Bugs

Starbucks is trying to get away from artificial coloring and sweeteners, so they now use ground up bugs to color their strawberry frapp.  Now vegans are angry that formerly vegan Starbucks (I don’t know how they can call them that when they have meat sammiches, but I’ll never understand the Hipster mind) is doing this.

I do understand that people with food allergies need to know what’s in their foodstuffs, in case they have a reaction to this or that.  But I’ve come across vegans who don’t eat honey because it oppresses the bees by making them work for our benefit and not just for their own hives, and these folk I have in mind when I see this.  It’s not the what, it’s the how, of vegetarianism and veganism that gets my goat.  Actually, Drs. Scarsdale and Ornish showed how a plant based diet fights heart and arterial disease, and watching one’s meat intake can be quite healthy.  If you’re doing it for that, or for some disciplinarian reason, like giving it up for your faith (hello, Jains!) or to just deny yourself as an exercise, fine.  But these people who think man is only bad for the world and worry about bee oppression; c’mon.  You’re in the same boat with people who claim to have an addiction to lip balm and need government paid counseling, and that guy who wrote a book about the images he sees in clouds when he lays out (in a radio interview he admitted he was on government assistance and spent his days watching the clouds go by).

Many in the Greatest Generation used to say “what this country needs is another war or Great Depression to straighten things out.”  Hell, we have TWO wars and another depression, and they haven’t done a thing.

I had recently decided to not spend money at Starbucks, but in light of this, maybe a strawberry frapp would be a good break one day.

Filed under: common stupidity, liberal games, no wonder I'm fed up

Orangutan

I thought the whole point of going to a prostitute was to have sex with a woman who was better looking than one with whom you’d normally end up having sex.  I must have the whole notion wrong.  After all, what guy is so pathetic he goes to an orangutan?  Obviously, there’s enough of them to keep a whole village living fat off the land, with the land being the village orangutan prostitute…

“Now the story of Pony, an Orangutan in Borneo who was rescued several years ago from a “prostitute village”, has been circulating again through the internet. It seems that Pony had been held as a sex slave in a village, tied by her ankle to a wall on a mattress, having her body shaved every day to make her more smooth and appealing to the men who came to pay to have sex with her.  Whenever anyone tried to investigate this or save her, they were met with villagers who threatened the would-be rescuers with poison-tipped sticks and other weapons.”

 

At what point does having sex with a shaved orangutan rank higher than just staying home and masturbating to Zooey Deschanel?

Filed under: common stupidity, no wonder I'm fed up

Chase

This experience is not rare.  I go to the bank, cash a check, pay the mortgage, get some back.

Cashier:  And how would you like your change?
Me:  One hundred, the rest, well, you know, normal.
Cashier:  And how would you like the rest?
Me: Twenties and down, you know, normal.
Cashier: How?
Me: From the top – one hundred, three twenties, one ten a five, four singles, and a dime.
Cashier: [giggles] Ok.

Enough people tell me I need to see the movie Idiocracy.  I don’t.  I get it.  I live it.  Every. Single. Day.

Filed under: common stupidity, no wonder I'm fed up

New Orleans

“Even after the Super Bowl victory of the New Orleans Saints, I have noticed a large number of people implying with bad jokes that Cajuns aren’t smart. I would like to state for the record that I disagree with that assessment. Anybody that would build a city 5 feet below sea level in a hurricane zone and fill it with Democrats is a damn genius”. – Larry the Cable Guy

Filed under: at least someone's having fun, politics

Poor Ted

Source Credit.

Filed under: at least someone's having fun

Football Canceled for Snow

There is no crying in baseball.  There is no weather delay in football.  Until yesterday.  And not a blizzard, the chance of a blizzard.  The millionaires for the Vikings and the Eagles should play Tuesday night in a skirt.  This blogger says it better, and has nice photos too.

Filed under: common stupidity

Effficiency

This follows on the heels of Og’s post on the TSA.  The TSA has a hard as you can get job to do, and they hire the flotsam and jetsam to do it.  I was part of the base security detail during Desert Storm, and it was a son of a gun trying to catch the ruses they set to check us, as well as work within the stupid rules they set (you can open hoods, you can’t open hoods, you had no rounds in your weapons, etc.) that hobbled you so much that you had no option but to stand and watch the show if anything did go down.

But still, the French and British can get able citizens to cover their airports, and the Israelis have done most remarkably of any country, since its experience with Entebbee.  We need a TSA, or even a DHS, when we already have the FBI, Secret Service, and Federal Marshals, professionally trained and ready for the mission of homeland security?

