Unhelpful

I wish fast food places would concentrate on fast food instead of all the other crap whose sole purpose is to make sure I want to start smacking people with baseball bats.

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Originally credited to fictitious r33t.org author ‘Gylcau’

I live in the Chicago suburb of Joliet, and I play Ultima Online. My family includes a few highly religous people who are convinced that role-playing games are the work of Satan himself.

I received a newspaper clipping in the mail last Wednesday. There was no return address or any indication who sent it. Draw your own conclusions.

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r33t.org’s favorite psychopath spammer has checked in with yet another installment of his religious millenialist ravings…

Subject: >>> ‘ <<<

See this ‘ that is what a multi-warhead looks like just before it hits the ground. In a few months when all of your societies begin to totally collapse, you are going to see a whole bunch of these ‘ all over the place.

The rest is the same as the original spam.

This leaves me wondering what mal-adjusted apocalyptic idiots like this are going to be doing after things return back to normal (my guess is business as usual in 4-8 weeks, with some possible extreme results in countries that haven’t put a lot of thought into y2k fixes). Maybe we can get this wacko to write for r33t - considering that he’s already got a fan club, I’m sure it would increase our hate mail in a most loving fashion.

When I was growing up, the year 2000 was that which by all others were measured. “By the year 2000, the average American lifespan will be 110 years old. By the year 2000, the DOW will have hit 3000!” And so on. Here as we swiftly approach January 2000, we must contemplate the end of the future. What comes after that, I have no idea - perhaps we can use a crafty, irritatingly trite term like “post-future”.

In a such as this, when we have an entire century to compact into meaningless soundbytes and are on the verge of new ways of thinking (for instance “do I write 00 or 2000 on my check?”), it becomes important to look to things we can count on.

Let us contemplate several constants, a few things that we - as citizens of the world - can be assured will remain true. These are truths that are constant, and we needn’t worry about their ability to withstand social, economic, and proctological change.

With no further adieu… Things we can count on:
Quality French automaking. Dependable, stable Italian government. Cuban naval superiority. Value of the Mexican Peso. Microsoft Quality Assurance. Wall Street altruism. American consumer electronics manufacturing. Catholic family planning. Protestant rationalism. Republican and Democratic realization that the “American System” is democracy rather than capitalist libertarianism. Chinese passivity. Canadian colonialism. Congressional morality. Quality Alabaman education. Indian international cinema success. English dentistry. Russian rock music. Singaporan justice. IBM OS/2 market dominance. Turkish foreign policy. Brazilian IRC prescence. Christian charity. Afghan peace. Lebanese tourism industry. Nepalese independence.

Thank you.

As I sat on the porch with the cats distributing tasty treats to the neighborhood kids, something was gnawing at the back of my mind.

I thought the general agreed-upon context of Halloween consisted of four easy to understand steps:

1) Dress up as something or someone else.
2) Go door to door
3) Yell “Trick or treat!” and hope to god some fat bastard’s idea of a trick was something other than letting his rottweiler make violent love to your tender orifices
4) Get candy

Now I’m not going to make value judgements on the costumes. Some are very good, and some are stupid or cookie-cutter, of course. You have varying levels of interest, various income levels, varying amounts of parental time and money to invest into this holiday which, if analyzed from a profit/loss perspective, clearlyclearly operates in the red.

What I fail to understand are the kids who come to my door that appear to be dressed up as kids. Wearing their normal baggy-ass clothes, with their jackets tied around their waist, with no sign of character identification, costuming, face paint, or obligatory plastic gore.

So much for step one. Everyone seems to get step two. Only the very youngest (and their parents) seem to have grasped step three.

I don’t mean to come off as a stickler for rules, but fuck, man!

Here at the office, we get some strange food products from time to time. One of the companies a few doors down gives them to us. Usually what they give us is pretty good - foofoo cereal with whole grains and dried cranberries and golden raisins, A1 Steak Sauce (which is great for when we order takeout from a place that serves fries), candy, and so on.

Usually.

Sometimes, however, we get things that defy description. Rice cake snacks that think they’re Chee-tos but taste more like cardboard, those nasty peanut butter and cheese crackers, and chewy calcium supplements.

When I was a child, I would go to Grandma’s house. It got boring pretty quick, so frequently I would ask her if she had any candy. She did, all right, but it was grandma candy. Anise drops, pulled sugar candy, and perfumy-tasting pink thingies. Oddly enough, I bet I’d really like the anise drops now, but the rest was pretty horrific.

