AYNTK

I think I've posted a link to this guy's blog before, but it's time to do it again. He's taken a rather political turn in the past year or so and he's pretty sharp. This recent post is one of my favorites.

Friday

Tuesday

Got that right...

Tuesday

Monday

Sunday

Wednesday

..But Only If You Have This Too

I've got a bone to pick with car manufacturers. I know what you're thinking..."Just one?" Well, despite the plethora of schlamozzles committed by automakers these days the one I'm currently a bit flapped about is the ridiculous restrictions they've placed on which options you can or can't select when you order your shiny new piece of driveway jewelry. I've been cruising around the websites of a few car companies playing with the "Build Your Own" tools and dreaming little dreams of driving bliss. Well, great big huge dreams actually, but what the hell ever. My beef is this: When you try to add, for example, the Satellite Navigation System, or the Dual Zone Automatic Climate Control, most car companies won't let you have either of them unless you also opt for Sport Package 3 or Luxury Package 478. Evidently if I want the Sat/Nav system I've also got to have the Middling Sized Orangutan Eating Hard Boiled Eggs permanently installed in the left rear passenger seat. And these "required" packages, as you may well guess, usually cost several thousand extra dollars. Now, I realize that car companies are in the business of making money (I thought they were in the business of making cars. Silly me!) but whatever happened to good old customer satisfaction? Were I to go out and buy a new car I would definitely want a satellite navigation system in it because I don't like getting lost and I frequently go to towns and cities I know nothing about. However, all joking aside, every single car I tried to add a navigation system to required that I also add some sort of luxury package which invariably included leather seats and door inserts; heated seats, side mirrors, and washer nozzles; faux woodgrain trim; XM or Sirius Satellite Radio; automatically dimming rearview mirrors; and in most cases, some sort of "home link" communications system which can be programmed to, among other things, open your garage doors, turn on the TV in your house, or give your worst enemy leprosy. I don't want any of those things. I prefer good basic non-fancyschmancy cloth seats, I really couldn't care less about Satellite Radio since I prefer listening to CD's or my iPod anyway, and I haven't got a house with garage doors to open, nor anyone I hate enough to actually inflict with a debilitating disease. Faux woodgrain? That stuff is just horrible looking. The heated bits might not be so bad, though. Same deal with a sunroof. You can't have one unless it's part of a bigger, more expensive package. Even a little extra bit to plug your iPod into comes only as part of a $1700 package from one manufacturer. But the point is, why must I have all this frivolous nonsense just to get a navigation system or a sunroof? No other reason than that it makes a bigger payday for the carmaker. It's maddening. It's frustrating. It's bad business ethics, I say. And it's totally legal. But if you went to the grocery store to get a loaf of bread and they said, "Sorry, you can't have bread unless you also get this 7-course Thanksgiving dinner package for $600," you'd go straight to the Better Business Bureau and they'd shut the place down immediately. Why should the auto makers be allowed to get away with it? Because cars aren't a necessity? Tell that to anyone who lives in a town without a decent public transportation system. It's just another example of Big Business doing whatever it can get away with to put more of your money into their own pockets, where it will be put to use devising still more ways in which they can take still more of your money. But I supposed we should be thanking them, for it is, truly, Money that makes the world go 'round.

Thursday

Wednesday

Here's another picture.

Proof that the apocalypse is near.

words fail me...
http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=109329

I Suck.

I've been remiss lately about posting stuff, but not much has really seemed all that important. So, in the meantime, here's samples of some pictures I've been taking lately. Don't forget, I'm NOT a professional, and I probably shouldn't be trying this at home.

What's Democracy, again?

According to a news article I just read on Yahoo!, Gen. George Casey, the "top US general in Iraq" and soon to be Army Chief of Staff has come out against the President's plan to send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq. He says they really only need about half that many and sending more troops than is necessary to get the job done just seems like a bad idea to him. Makes sense to me.

So, W has started a war that nobody else wanted to start for reasons that turned out to be completely fabricated, and now he's going to escalate it against the wishes of the citizens of this country and against the advice of his military commanders. At what point does this kind of "leadership" stop being a Democracy and start being totalitarian? What has to happen before we, as a country, finally wake up and say, "Excuse me, you are doing stupid shit that nobody asked you to do and you're pissing off the rest of the world, so we're going to have to ask you to leave." If you or I started acting like this at our jobs, we'd be fired immediately. Why is this ass-clown allowed to get away with it? Is anybody else afraid of what the rest of the world might do in retaliation for all the dumb shit our "leader" has done? I have to hope that the people of the world realize that he's not really representing us, the citizens of this country. Otherwise we're all coming off as even bigger assholes than we really are. Very big assholes. For what we've got in the white house right now, we might as well have found the biggest, dumbest gorilla we could find, given it a big gun and planted it's ass in the oval office. We would have gotten about the same results.

The Daily Show does it again

These guys are really clever. Yay John Stewart!

What the...where, huh...how?

It turns out you can't always just sit there doing nothing and come off looking like a genius, or a hero. This disappointing revelation came to me yesterday when I was standing next to a newspaper stand and a man walked up and started making that "hand-in-the-armpit-fart-noise" that was so popular with the boys in elementary school. Yay, elementary school boys. But this guy was a full grown man, wearing a suit, no less. He was a bit disheveled, the tie was undone and hanging loose, and the coat a was bit rumpled, but not overly so. He didn't have the obvious look of a New York Crazy Person, and he didn't smell like a garbage bin doing double duty as a human waste receptacle. In short, he appeared to be a normal, everyday, slightly haggard business man.
So there I was, just standing by the newspaper stand minding my own business, watching the flow of the city and wondering where the hell everyone was going in such a dang-blasted hurry when this guy walks up, unbuttons one button of his Oxford shirt, sticks the hand up into the armpit and commences with the fart noise makee makee. Fart, fart, farting away and just staring at me. At ME! Like I was supposed to be critiquing his performance or something. Or maybe like I was his boss who'd just turned him down for a raise, or that assignment in Acapulco. At any rate he farted away at me for a little while and then buttoned up his shirt and proceeded on down the street like nothing ever happened. And there I'm left standing with a look on my face like I've just woken up and found Gary Busey in my kitchen smoking opium and making a quiche. Everyone else about who was unfortunate enough to have witnessed the incident, but fortunate enough not to have been the recipient of the performance was staring at me, waiting to see what I would do next. Now, after almost 5 years of living in New York, I've become conditioned to the absurd, random things you see happening in the streets and, normally, I would have just taken such a thing in stride and pressed on with my day, business as usual. This time, well, I just couldn't do it. He must have caught me in a vulnerable moment because my absurdity filters totally failed to catch the incident before it made it's way into my brain and the words "If it weren't for my horse..." started echoing faintly around inside my head.
So what did I do? Nothing. But it wasn't a "cool" nothing where you just ignore the weird thing, or make like it happens all the time, it was a total dundering nothing, where you look a bit like a frustrated and confused George Castanza, stammering sounds that aren't words and pointing in all directions at once, wondering how Gary got into the apartment in the first place, and would he let you have any of that scrumptious looking quiche. No ladies and gentelmen, I did not get to look like a hero that day, I got to look like a genuine, first class idiot. And I wasn't even the one making fart noises.

Where'd who go?

Not that I'm bemoaning the loss, but what ever happened to Brendan Fraser?