Breathe In The Name Of The Law!

Mayor wants to ban death.

“The mayor of a Brazilian town is trying to bring in a law making it illegal for residents to die.

“Mayor Roberto Pereira da Silva, of Biritiba-Mirim, came up with the idea because the town’s only cemetery is full.

“He wants to bring in a law that would see relatives of people who die before their time face fines or even jail.”

I’ll never understand the whole “before their time” thing no matter how many times I hear it, especially when it keeps coming from those people who think that everything is “God’s will.” If it’s God’s will and he does everything when it’s time to do it according to some sort of “divine plan” he’s cooked up, then how can any death be a premature one? When you’re supposed to go, then you’re gone, no matter how or when you go. You can’t have it both ways, pick a side and stick with it. Mark that down as another problem I have with the whole religion thing. Too many logic gaps for me.

As a small side note, this story has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with physical space, but I needed to throw that out there because those “God knows everything” people drive me endlessly up the friggin wall.

If There Was a Net God…

I read the ten net commandments from the Spyware Weekly Newsletter, and they’re bang on. Anyone who doesn’t already follow these rules should start. I guess I’m partially breaking no. 2, but only in the safest possible way.

Note: When he says every second Tuesday, he means the second Tuesday of every month.

1. Thou shalt not buy merchandise found in pop-up ads or spam.
2. Thou shalt not post thy email address, phone number, address or social security number to the internet, nor shalt thou post anyone else’s.
3. Thou shalt not forget to update thy Windows every second Tuesday.
4. Thou shalt not connect to the internet without installing an antivirus, nor shalt thou begin a scan without checking for updates.
5. Thou shalt not connect to the internet without installing a firewall.
6. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s credit card number, nor his bank routing number, nor his social security number.
7. Thou shalt not enter thy credit card number without seeing the tiny padlock icon on thy status bar.
8. Thou shalt not reply to the email from the Nigerian banker.
9. Thou shalt not forward chain letters to thy friends and family.
10. Thou shalt not use “password”, nor thy birthday, nor thy children’s names, as thy password.

Pretty Weirdness

I hate to throw something like this on top of Carin’s great post about the shelter, but like they say, the show must go on. By the way, who are They? I know a million people have asked that question, but none of them have ever been able to answer it. Ok, there’s always
this guy,
but I’m not counting him since he just decided to become the answer last year in a rather creative attempt at cashing in on his 15 minutes of fame, and surely the real They have been around longer than he has, so his little publicity stunt means next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. And it’s at this point that it dawns on me once again that I sure do spend a lot of time thinking about stupid crap. I’m not sure how healthy it is, but hell if I’m stopping, it’s somehow worked for me up to now. Why tamper with marginal success I always say.

Wow, I actually had to look up at the title to remember what my point was supposed to be. Guess my fingers kind of got away from me for a minute there. And is it just me, or does that last sentence sound far more disgusting than it should?

Ok, after all that, let’s talk music!

Does that new INXS song “Pretty Vegas” weird you people out as much as it does me? I don’t know about you guys, but whenever I hear that song I always have to stop for a second and remind myself that this is 2005, that’s JD Fortune singing, and that Michael Hutchence is most certainly still dead. He might still be hanging from the hotel doorknob for all I know, but wherever he is, he ain’t singing on that song. But even though I know that, the lengths to which Hutchence 2K5 goes to sound exactly like him are extremely frightening to me. I’m so bothered by this that I can’t even enjoy Vegas for the not bad song that it is. Maybe it’s because I can’t get over the fact that I was fooled into thinking it was an old INXS song and it took me like 4 minutes to realize I was wrong when I’m usually the guy who knows that kind of thing in about 4 seconds, or maybe it’s because I can’t get the damn thing out of my head, but whatever it is, this song has started driving me nuts. It’s gotten to the point where I’m seriously considering dropping way more cash than anybody should have to for an INXS album just for the sake of hearing what the rest of it sounds like. Isn’t that sad? Ok, you don’t have to answer that. But please, somebody, tell me that I’m not alone. Or better yet, send me a copy of the album or at least hook me up with a few mp3’s so I can get a sense of whether the whole sound-alike thing is a marketing ploy designed to sell albums to idiots like me or something that should legit scare me. Whatever the answer ultimately ends up being, there needs to be one so I can finally get my mind back to a state of relative ease.

