I’m not going to mince words on this one. Animals are dumb.
I don’t usually take a strong stance on this, but recently, a couple of striking examples have brought the topic to mind and left me bitter. Both of these examples make for great stories.
Example one: My sister’s dog is retarded.
For reasons unclear to me, my sister adopted a retarded puppy. Not medically retarded, mind you. No, it’s a charming mutt in perfect health. However, by my standards, it’s retarded. It greets guests by first jumping all over them. This is wonderful in and of itself. But when it tires of that, it takes it a step further by first leaping onto furniture (like a couch), then launching itself at them from this new height. That’s extra special. I love that dog.
My sister also lives in a house that has a trampoline in the backyard. Trampolines are great fun. They help you jump really high by letting you launch off of an elastic pad. But when you jump, that elastic pad drops down really low. That’s why trampoline pads are always up on stands. Guess who thinks it’s a great idea to stand underneath the trampoline, dead center, and bark his fool head off at jumpers as they rocket down onto his head?
My sister’s place also features mirrored closet doors. Guess who’s not allowed into the bedroom, because he sees his reflection and barks and leaps at it for hours before having to be forcibly separated from his own reflection.
In conclusion, my sister’s dog is retarded.
Example two: Geese are retarded.
It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I work at a chemical plant. This chemical plant has a man-made lake in the middle, which is used as fire water in the event of a major emergency. Since this is basically never used, we really just have a big lake in the middle of the complex. Geese like big calm lakes.
Geese also like to nest by them. One lovely couple decided to do just that. They build a beautiful nest, five feet away from the contractor entrance to the main engineering building.
That would be a beautiful example of nature in action, save for one minor issue. Nesting geese are fiercely territorial. Guess who spends all of every day attacking an endless stream of less-than-amused contractors?
This choice of locales was very well chosen. In the same way that an antisocial hermit could find a very well chosen living space in the middle of the food court in a busy shopping mall.
To be fair, there are small sections of the day when there are no contractors to attack. The goose spends those sections of the day attacking its own reflection in the glass panes of the nearby doors, and on the reflective surfaces of newly-washed cars.
In conclusion, geese are retarded.
There are times when I think nature is wondrous and beautiful. But there are also striking examples of why humans don’t generally feel bad about strip mining and deforestation. Today seems like a good day to pillage some rainforest.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Thursday, April 17, 2008
English Accents Are For the Retarded
Ok, I feel this needs to be said. There are way too many people who have bought into the idea that English accents are sexy and/or intellectual.
I will start by qualifying my argument. I have no issue with the Queen’s English. The woman understands the rules of English correctly, follows them, is very polite, and is terminally dull. These are all things that a woman in her position should be. She uses her English very professionally and sounds highly educated, even if she rarely seems to have anything especially interesting to say. She uses English well, and many of us could take a lesson from her. (How many people noticed that this paragraph says almost exactly the same simple thing three times, in three different ways? I’m taking a lesson from royalty.)
On the other hand, there is the side of my argument that I will not qualify. The Queen represents a decidedly small portion of the population of England. Most of her citizens sound like retards. I know this because they keep seeking me out and sharing that with me for some reason.
I, like so many of you, adore websites like Facebook and MySpace. They are an amazing way to learn more about your friends and keep in touch. They also allow strangers to find you. Several aspects of my profiles seem to attract the attention of strangers. I’m not going to bother to list these aspects, but they’re like honey to flies.
Lately, I have been attracting a lot of British strangers.
Let me take a quick poll here. How many of you are fans of the cultural relevance of the American dialect which, in the nineties, was given the name of “Ebonics”? The theory was that a subset of our population which was more “ebonic” than the rest of us were doing badly in school because they didn’t know proper English and were lost causes. Thus, their grades would improve if we assumed that they were incapable of learning in school and just graded them on what they knew anyway. If I recall correctly, this was the most racist thing anyone proposed in the entire decade.
My guess is that not many hands went up. Now let me ask how many people think British slang is cool. I see we have a lots of hands up this time.
Most British slang is just like Ebonics, but much more hideously incorrect. Ebonics was strikingly similar to English, but with a smaller subset of words. For example, in Ebonics, the same word is used as a noun, adjective, and adverb in places where grammar dictates there should be three distinct forms. Pronunciation may be altered slightly, but all in all, speakers of English have little trouble figuring out what an Ebonics speaker is getting at.
Not so with British slang. One of my favorite exchanges took place when a freak sent me a picture to something inappropriate as a way of saying hello. Then I was told that my pictures were horny. This confused me. I asked how, exactly, my pictures were horny. I honestly had no clue WTF was being discussed. I was told that, “your pics are really horny. you know.” I insisted that I didn’t. Several minutes later, I asked if the gist of the message was that my pictures were inspiring horniness in others. This caused equal confusion on the other end, but eventually turned out to be more or less the gist of things.