No, the TSA isn’t an example of usual government FUBARosity.  When I was in basic and got my initial issue, all the guys had to do was look at me for a few seconds to decide what sized BDU’s and boots to throw at me.  They had their job down pat.  Since Indiana took the motor vehicle bureaus out of the political sphere and made the BMV a real live department, it has for me been a model of efficiency even if the rules they’re given by the feds for clean air standards has gotten them looking like the bad guys in that.  Crappy service isn’t any more automatic because it’s a government job anymore than it’s automatic to be customer oriented because it’s private – witness your cable company.

It’s just that when you get anyone in a position of getting people through the chute, when you either get the ignorant ghetto folk involved or people with a desire to bully, all you do is plug the chute and make everyone miserable.  Like Og said, giving them flak just brings a heap of their crap onto you.  You don’t argue with the cop on the side of the road while getting the ticket, you do it in the courtroom.

But what do you do when these gang bangers steal the people blind, and there’s no recourse?  Think the experience of a few people who I know are the exception, and anecdotes aren’t data?  Look here and here, here and here.  Now consider all the people who just let it go and didn’t call a reporter, and you have a picture of the TSA.  You may as well just give the job over to the Romani and be done with it.

In third world banana republics, the police are thieves with badges.  And when backwoods sheriffs set speed traps and inner city cops shake down businesses for protection, the rest of the country can say hey, it’s those people, not all of us.  But the TSA is all of us, for it’s all of us who let the neck tattooed and three inch fingernailed shuckers and jivers be the TSA, and not the bathed nor the more urbane and professional among us.  Other countries more socialistic and less rich than we can get a degree of common sense out of their security people, enough to make the experience of the chute a lot less of a freak show and a lot more efficient and well done.  The FBI requires a college degree for application, and even the army requires either a high school degree or at least enough towards it so one can get the GED while in service.  To be in the British foreign service when they had their empire was the job for which the best and brightest would give their eye teeth.  To whom do you successfully complain when the agency with no oversight, or even the thought of an internal affairs system, needs policing it own self?

Filed under: common stupidity

Drinking

I really, really don’t understand the thinking of some people.  A guy and his buddy decide to sit around and drink in the yard.  A common enough situation.  I never felt the hankering to get naked while doing that, and no one else with whom I’ve drank has felt that way either.  Here’s two guys who did, and now they’re in jail.

When police arrived, Clayton Cooper, 20, and Kyle Cuneo, 23, were found naked and drinking beer in the backyard of Cuneo’s residence on Taft Street, Rice said. Cuneo was wearing a diaper, but his genitals still were exposed, Rice said.  He said Merrillville police received previous reports of Cooper and Cuneo drinking in the nude in public, but police weren’t able to apprehend the men at those times.

The police first responded to two guys standing naked in the road as school buses went by.  I know you want to be comfortable as you tie one on, but really.

Filed under: common stupidity

Demo

When violating Rule 1, make sure you aim at yourself when “proving” that the gun’s chamber is empty:

A Mesa man was arrested on suspicion of second-degree murder after shooting his girlfriend in the neck while demonstrating his gun-safety skills, police said.  Barraza “attempted to prove the weapon was safe the way he carried it (by maintaining an empty chamber in the cylinder of the revolver),” court documents state. “He then pulled the hammer back and pulled the trigger.”

When I first saw the story I misread it to mean “A Mensa man…”  Of course, alcohol was involved in the incident.

Filed under: common stupidity

Decorum

… is defined by Miriam Webster as propriety and good taste in conduct and appearance.  I belong to a different age and am lost in this 21st Century.  Let’s say there’s the webmaster of a well-known (in Chicago) website like chicago-scene.com wandering about and taking photos of the crowd, and the dude gets to me and my date.  Would I straighten my posture, look somewhat serious with maybe a bit of a smirk or raised eyebrow to tell the viewer “yup, she’s with me, not you, ain’t I something”?

What would Frank Sinatra or Johnny Carson, even Hugh Hefner or today’s king of poon, John Mayer, do?  After all, I’m posing with a Young Urban Professional certified member of the Lincoln Park Trixie Society.  Maybe a bit mannish looking, but in today’s gay-preferred society that might work in a certain gender bender to be popular sort of way.  I know my friends will see it when I e-mail it to them, or if they see it on FaceBook.  Hell, maybe the boss even looks at this stuff.  I have a split second to make that good impression.  What do I do?

This guy has other ideas:

No Way to Pose

Filed under: common stupidity