And on a final note,I’d just like to point out that about 93% of all of the Christmas music I’ve ever heard in my life is really, really bad.

More later.

Big Fuckin Post, No Fuckin Title!

Yep, I gave up. After sitting there for a good 20 minutes trying to find a title for this post, I just threw one in. Hey, at least it’s a title of some sort. Sorry I haven’t written in a while. I really don’t know where this week went. I guess that’s what happens to time when you get closer to Christmas. But I’ve been thinking about something for a while, and tried to post about it, but oh no. My computer had other plans for that post.

Like I said a while ago, I started volunteering at a women’s shelter. I knew going in that it might be heart-breaking. But I guess I expected the heartbreak to just smack me in the face like it does sometimes at the telephone help centre where I volunteer. But I’m figuring out slowly that the things that rip me apart aren’t in the obvious, but in the subtle.

Let’s just run through a few things that have happened over my few shifts there. At the beginning I didn’t know the way there because the address is confidential. So they were meeting me and showing me the way. As we walked towards the door, the staff walking with me stopped me, turned and talked to someone else. She said very nicely, “Hello, are you looking for some apartments? I live in the area, I know it well, do you need some directions?” It turned out to be a man. After gently directing him away from the shelter, she told me she wasn’t sure if he was trying to sneak in and get past the staff. That freaked me out. How often do they have to politely fend off people from trying to get inside? And One day, would I have to do this too?

When I finally get to the door, I am told it has cameras, shown a keypad where you punch a door code that I still haven’t been given, and a doorbell that connects the person on the outside of the door to someone who speaks over an intercom speaker. I understand the reason for all this security. I mean, the women in here have x’s that aren’t exactly friendly and when they drop by, it’s not to bring the women some cookies and maybe a nice card. But even understanding it doesn’t make it any less forbidding. Then, the door opens, and I have five seconds to get through the next door.

So I’m now inside the walls of the shelter. At first it feels sorta homey. I can smell some rice cooking, I can hear some music playing and some women talking. And then I hear something else. A baby crying. This should add to the homelike atmosphere, but it doesn’t. It shakes me and brings me back to reality. This is a shelter. A shelter for women and their kids to get away from someone who’s beating them. That means, what has this poor baby seen already? In this baby’s brief life, what has he or she had to go through? What does this world seem like to this little baby?

I walk to the office to check in and see which kids need a babysitter. I get there and the phone rings and someone’s prescriptions come in, and she doesn’t even have the money to pay for them, so they have to be paid for by the shelter. Then I start to notice the state of organized chaos that is the norm here. As one of the staff starts to deal with the prescription, a woman comes in, cannot speak English at all, and the staff on the phone has to hand off the phone to someone else because she’s the only one who can speak Spanish, so she can talk to the woman who’s just walked into the office. Can you imagine not only needing to run away from someone who has probably controled every aspect of your life, but on top of that, not having the ability to speak the predominant language spoken where you are? Not being able to ask for help? Having to hope that the person offering help is an excellent reader of body language? She’s just lucky that there is one person in the shelter who can speak Spanish fluently. But what happens when that person goes home?