I am sad to say that this is not an isolated incident. I’ll be the first to admit that my circle of friends includes only a small number of born and raised Brits. We’ll toss the Queen in there for good measure, just to be fair and balanced (and inaccurate). Even with her factored in, the amount of outright incorrectness in the speech of the British is much higher (on average) than that of the average American, from my limited point of view.
In conclusion, an American trying to sound “cool,” by emulating the slang and accent of the British… No. Let’s be blunt. English accents are for the retarded.
I will start by qualifying my argument. I have no issue with the Queen’s English. The woman understands the rules of English correctly, follows them, is very polite, and is terminally dull. These are all things that a woman in her position should be. She uses her English very professionally and sounds highly educated, even if she rarely seems to have anything especially interesting to say. She uses English well, and many of us could take a lesson from her. (How many people noticed that this paragraph says almost exactly the same simple thing three times, in three different ways? I’m taking a lesson from royalty.)
On the other hand, there is the side of my argument that I will not qualify. The Queen represents a decidedly small portion of the population of England. Most of her citizens sound like retards. I know this because they keep seeking me out and sharing that with me for some reason.
I, like so many of you, adore websites like Facebook and MySpace. They are an amazing way to learn more about your friends and keep in touch. They also allow strangers to find you. Several aspects of my profiles seem to attract the attention of strangers. I’m not going to bother to list these aspects, but they’re like honey to flies.
Lately, I have been attracting a lot of British strangers.
Let me take a quick poll here. How many of you are fans of the cultural relevance of the American dialect which, in the nineties, was given the name of “Ebonics”? The theory was that a subset of our population which was more “ebonic” than the rest of us were doing badly in school because they didn’t know proper English and were lost causes. Thus, their grades would improve if we assumed that they were incapable of learning in school and just graded them on what they knew anyway. If I recall correctly, this was the most racist thing anyone proposed in the entire decade.
My guess is that not many hands went up. Now let me ask how many people think British slang is cool. I see we have a lots of hands up this time.
Most British slang is just like Ebonics, but much more hideously incorrect. Ebonics was strikingly similar to English, but with a smaller subset of words. For example, in Ebonics, the same word is used as a noun, adjective, and adverb in places where grammar dictates there should be three distinct forms. Pronunciation may be altered slightly, but all in all, speakers of English have little trouble figuring out what an Ebonics speaker is getting at.
Not so with British slang. One of my favorite exchanges took place when a freak sent me a picture to something inappropriate as a way of saying hello. Then I was told that my pictures were horny. This confused me. I asked how, exactly, my pictures were horny. I honestly had no clue WTF was being discussed. I was told that, “your pics are really horny. you know.” I insisted that I didn’t. Several minutes later, I asked if the gist of the message was that my pictures were inspiring horniness in others. This caused equal confusion on the other end, but eventually turned out to be more or less the gist of things.
I am sad to say that this is not an isolated incident. I’ll be the first to admit that my circle of friends includes only a small number of born and raised Brits. We’ll toss the Queen in there for good measure, just to be fair and balanced (and inaccurate). Even with her factored in, the amount of outright incorrectness in the speech of the British is much higher (on average) than that of the average American, from my limited point of view.
In conclusion, an American trying to sound “cool,” by emulating the slang and accent of the British… No. Let’s be blunt. English accents are for the retarded.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Help Me Cure AIDS
Today’s blog post is going to be wildly different from my usual mix of sarcasm, humor, and banal observation. I’m totally serious, and I genuinely want you (whoever you are) to do this.
I want you to help me cure AIDS. Don’t worry. It won’t be hard.
[Note: if you don’t give a crap about AIDS, do this anyway. I’ll explain later how you can help me cure cancer instead.]
All I want you to do is install a program on your computer. It won’t do much if you’re using the computer yourself. However, if you walk away from the computer (leaving it on), or only use the computer for very simple tasks, your computer will begin doing complex calculations on molecular modeling simulations in an effort to cure AIDS.
