A Bunch of Crap to Try and Fill the Void

Well, it’s been a week and none of us have said shit all. Sorry about that. But that’s what happens when one of us gets laid out by a wicked cold, he seems to be over it, we have a party, and then wam! The other one gets the same wicked cold and the first one realizes nope, I’m not quite over it. So I figure I’ll just throw a bunch of stuff together.

First off, this cold is a bastard. It seems to find its way to every corner of the world, fucking up the lives of people everywhere. It’s nuts. And it seems to vary its bag of tricks depending on the person. For Steve, it made him hurt all over, filled his ears with crap so he felt like he was deaf, and took his energy, along with making his throat hurt like hell and making him want to cough all the time. For me, it has made me sound like Steve’s 9-year-old cousin, a boy I might add. All I have to do is add a lisp and it’s bang on. Plus it’s making me cough all the damn time. But thankfully I can still hear, which is good because I have to go out and do things today, and that means needing to hear to cross streets. I don’t feel like being cold-ridden road-pizza. I just hope I’m not still fighting this two weeks later like poor Steve is.

I think I’ve found a wee small problem with this building. We have one hell of a whiny bitch of a neighbour. Ok, I think there have been four times this month that the management has been at our door, in the middle of the day I might add, to ask us if we have music up loud. Then they stare at us, befuddled, wondering why they have been sent. There was one time when the music was up kind of loud, but it wasn’t even late!

Apparently there’s a woman in this building who just had a baby, who just can’t stand noise. She’s even been told that her baby’s crise are louder than the music she’s hearing. AT least the management is being cool about this whole thing and knows that we’re not trouble. But come on! She makes us feel that we can’t even live our lives normally. What really pisses me off is I know what it’s like to live beside a noisy neighbour. Don’t believe me? I lived beside Stupidhead and Ditzomatic. I know a noisy neighbour, and it burns me up to be painted with the same brush for no good reason. At least she’s only hear for another month.

I was watching an episode of Star Trek Voyager on the weekend, and something profoundly pissed me off. It’s small, but to me, it’s not so small. Allow me to geek out for a second. There was this weird episode where a bunch of people were in stasis for years, but their minds were being kept active in an artificial environment. This environment was programmed to change, to respond to their needs. Somehow, since they were all afraid that something might go wrong, all their fears manifested themselves into this weird clown character. Ok, geeking over. At one point, one of the crew said, “Like the man said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Uh, ahem, the man? The fucking man? How about we put a name on this, uh, man. Let me give you a helping hand. It starts with Franklin and ends with Roosevelt and there’s a D in the middle. It happened in this fucking century and it was a president of the nation in which the creators of this series live.

Maybe it pisses me off even more because the person with whom I was sitting actually thought this was made up by the script writers and given to the guy who plays Harry Kim. Oh how clever of them. How profound and novel. They’re so brilliant. Um, nope. This is a chance to teach some people who may not know about history a little bit about history. But they chose to say, the man. Maybe the script writers don’t know who said it either. Go look it up. Google knows, why don’t you?

I was reading a few blogs I often read, and I need some second opinions. I want to know whether or not I am an insensitive bitch. I came across this post, and was left going, what’s the problem? Short summary. While sitting at a table beside some loud, drunken folk, some black people walked by who were described as:
obviously decked out — quite atrociously so — for homecoming festivities. One gentleman in particular sported a baby blue pimp suit and all of the guys had on sunglasses…at 8:30pm. They knew they were slammin.

Note the author is making fun of these guys.

Then she says the loud white drunks at the next table started calling them the Jackson five and doing a wacky dance and laughing at them. She thought this was horribly racist and made loud remarks to that effect.

Um, maybe the drunk guys were making fun of them because they probably looked like the, um, er, Jackson Five. The author herself thought they looked ridiculous and like goofs. So what’s the problem? If a bunch of white guys went by dressed in stupid outfits and somebody laughed and said, “Look, there goes NSYNC,” would that be racist too? I hope so. Now, if these so-called douches were constantly making jokes about watermellons and fried chhicken, then yep, I’m totally on side. Call them racists. Hell, stick a sign on their heads, I’ll supply the tape. But until then, I don’t quite follow.

I admit that I wasn’t there and I don’t live in the U.S. and I’m not black, but that sounded like innocent fun. But everyone seems to agree with her. So what am I missing? I left a comment and it’s pending moderation.

Oh shit, I suppose since I have to be out of here soon, I should get ready. See ya later.

Does This Disturb You as Much as It Does Me?

Does this scare you? It should. George W. Bush just signed a new bill into law that will allow terror suspects to be tried sooner, interrogators to legally use techniques like sleep-deprivation and induced hypothermia, and make it even more ok than they seem to think it is now to hold people indefinitely.

This disturbs me on so many levels. First, it disturbs me that we’ve reached the point where government can be so brazen as to just stand there and go “yep, we’re torturing suspected terrorists, and we’re going to sign it into law and there’s nothing you’re going to do about it.” There’s not even an effort to hide what they’re doing. They’re not even afraid of any opposition.