I’m sure Viactiv would have felt right at home on Grandma’s candy shelf. It combines a chocolate flavor with a chalky texture. I suppose the best word to describe the flavor would be … chalklet. I tried one with someone else who was feeling especially daring. We exchanged distasteful looks and spat them out. They weren’t immediately repulsive, they just tasted … wrong.

I wonder if Grandma still buys those anise candies…

Most of you who pay any attention to movies remember that there was a question as to whether or not Star Wars: The Phantom Meneace could outsell Titanic in the US.

It didn’t, though it outperformed Titanic during the first few weeks of its run.

Instead of acknowledging this, some people are still plugging away, spreadsheets churning out data (the URL has changed several times, this one will probably be wrong in a week).

OK folks, enough. Charting Star Wars as it reaches 19th place in the daily grosses is beyond absurd. The last day I read as I verified the link put the daily total at $33,340 on something less than 500 screens. Hell, Elmo in Grouchland is still making more than twice that much.

Folks, it’s over - I’m embarassed this is even news to anyone. Don’t even talk about re-releases and all that, because if you think Titanic made $1.8 billion worldwide just to sit on a shelf for the rest of its life, you’re nuts.

The site is interesting in several ways, and their obsessive-compulsiveness makes for a reasonable way to spend 5.6 minutes of your life - they ought to consider becoming a general “top movies” site, as their data content is updated as frequently and rigorously as several trade magazines.

SWVS, ditch the Wookie and cash in.

When I was a young child visiting Grandma, one thing you could always count on was the toilet paper. I have no idea where she bought it, but apparently in the late 70’s and early 80’s it was possible to find recto-sanitation materials of a much different variety than your typical 90’s toilet paper.

The stuff she would buy was a deep but almost pastel blue, smelled just like cheap purfume (because humans, like cats, apparently go around sniffing each others’ anuses), and it was extremely soft. Read more »

I cannot comprehend why people waste their time with Seti@home when we’re already surrounded by aliens.

Case in point:

From the Sanrio website:

Pink no Corisu came from the Pinkuru Planet to Earth to see how many flowers she could make bloom here by using the power of the little blossom she wears on her head!

On her planet, there are lots of flowers and it is very peaceful.

She loves it because her mama and papa (the king and queen of the Pinkuru Planet Squirrel Kingdom) live there and the air is always filled with the sweet smell of flowers!

I mean honestly, what better reason could you come up with for visiting our planet? She just wanted to see how many flowers she could make bloom!

Human history is filled with accounts of peoples with no common interests being forced together into nationhood; conversely, it also chronicles the sagas of a single people needlessly split into factions.

More recently, we’ve seen the breakup of several nations whose people had divergent interests, such as the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Alternately, we’ve seen peoples reunited - Yemen, China with Macau and Hong Kong, and of course Germany.

Yet other peoples remain divided by foreign invasions and revolutions and have remain artificially divided ever since, such as the Koreas, and Ireland from English-controlled Northern Ireland.

How simple it is to forget these very same issues as they fester unattended in our own back yard.

Virginia and West Virginia: One People, One Destiny, One Virginia!

West Virginia split from Virginia over the issue of seccession. Folks, the war has been over for more than 130 years - it’s time to heal these wounds, and shape the future of a United Virginia.

SOCIETY FOR THE RE-UNIFICATION OF VIRGINIA

r33t.org re-unification council -
First: Virginia, Next: The Ottoman Empire

Beyond Grandpa

Go there. Now. Drink the tea, watch the video, lick the T-Shirt.

You’ll thank me in the morning.

Bugs Bunny
Robotech
Kimba the White Lion
Underdog
Rocky and Bullwinkle
Smurfs
Yogi Bear

I was contemplating a sushi menu earlier today. I realize that sushi does not consist exclusively of dishes that include raw fish, but odds are if that you eat a few different varieties, most likely the majority will include raw fish.

Enter the “California roll”. I’m convinced that this is some sort of in-joke among “authentic” sushi chefs; it’s a jibe at Americans (probably well deserved), but most don’t get it.

The California roll consists mostly of things that Americans are comfortable with - rice, crab meat and cucumber. Of course there’s the whole seaweed wrapper thing, but that’s pretty low on the “gross” scale, even for sheltered mid-western suburban boys.

The California roll is for people who want to say they like sushi, but can’t stomach the idea of eating a raw piece of tuna or flounder.

Hypocrisy alert: Though I savor jellyfish salad (thx Fallo), I can’t even bear to comprehend the notion of eating a sea urchin.

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.

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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.