I’m told there’s a little girl who needs a babysitter. So I meet up with her and we go off to play. She decides to play with a jack in the box. But the character refuses to come out of the box. So the little girl says to me, very calmly, “I know how to fix it.” With that, she picks up the jak in the box and smashes it down hard on the floor. My mouth opens a little and then I manage to not make a big deal. I say to her, “Oh, I don’t know. I think you might have scared him. Now, he might not come out at all.” Then, with the next crank, the little guy pops out. I find this whole situation freaky. Think about it. She got what she wanted by smacking the thing around, just like I’m sure her mother’s abuser got what he wanted by smacking her mother around. I know the jack in the box doesn’t have a mind and it was just a strange coincidence, but it was the wrong kind.

Back at the office, someone comes in and wants to speak to the staff about donations. What she has is not anything huge, but what it is seems to be needed. It’s a bunch of clothes and blankets. Then I got thinking about how these people usually arrive. With nothing but the clothes on their backs, and maybe a kid’s favourite toy if they managed to grab it on their way out the door. And they’ll likely be leaving soon, having to start all over again from scratch. How does one do that when they don’t even have the money to pay for their prescriptions?

I come back a couple more times and the little girl really wants to see me and is talking to me. As I go to leave I say, “I’ll see you next week.” There is a pause and the staff with me says, oh no you won’t because she and her mother are moving out on the weekend. I give the little girl a hug and tell her I hope she likes her new place. And that was the last time I saw that little girl. I wonder how stable her life has been up to this point. Has this been the only time of Chaos? Or has it been a series of moves, always hoping the next house, the next town, the next man, will be better?

Then I think about how it’s going to be the whole time I’m there. The high turnover, the constant change of faces. I know it’s a good thing that they’re not stuck there long, it means there’s hope for a new life. But for me, It also means I’m going to have to grow a thick skin and not get attached to anyone there, because likely before I know it, they’ll be gone.

As I go to leave because my shift is over, I have to hit a big button to activate the intercom and ask if it’s safe to go. She says it is and I step back into the parking lot, the street, the seemingly normal world. Then I wonder how normal it is, or how many other strange worlds are spinning in their own little orbits all around me. And then I think I should stop philosophizing because nobody needs a big pile of philosophy. Whatever I may think, I know this. It sure didn’t need much time to simultaneously scramble up my brain and make me thankful for how good my life really is.

Cheap Plugs And Pointless Awards

Ok, time for me to whore myself out a little.

The good people over at
Salty Ham
are in the middle of celebrating 2 years of existing, and there are a lot of things going on over there right now. Among them is the Top 50 Current Wrestlers list, the first part of which you can read
here.
I wrote stuff there, go check it out if you’re either a wrestling person or a Steve person. Do Steve people actually exist? Probably not, but I can pretend.

And I know that this has nothing to do with anything, but as of Tuesday night, I’m convinced that pop music is pretty much dead. They actually presented something called the Ringtone of the Year Award during the Billboard Music Awards that night. Why do ringtones need their own award? You know who deserves his own award? The first guy to get so pissed off when he hears one of those fucking things in a public place that he kicks the person square in the nuts and shoves his cell phone up his ass. Then again, watching the Billboard Music Awards in the first place is a pretty good indication of what sort of state pop music is in, ringtones or no ringtones, so maybe I’m just getting way too worked up about this. That being said, piss off with the ringtones already, would ya please? It’s a phone for God’s sake, not a fucking jukebox.

Stalker’s Drug Mmart

I heard something on the news that just gave me the shivers. The Canadian Pharmacists’ Association is changing it so that people who get the morning after pill have to give the pharmacist their names, addresses, phone numbers, and details about there sexual activity before they can get it. This is apparently to make sure people are using it appropriately and effectively. Doesn’t that just make you shake your head and go, huh?

In case you didn’t know what the morning after pill is, it’s a few pills you get within the first couple days after a roll in the hay that you think might have gotten you pregnant to stop the pregnancy from going too far. It’s basically like a whole bunch of the stuf that’s in a month’s worth of birth control pills all squished into a couple of pills. it used to only be available by prescription, but now they made it available over the counter, presumably to make it easier to get than before. Do you see where I’m going?