[Note: skip this paragraph if you are not interested in any more detail than that, or if you are easily frightened by technical talk.] If you follow obscure topics in the news, you may already be aware that researchers faced with extremely complicated problems often have trouble getting time to work with the supercomputers that they need to do their jobs. As a result, calculations modeling these complex systems largely sit stagnant, even though people have a pretty good idea how to solve them. This is simply because the researcher cannot get access to a machine capable of doing the job in less than a century. The ironic thing is that in developed nations, computational power is HUGELY underutilized. Most computer owners only use about 15% of the processing power of their computers (on average – there are spikes, especially if you like modern computer games). For example, if all you’re doing on your PC right now is reading this blog, your CPU is probably using about 1% of its actual processing power. It’s like a jet engine on a go-cart. Serious overkill. I’m asking you to donate about 60% of that unused processing power to help cure AIDS. The program I want you to run turns your computer into a “part” of a simulated supercomputer being managed by a remote server. Your computer will chug away at a small slice of a much larger problem downloaded from the internet. It will then send the answer back to the server, download a new small slice, and repeat. Over time, these solutions are assembled into final results.
The following program does ALL of the work. It runs in the background, using your processor and memory only when you’re not using them yourself. Unless you’re curious what your PC has been up to while you weren’t using it, you can simply set up the program and never look at it again, all while still having a serious impact on understanding and curing AIDS. [Note: If you ARE interested, you can see what you’ve been working on, how much you’ve contributed, and much more.]
I’m not joking when I say that you can make a big difference here. I’ve been using this program for about a week now. On average, about 75 computers have been logged on at any given moment since I joined the system. Two of those computers are mine. That means I’m personally donating more than 2% of the network. (Possibly more, since both my computers have dual core CPU’s, which makes a BIG difference here. If you have a quad core CPU, you’d be able to do 4x the work as a guy with a single core, for example.) If I can talk ten readers into installing this on their computers, I will have increased the size of the network by about 13%. That’s a big jump in speed and efficiency! I’m more than happy to take the time to write this for the possibility of that kind of result.
It’s very simple to get this running. All you need to do is register a username, download the program, click a few checkboxes to let it know what you’re willing to let your computer research, and go. That’s it.
If you want to start with the official page to get to know the process in an “official” capacity first, go here:
http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu/
read all you want, and follow a couple of obvious links to the download page.
If you just trust me or don’t care, get right to the registering here:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/reg/viewRegister.do
Note that curing AIDS is not the only thing your computer can work on. By default, your computer would be set up to research AIDS, cancer, novel drugs, and other biological processes. If AIDS is your only big interest, uncheck the other boxes. If you have a strong interest in cancer research, just check that one. If you just like being helpful and/or have no particular interest in any health problems, check all the boxes. You’re helping the world in a big way no matter what projects you pick.
Also note that you can help even more by forwarding links to this post (or just the included links themselves) to friends and family. I generally don’t care how many people look at the stuff I write. I do my stuff for me, believe it or not. But in this case, preaching to a crowd is EXACTLY what I set out to do. Help me make a difference!
I want you to help me cure AIDS. Don’t worry. It won’t be hard.
[Note: if you don’t give a crap about AIDS, do this anyway. I’ll explain later how you can help me cure cancer instead.]
All I want you to do is install a program on your computer. It won’t do much if you’re using the computer yourself. However, if you walk away from the computer (leaving it on), or only use the computer for very simple tasks, your computer will begin doing complex calculations on molecular modeling simulations in an effort to cure AIDS.
[Note: skip this paragraph if you are not interested in any more detail than that, or if you are easily frightened by technical talk.] If you follow obscure topics in the news, you may already be aware that researchers faced with extremely complicated problems often have trouble getting time to work with the supercomputers that they need to do their jobs. As a result, calculations modeling these complex systems largely sit stagnant, even though people have a pretty good idea how to solve them. This is simply because the researcher cannot get access to a machine capable of doing the job in less than a century. The ironic thing is that in developed nations, computational power is HUGELY underutilized. Most computer owners only use about 15% of the processing power of their computers (on average – there are spikes, especially if you like modern computer games). For example, if all you’re doing on your PC right now is reading this blog, your CPU is probably using about 1% of its actual processing power. It’s like a jet engine on a go-cart. Serious overkill. I’m asking you to donate about 60% of that unused processing power to help cure AIDS. The program I want you to run turns your computer into a “part” of a simulated supercomputer being managed by a remote server. Your computer will chug away at a small slice of a much larger problem downloaded from the internet. It will then send the answer back to the server, download a new small slice, and repeat. Over time, these solutions are assembled into final results.
The following program does ALL of the work. It runs in the background, using your processor and memory only when you’re not using them yourself. Unless you’re curious what your PC has been up to while you weren’t using it, you can simply set up the program and never look at it again, all while still having a serious impact on understanding and curing AIDS. [Note: If you ARE interested, you can see what you’ve been working on, how much you’ve contributed, and much more.]