Second, it disturbs me because these people are being treated as guilty before anyone has even come close to finding them guilty. What happened to all the freedoms that everyone is supposed to receive under the law?

Third, don’t they know that torturing information out of people only gets them to say what the torturer wants to hear? I think they do, that’s the scary part.

Oh this world is going to hell.

I Smell Something Burning. It’s Common Sense!

A friend sent me a story that pissed me off, so I thought I’d write about it.

Let me try and sum this up for you. At a housing complex in a tough neighbourhood in Winnipeg, a bunch of kids between the ages of 8 and 11 decided to set fire to a shed in the playground. A 14-year-old boy saw them trying to burn the shed down. They started calling him names, shoved him into the shed, which wasn’t hard to do since he has trouble walking, jammed the door shut and set the fire. Someone heard the commotion and managed to get the boy out and firefighters took him to hospital. He escaped with some smoke inhalation, but he’s fine now, at least physically.

Now, because of their age, the kids who did this to him can’t face any kind of charges or consequences whatsoever. The best the police can do is send them to a voluntary program to tell them about the dangers of fire. But, the story says these kids’ parents aren’t really a major presence in these kids’ lives. So how many of them do you think will show up for the program?

Some people are thinking, obviously, that something needs to be done about this. They don’t want to send kids to jail. But they want them to face some kind of community service, and maybe their parents should be made to pay fines for the damage the kids did. Maybe that would teach them to supervise their little rascals.

But of course, people are screaming that this is unfair, “draconian” even, as stated by federal Liberal justice critic Sue Barnes. She thinks maybe these kids didn’t understand that what they were doing could have hurtor killed somebody.

Ok. When did your teachers and parents teach you that when the fire alarm goes off, get out because it’s not safe to be in a building with a fire? I think I was about five. If I know that fire can hurt or kill me, I think I can think far enough ahead that maybe we shouldn’t lock someone in a burning shed because no good can come of that.

The ridiculous statements continue. >> “As far as we know from child development literature, this whole idea of future consequences is something that … probably is not fully developed until well into late adolescence,” said professor Barry Mallin, who teaches school psychology at the University of Manitoba. Oh yeah? Then why are kids aged 12 and up able to be charged with a crime?

Then there’s this gem. “I would think (children) don’t see the whole physiological aspect of saying, `You know, you put a kid in there and he starts inhaling smoke and he’s going to be incapacitated and he’s eventually going to die,'” said Professor Glen Bergeron, who teaches kinesiology and applied health at the University of Winnipeg.

Congrats, mr. Big words. Congrats on making “Fires are dangerous and can hurt you, they could even kill you,” into something harder to understand than it has to be. I think those kids can understand that. And if they can’t, well I guess mom and dad need to keep a closer eye on them, don’t they? Maybe they need to teach them a few things.

It’s sad that, in a world where personal responsibility is a dying concept, some people want to kill it even faster.

Are There A Lot Of Kidnappings In Spain Or Is This Guy Just An Idiot?

Woman “kidnaps” son four times for ransom

MADRID (Reuters) – A Spanish woman staged fake kidnappings of her son four times and got his father to pay her more than a million euros ($1.26 million) in ransom money, newspaper El Mundo reported Friday.

Police in the southern Spanish city of Seville arrested the woman and five accomplices, including the 15-year-old son who cooperated in the deception by calling his father on the telephone and begging him to pay up.

The father paid ransoms after the first three fake abductions without realizing the involvement of his son’s mother, from whom he had separated. He became suspicious the fourth time and hired a private detective, El Mundo reported.

Oh Shut Up!

This is one of those stories where, I hope anyway, you read it and just say to yourself, “you’ve got to be kidding!”

It seems that the mother of a Muslim grade 5 student in Edmonton is very upset because the new issue of a booklet used to teach students about current events had the nerve to run a story about the recent plot to blow up commercial airplanes that was discovered by British authorities. The people behind the publication, called “What in the World?”, had the unmitigated gall to mention in their article that all of the suspects arrested in connection with the plot were Muslim which, at least last I heard, they were.

But that doesn’t matter to Sabah Fares, who says that her daughter felt like “running away” when the story was used in her class because she is the only Muslim there.

“I don’t blame her,” Fares said. “This is what I’m going to do if everybody is looking at me like ‘Oh, they did it,'”

I don’t know about any of you, but I think this might be a good time for someone to call a waambulance.

I know through experience that there’s discrimination out there, and I know that people, especially children, can be really, really mean sometimes. But to sit there and say that the authors of a news article are stereotyping your people by presenting the facts is just flat out ridiculous, there’s no other way to say it. If that were the case, why not go after CBC or CTV or any of the thousands of other media outlets who because it happens to be their job, told the same damn story? The people you have to worry about aren’t the people who wrote the story or the teacher who decided to use it. The ones you should be concerned with are the ones who A are ignorant enough to look at all Muslims and say “oh, they did it” and B your fellow Muslims who were ignorant enough to try to blow up airplanes to prove a point. Attacking a school for teaching kids about news that you don’t happen to like won’t get anybody anywhere unless your ultimate goal is to shield your child and others from the world. If anything, maybe you should be happy that stories like this are getting out. Perhaps if we teach kids from an early enough age that violence in the name of peace is fucking retarded no matter what colour or faith you are, maybe a few generations from now we’ll have taken some serious steps towards stamping out the idea that such a thing is acceptable. I know it sounds crazy, but it worked on slavery, so anything’s possible.