If you have to give all this info to some random pharmacist, how many people actually will? Now, instead of a bunch of people using the morning after pill and no one having stats on its effective use, oh fiddledy dee, we’ll have a bunch of unwanted children instead. Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful plan?

And, why is there any good reason for someone to collect these people’s addresses and phone numbers? Are they trying to create a “for a good time, call” database? Someone’s phone number isn’t going to tell you if they know all the right info about the plan B pill. Why not just take each person who requests it aside and tell them the info they need to know and not bother taking shit down and filing it away for tracking purposes? Isn’t that what they say pharmacists should do anyway in all those commercials with the cute old ladies?

If I am to take these people on faith that this is something they need to do to make sure people are taking their medicine as directed, why not do it for everything you get over the counter? Why not ask for someone’s headache history when they need a pain-killer? Why don’t they ask if you’ve bought other cough syrup when you break down and get some Buckly’s? *Everything* can be abused and administered the wrong way. That Southpark episode about cough medicine abuse was a joke, but I’m sure there’s some base to it. Hell, some of the stuff in crystal meth comes from cold medications. While we’re at it, why not ask people if they’ve ever had drug charges brought against them because they want something to make them stop hacking up a lung? Surprisingly, extreme as it may be, it makes more logical sense than this shit.

This Is Progress?

First things first, if any of you reading this emailed me something any time between Wednesday night and 9:30 or so on Thursday morning, odds are good that I probably won’t be getting it unless you send it again. This morning I downloaded a bunch of mail onto Carin’s computer, which promptly proceeded to crash and eat about half of it. Needless to say, Steve was not a happy guy this morning.

But the tragic and untimely death of a massive amount of electronic correspondence did get me thinking. It got me thinking about the way we live and the ways in which we function as a society. How we do things, how things are done for us. Who and what we trust, and the things with which we trust them. In short, it got me thinking about whether we, as a people, are truly as advanced as we tend to think we are.

Stop and think about your own day to day life for a few minutes. Think about all of the conveniences that inovation has afforded you in the hopes that you’ll be a more efficient and productive worker during select hours, and lazier during others. Consider how much you’ve come to rely on those conveniences, and how much it sucks when you’re placed in a situation that doesn’t allow you to have access to them. Remember all those times when you were running late for something and you didn’t have your cell phone with you? You got pretty pissed off and annoyed with yourself, didn’t you? It’s ok, you can admit it, we’ve all been there and we’ve all reacted the same way. And why? Because we’ve become a culture that depends on computers and gadgets to keep us in touch 24/7. If you don’t think that’s true, think about how angry you get when your buddy doesn’t have his phone turned on, or the profound sense of shock you feel when you happen upon somebody who doesn’t use the internet and has no use for an email address and then tell me again that I’m wrong. Ok, now that you’re on side, ask yourself this question. For all of the teleconferencing and instant messaging and email and whatever else you want to throw in there that’s supposed to save time and make things easier, are we really that much better off? Have all of the technological safeguards that we’ve put in place to prevent mistakes and their associated misery really worked, or have we simply swapped one set of problems for another? Personally, I think the answer is pretty simple.

I won’t try to argue that technology doesn’t have it’s good points. I understand and appreciate that a great many inventions have been a great deal of help to a lot of people. Without some of the concepts and improvements that have come along over the years, I can pretty safely say that my life as a blind person would suck mightily. Because of technology, I can pay bills without help, I can keep track of notes I need to read in order to do various jobs, I can piss around doing stupid crap on the net while I’m supposed to be doing those jobs, I can do, well, pretty much anything I want, and I have technology to thank for that. But that being said, I truly believe that we’ve come to depend on and blindly trust in it’s supposed infallibility way more than we should. What happened to my email today is a fine example of that. Sure, email’s great when it works, but if for some reason something goes wrong, boom, it’s all gone and you’re out some important company memos, just like that, no questions asked. It’s all gone and there’s nothing you can do about it. Think of it this way. When a postal truck flips over on the highway and bursts into flames, what do you suppose happens to all the mail? That’s right, it’s gone. that’s it, there’s no getting it back. John’s house payment and Francine’s thank you cards are all incinerated and they won’t be getting to where they need to go. So how is it then that email is so much better? I know that in the time it takes to snap your fingers a couple of times you can send 1093 emails, but what good is that if they don’t get to their destinations? Have you ever gotten an email from somebody 2 weeks after it was sent? What’s the difference between that and those stories you hear on the news now and then about a postcard from Paris that was sent during World War 2 finally getting to somebody in Virginia 65 years after the fact? When you scale it down and consider how long each is supposed to take, there’s really no difference.

