits in the same enclosure are very annoyed. Action Jackson isn’t very selective, as he’s trying to ride every other member of his species. I don’t know if any of the others were male, but I don’t think Action Jackson was terribly worried. Hell, he mounted one the wrong way. When we saw that, we were laughing hysterically, and so were the people next to us.

There were no people next to us. I look over, and the other two people laughing turn out to be a parrot that does a great impression of … two people laughing. So we’re laughing at Action Jackson, the parrot’s laughing at us, then we start laughing at the parrot.

Then the parrot leaps out of the cage and starts gnawing a bunny.

It’s all true, except the bit about the parrot gnawing a bunny. I made that part up. THX.

It took Jesus three days. It took me less than one, and I walked on water yesterday. It squished from under the sod beneath my feet. Unlike Bruce Willis in “The Sixth Sense” who was dead but didn’t realize it, I was dead and was quite aware of the fact. I considered venting my anger at God, but that’s pretty pointless for an atheist.

I received some spam today (and you know I’m a target for some of the weirdest) that was rambling and meandering. It was extra cool because it preached some sort of new-agey “let’s all believe in the same god” vibe, and it had TWO SPACES BETWEEN EVERY WORD! Needless to say, this refreshing spaciousness moved me. Perhaps you would like to laugh along:

Those who claim to know God have made absurd claims. And they behave as if religions are a competition.
We thus find The First Church of Jesus Christ, and The First Baptist Church, and The First Adventist Church.
Are we in a race ? Does it matter who was First ?

Go ahead and read the whole thing if you’d like.

On the domestic front, me and my wife have settled our differences regarding the butter/margarine issue. Now I just use soy cream and minced garlic on everything.

Chick Publications wants you to be a better person. This is accomplished by twisting phrases to mean whatever the tract writer wants (a favorite obsession of fundamentalist religions everywhere), using fearmongering, outright deception, and scare tactics.

Open minded people everywhere share a common experience at cringing at the subreption within these texts. It reminds me of a story from my childhood.

In my neighborhood, we had something called “The Five Day Club” every summer. Some holier-than-thou proselytizer would have some volunteers from their church come into the neighborhood, round up all the little child-heathens, and tell us bible stories, morality fables, etc.

There was a rather perverse incentive program. We’d get candy for memorizing certain biblical verses and for bringing friends. At the end of each session (which seemed like hours but was probably only 90 minutes or so), lemonade and cookies were served. Even though I was young, say, 7 or so, I found it curious to be lectured on generosity followed by having one of the neighbor’s kids large, well-fed parents making sure we only took a single cookie.

To sum it up, it was kinda like AMWAY for Jesus children. In terms of cookies and candy, it was a smashing success; in terms of life lessons, it probably ended up teaching many of us lessons other than those intended.

I suppose this process was supposed to instill a sense of reverence of Jesus and the bible into us. What it ended up doing was teaching us that adults would give you candy for memorizing stuff that you didn’t really understand, and that if you let people tell you stories, you’d get cookies and drinks afterwards.

Being competetive boys, God’s Candy Competition wasn’t quite good enough. My cousins and friends would try to “out-do” each other by getting “saved” more than one another. Often, there was a pool party afterwards, during which we lorded our piety over one another.

“I was saved 24 times”

…I would feel bad because I was only saved eight times. I was a slacker before my time.

Needless to say, I read the first sentence and realized this wasn’t meant for my eyes.

One of my cats has a little shallow box she likes to sit in when I’m in the family room. It’s just her size, and she’s big enough to see over it, you know, just in case something interesting happens.

Although it’s probably been lying around here for a year or so, today is the first day I took a look at the writing on it. In big writing, it’s labelled “PROPERTY OF U.S.P.S.”. And it has a warning below that, in smaller print…

I’m not sure how I obtained this box, but I suspect I brought it home from work when I had to cart a few things home. Perhaps my wife did it and not me. The language is pretty clear, and I can only draw one conclusion: I am bad. Naughty. Not just “shake someone’s Etch-a-Sketch upside down while they’re not looking” bad, but “dangerous bomb-making internet cult member pedophile” bad.

I’ve decided that I’m going to stand my ground on this one. If any member of the United States Postal Service wants to have a SWAT team standoff and throw riot gas in my windows, so be it. $1,000 or three years imprisonment with sex-starved extremely hard-bodied men is actually a small price to pay for a slice of kitty joy.

Be careful if you live anywhere near me. I might come up dressed in jean shorts, a loud print shirt, and my favorite Docs - and you’ll think I’m an official representative of the U.S.P.S. since I boldly display my Official Cardboard Postal Box. I’m a dangerous fuck. Don’t test me, I might even steal a soft drink from your refrigerator while you’re not looking.

All of this begs the question, is use as a kitty napping place considered “misuse” for such an icon of proper civil governance?