Just a test.

I'm blogging from my phone! In a bathroom no less! But not on company time!

Seriously though - I'm just testing it to see if it works.

Later, y'all!

An inconvenient truth

Let us petition the United States Government to rename Columbus Day as National Inconvenience Day. The reasons for doing so are numerous:

1.) It is a well-known scientific and historical fact that Christopher Columbus did NOT discover the American continent. The Vikings discovered it and attempted to colonize it almost 400 years earlier. Columbus himself died thinking that he had found India, and he never even set foot on the mainland. From the evidence we have, it seems Columbus was lucky his ships didn't sink and his entire crew drowned the moment they left the dock. The man was an idiot; brave, but stupid.

2.) Who gets Columbus Day off? Postal workers and bank employees (i.e., no one that you or I know). Like every other stupid fly-by-night holiday, the only ones who benefit from time off are the ones who handle your money and deliver your post. The only thing this accomplishes is that I can't mail letters or get coins to do laundry. Granted, this is becoming less of a problem in the electronic age, but it still annoys the piss out of me.

3.) Who benefits from Columbus Day? The only people I can think of are people who are thinking about buying furniture and people who are re-flooring their kitchen. I haven't even seen ads this year for a J.C. Penny Columbus Day sale, which makes me think that they've given up (I mean, who has time to shop there when we're all at work?).

So to sum up, we're celebrating the non-discovery of a continent via Caribbean islands by a jackass who didn't even know where he was, and we do this by closing our financial and money-handling businesses while we still shuffle ourselves to work thereby handicapping our ability to get things done and making it harder to get money to buy the furniture that we don't need that's on sale.

What was the point of this holiday again?  If you're going to declare a holiday just for the sake of having one, at least give everyone else the day off (firemen and policemen not withstanding) instead of giving it to a few services that the rest of us rely upon to get through our day (if everyone had it off, there'd be no need for those services anyway).  All it does otherwise is to seed unrest, like the mockery Labor Day has become (you know what I'm talking about: how managers and executives get Labor Day off but the peons that it was created to celebrate still have to work so that these high-paid a-holes can still go shopping and eating out on their day off).

Sack up, America!

Darwin's Darkest Hour

I just watched this "very special movie presentation" on PBS which was produced by Nova and National Geographic and called Darwin's Darkest Hour.  It dealt with Charles Darwin and his struggle to get his ideas published as original while being austricised by the still very church-centric public.  Darwin never claimed that there was no God, he just believed Christianity to be the wrong path, and this gave the media at the time enough fodder to demonize him.

Despite the drama involved, I only came away with one thought...

This is Charles Darwin when the film takes place:

This is the actor they hired to play Darwin, Henry Ian Cusick :

 

Notice a difference?

Being a bald, ugly (though admittedly not as smart) man like Charles Darwin, I take exception to this representation.  You can't tell me they couldn't have hired a bald actor or (heaven forbid) shaved Cusick's head for some semblance of historical accuracy.

I know that bald isn't sexy, but WE'RE TALKING ABOUT CHARLES FREAKIN' DARWIN HERE!  Sexy shouldn't factor into it!

The Cleveland Show

I'm not the biggest fan of Family Guy or American Dad, Seth McFarlane's popular animated shows on Fox.  My favorite animated Fox shows were the Simpsons (for the nostalgic remembrance of when the show was really good) and King of the Hill, which is the most consistently good show on the network.  Now that King of the Hill has been canceled, Fox has decided to replace it with The Cleveland Show, and the premiere was tonight.

Half an hour of the least interesting, most boring television I have ever seen.  Not one chuckle.  Besides Cleveland being one of the least interesting characters on Family Guy I don't see how the brass at Fox figured he could hold his own show, especially with such a derivative supporting cast.

I won't be watching it again.

Did I mention that I hate it when I'm right?

Good thing it doesn't happen very often.  Too bad tonight is one of those nights.

More riots in Oakland (follow link)

Blogfest 09?

Wow.

I've never added so many posts in so little amount of time, but things are just really happening around here.

First, the news vans showed up:

Then the news helicopters:

Then the police:

Then city maintenance trucks carrying newspaper vending machines:

Then the protesters showed up:

In their hippie-mobiles:

Now, it's not that I entirely disagree with the protesters - I don't.  There is a truth to the belief that the leaders of the world's economy are just backstabbing money-grubbing greed-mongers who relish in hobnobbing with the world's rich by keeping the poor in their perceived place.  I do feel that holding protests (violent or otherwise) only seeks to stroke the ego of the protesters.  You see, the people in charge only take notice when you beat them at their own game.  If all you're doing to change the world is chanting and waving a sign because you spent the last twenty years too strung out on hemp and a vegan diet to be able to fight and think about anything more constructive to do in the name of world equality, then you kind of deserve it when the communist leaders you elected forcibly take your land and send you to the slave mines.

And for you right-wing young republican types, even hippies need to use the bathroom:

You're more alike than you think!

I hate it when I'm right.

Yesterday I said that any protester that attacks a local business is a mouth-breathing idiotic hypocrite.   Given last night's monkeyshines in Oakland, I stand by this statement.  Although most of the businesses attacked were the bastions of corporate America, there is simply no excuse for this type of protest.  The average age of those arrested leads me to believe that at least some of them are College students, probably in Oakland.  Because of the physicality of the crimes this almost certainly means that these anarchists are attending the University of Pittsburgh (lets face it, I could kick the collective pasty asses of 99% of Carnegie Mellon's student body *cough*NERDS*cough*).  I don't know for sure, of course, but you can find a partial list of the morons here.

Why do Pittsburgh riots almost always happen in (or at least start at) Oakland?  Obama gets elected? Let's riot!  Steelers win the Super Bowl?  Let's riot!  It could just be the combination of the college crowd and readily available alcohol, but most of these people are pre-med.  That means that many of the same people breaking windows and throwing bikes at police officers are the people giving you an operation in the future: 

"Dude, capitalism sucks!  I'm gonna sell your organs in protest!"

"To who?!"

"Um, communists!"

Seriously, protesters - the world leaders aren't going to listen to you anyway.  Most of them are either smart, aware of your plight, and unconscionable or they're just unconscionable.  They don't care.  Whatever problems you're trying to bring to their attention, it doesn't benefit them in the slightest to give a damn.  All that you're doing by getting aggressive is giving the angry white guys with uniforms, tear gas, batons and shaved heads a much-yearned-for reason to bash your heads in using said implements.  Just chill out, dance for the cameras, and whine about it in your blog tomorrow.