I’m not joking when I say that you can make a big difference here. I’ve been using this program for about a week now. On average, about 75 computers have been logged on at any given moment since I joined the system. Two of those computers are mine. That means I’m personally donating more than 2% of the network. (Possibly more, since both my computers have dual core CPU’s, which makes a BIG difference here. If you have a quad core CPU, you’d be able to do 4x the work as a guy with a single core, for example.) If I can talk ten readers into installing this on their computers, I will have increased the size of the network by about 13%. That’s a big jump in speed and efficiency! I’m more than happy to take the time to write this for the possibility of that kind of result.
It’s very simple to get this running. All you need to do is register a username, download the program, click a few checkboxes to let it know what you’re willing to let your computer research, and go. That’s it.
If you want to start with the official page to get to know the process in an “official” capacity first, go here:
http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu/
read all you want, and follow a couple of obvious links to the download page.
If you just trust me or don’t care, get right to the registering here:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/reg/viewRegister.do
Note that curing AIDS is not the only thing your computer can work on. By default, your computer would be set up to research AIDS, cancer, novel drugs, and other biological processes. If AIDS is your only big interest, uncheck the other boxes. If you have a strong interest in cancer research, just check that one. If you just like being helpful and/or have no particular interest in any health problems, check all the boxes. You’re helping the world in a big way no matter what projects you pick.
Also note that you can help even more by forwarding links to this post (or just the included links themselves) to friends and family. I generally don’t care how many people look at the stuff I write. I do my stuff for me, believe it or not. But in this case, preaching to a crowd is EXACTLY what I set out to do. Help me make a difference!
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Why I’m a Vegan
I have a “real” story I tell people about why I decided to become a vegan. It’s pretty reasonable, doesn’t infringe on how other people want to live their lives, and makes a good bit of sense, all while being very ironic, and a little bit funny.
People hate that story, because I use it to justify being a vegan. I’m told that the way I’m supposed to be making that argument involves throwing blood on non-believers, hate crimes, and being insufferable at all meals. But that’s just not my style.
Because so many people hate my official explanation, I have had several years to ponder if there might be a more effective way to explain my non-threatening stance on veganism. The other day, it hit me.
If you are reading this blog, odds are nearly at 100% that you know someone with a dog who spoils it terribly. They treat it like a member of the family, it follows them everywhere, and it’s spoiled beyond all recognition. The people who most often do this are middle-aged housewives. Often, they have had several dogs over the years, and in many cases, each new dog looks suspiciously similar to the last.
If you know this dog owner well, you probably know how the previous dogs met their end, because this is one of the owner’s favorite things to talk about. Typically, the dog (after becoming grossly overweight) died of some form of organ shutdown. By the time the third dog enters the scene, it is often on an all-organic diet of special food. Sometimes, this food is more elaborate than the stuff its owners eat. It is generally high fiber, vegetable based, and low in calories.
That said, let me finally get to my point. On many, many occasions, I have been invited over to people’s houses only to hear the following story:
“I miss Fido II terribly. He was such an adorable dog, and he died so young. But then again, he did love those table scraps, right up to the point where he got fat and died."
::Pause, as I stare at the speaker::
"That’s why I only feed Fido III cooked beans and rice. Oh! That’s the kitchen timer! Meatloaf is ready dear, won’t you have some?”
“No thanks. I’ll have what Fido is having.”
People hate that story, because I use it to justify being a vegan. I’m told that the way I’m supposed to be making that argument involves throwing blood on non-believers, hate crimes, and being insufferable at all meals. But that’s just not my style.
Because so many people hate my official explanation, I have had several years to ponder if there might be a more effective way to explain my non-threatening stance on veganism. The other day, it hit me.
If you are reading this blog, odds are nearly at 100% that you know someone with a dog who spoils it terribly. They treat it like a member of the family, it follows them everywhere, and it’s spoiled beyond all recognition. The people who most often do this are middle-aged housewives. Often, they have had several dogs over the years, and in many cases, each new dog looks suspiciously similar to the last.
If you know this dog owner well, you probably know how the previous dogs met their end, because this is one of the owner’s favorite things to talk about. Typically, the dog (after becoming grossly overweight) died of some form of organ shutdown. By the time the third dog enters the scene, it is often on an all-organic diet of special food. Sometimes, this food is more elaborate than the stuff its owners eat. It is generally high fiber, vegetable based, and low in calories.
That said, let me finally get to my point. On many, many occasions, I have been invited over to people’s houses only to hear the following story:
“I miss Fido II terribly. He was such an adorable dog, and he died so young. But then again, he did love those table scraps, right up to the point where he got fat and died."
::Pause, as I stare at the speaker::
"That’s why I only feed Fido III cooked beans and rice. Oh! That’s the kitchen timer! Meatloaf is ready dear, won’t you have some?”
“No thanks. I’ll have what Fido is having.”
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