Somebody Really, Really Loves Jonathan Coulton!

Oh my god this is funny. This guy, whoever he is, sat down, took all the titles of the things a week from Jonathan Coulton, whipped out the tune from The Presidents, and made a tribute to the Things a week. It’s kinda geeky, kinda funny, kinda shittily recorded, kinda got too many syllables, but ah damn, it just has to be heard. It even has solos that sorta sound like excerpts from Jo Co’s things. If you listen to it, after the ad finishes for the service hosting the file, turn the volume way up. Hopefully, this direct link will work, but if it doesn’t, the link to the lyrics has a link to the page where you can download the mp3, for as long as it sees the light of day. So grab it now! It’s hillarious!

I am Blind! Not stupid!

God! What is with anything in a specialty market? The people who are selling these products think, and let me emphasize the word THINK, that they have the people who want it by the short and curlies and can sell it for whatever inflated price they want. They also think that their customers sincerely believe they can only get these things from one place. Companies selling these things perpetuate this by not giving you the name of whatever company manufactures the products they distribute, so those who are newbies to this whole thing will be convinced of this, and won’t bother to shop around. To add insult to injury, they think they can condescend to their customers and treat them like stupid, worthless piles of shit when they call. After all, we should be grateful that this company is willing to sell these specialty products to us at all, right?

Wrong!

Hey bud, when a product is $50 U.S, do you think that you can honestly expect me to buy it from you for $120 Canadian, just because you’re Canadian? Do you think I’ll actually believe the dollar is that bad? Even at its worst, it wasn’t that abysmal. Wake up!

And bud no. 2, if you’re an hour away, do you think I’m going to swallow $15 worth of shipping? Hell I could probably get a drive down there and pick it up from your slimy hands for less than that!

And bud no. 3 who actually makes these things, how can you expect me to believe that the reason you don’t ship to Canada is because it costs more than the product’s value to ship it? The one I want is $50 U.S. Who is your shipper, and who is doing your books? You need to fire him immediately for not noticing that you’re getting gouged to the tenth power on shipping! You can’t tell me that’s the real reason and expect me to believe it.

Here’s a message to all of these companies who think that charging insane prices for this shit is a good idea. I will leave you with a name to chew on. Anne Moris. She once sold the same products that other people did, but her prices were nuts. Do you know where Anne Moris Enterprises is now? Gone! Dead! Nonexistent! 404! Out of business! I don’t know precisely why, but those insane prices sure didn’t help, partly because they’re ludicrous, and partly because word gets around. Soon we tell our friends, and they find other places to buy the stuff. The whole small market thing can work both ways.

The Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) should learn this soon, or they won’t be able to keep their tech aids store open any longer because no one will shop there. But it may close anyway, just like everything else of theirs is doing. Oops did I say that out loud? Seriously, though, of all the people guilty of trying to rip customers off, they are second only to Maxiaids, who I won’t even link to because I won’t give traffic to people who are called fraudsters by anyone who has dealt with them. I tell everyone I can to not buy from the CNIB. First of all, they don’t even know who manufactures their products. Second, they charge exorbitant prices. Third, when you ask questions, they treat you like you shouldn’t even dare ask these questions and just buy the product, which is bad because some of the stuff they sell doesn’t even work as advertised. And then they wonder why I won’t buy things from them sight unseen.

And here’s a message to all the companies who think that they don’t have to worry about customer service. You do! When I phone up and ask a question about a product, don’t speak to me like I’m a. 2 years old and b. troubling you immensely. If you don’t want to answer customer inquiries, don’t open your god damn business! I phoned one place this morning and asked this guy who sounded like the slimiest swindler on the planet how much the shipping was on a product. He very slowly asked me, “Where do you live, dear?” I told him and he said, “Gee, how much *does* it cost to ship to there, dear?” I said that’s why I was phoning him. Then he just went, “oh…hmmm…I’d say about $15.” Did you just dream that figure up? Or are you actually going to look it up for me like a normal person would? Needless to say, I’m not buying it from there.

There has only been a couple of adaptive product companies who have treated me well, and they consistently get my business. This is why it pisses me off to see so many of them trying to treat me like crap. If there were a zillion places to choose from, I’d just shrug it off that this one company sucks and move onto the next place. But there are so few that sell this stuff, and it sucks to have to dig for the good service. But here’s a lesson for you folks who sell products like these. I *will* dig for the good service. We *do* have options. The sooner you realize this, the sooner you can start working on saving your company from going under.