But where the point is really driven home for me is at the bank, or maybe I should say at what passes as a bank these days since you can bank from pretty much anywhere now. Me for instance, I do a majority of my banking over the phone. Stop and think about that. AT no time do I ever have to handle money, or interact with someone who does. Isn’t that weird? My entire monitary existence has been reduced to what amounts to nothing more than an abstract idea and some blind faith that the hard drive is good at math. Gee, I don’t see what could possibly go wrong there. What used to be me exchanging money with somebody else for goods and services has now become one machine telling another machine that I have the correct number of numbers required for that other machine to agree and then convince another actual person that they can then give me what I need. I’ll give you a moment to get your heads around that.

But in any event, I think I’ve made my point. All of this technology, as useful and helpful as some of it is, isn’t the saving grace of humanity that people would have you believe. Think about that the next time one of your “virtually faultless” CD’s starts skipping because it has a scratch in it. That sounds an awful lot like what happened to all of those records that sucked so much back in the day.

Stupid Stephen Harper

Yeah yeah yeah, we already know Stephen Harper is scary and not who I’d vote for that’s for sure. But I saw him do something that I found to be completely patronizing! There is no other word to describe what I saw.

Stephen Harper’s up there, spouting off about his feelings about the liberals. Same old same old. But occasionally, after going through a huge diatribe about how his government will stand up for Canadians in English, he’d sprinkle in a little french. Usually, it was a couple of words, and if you were super lucky, you got a whole sentence! What a god damn fucking gift! The guy who’s going to lead the country can only afford to stop and say an occasional sentence in French? And this is a good campaign strategy? Who should I strangle first, Stephen Harper, or his little speech-writing weasels? Let me add that these occasional sprinklings in French were spoken so poorly that I thought maybe a male version of my mother, who thought Gothier was pronounced goth-yer, (I’m sorry mom), was up there.

Ok, if you’re not going to make a concerted effort to speak our second *official* language, don’t even fucking try. I mean, he wasn’t even in Quebec for Christ’s sake. He was in Nova Scotia. Was he trying to somehow earn brownie points with the people of Nova Scotia because he could say Bonjour? Was he just trying to shut up the critics who noticed his complete lack of French last time around? Doing what he did was like throwing bread crumbs to a starving homeless guy. It’s patronizing and it shows exactly how little French he actually knows.

I think the translator that was there to convert any french back to English was shocked to have to do some work at one point, and I only saw one such two-sentence translation in the whole damn pile of shit known as a speech. Ooo I guess I should say that if you’d won the lottery, you’d get two whole sentences. And let me say that they were nothing like the giant mound of English he’d been spewing.

This really pisses me off because I saw this a million times when I spent a bit of time in Quebec. The voicemail greetings you’d get that were supposed to be bilingual technically were, if you wanted to be an ass about it, but the English message was nowhere near as detailed as the French equivalent. The French would say something about “you have reached insert name here. I am out of my office Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but leave me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” And the English? “Hi. Leave a message after the beep.” Tell me that’s not horribly inaccurate. I’m just lucky I can speak French.

So now, whenever I see this, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Does he actually think this is going to win him favour? Think again, Mr. Harper.