Active Listening By The Deaf

Man. I can’t believe how people who claim to be good listeners don’t really listen. Or maybe they only listen in certain contexts, and then turn off their ears everywhere else.

I said I was in training to work with people who are trying to get out of abusive situations, and that would involve learning how to listen, right? Well, it seems my fellow trainees don’t have the talent mastered yet. I was sitting with them, and Martha Stewart came up in conversation. All I said was, “It pisses me off that just because she’s a celebrity, she can have the rules bent for her.” I’d just heard on the news that she really wanted to go to this pumpkin fest in Nova Scotia and help them raise money. That’s dandy. But she’s a criminal, which means you have to have a special visa to get across the border. And apparently, she and her 50000 lawyers didn’t investigate this until it was too late. So instead of accepting her fate and not coming, she whined and cried like a spoiled child until they made her a special visa.

After I spoke these words, all hell broke loose in the room. Crise of”don’t pick on Martha Stewart, she only went down because she was a democrat. and because she’s female.” erupted all over the place. Of course. I should expect this in a room full of radical feminists. But what flew right over their heads as they started spasming, knee-jerk reaction style, is that whole argument is beside the point. I don’t care if she was wrongly accused of ass-raping a goat. The point is she was convicted, and she should abide by the same rules as the rest of the convicts. And on top of that, she wasn’t even wrongly accused, so that shred of sympathy is gone. If some other common criminal just found out their great aunt in another country was on her deathbed and wanted to go see her, you know what would happen? They’d find out they’d need a special visa, wouldn’t be able to get it, and would have to live with the fact that they didn’t hear great aunt Birtha’s dying words as long as they lived, and no one would care. That would be the end of it. But because she’s Queen Martha Stewart, they kissed her ass and she got special treatment. That was what pissed me off.

But nobody heard that. They heard Martha Stewart and started flipping out about how she was apparently unjustly treated and males did way worse than she did and got off scott free because they were republican males. Ok, perhaps. But you see those things on the sides of your heads? Ya know, they’re not just used for balance. They’re used to listen. LISTEN! L i s t e n! Next time, before you chop off my head, ears and all, actually listen to what I have to say.

Good Lord

The only problem I can see with this is that if God has as much influence as the lawsuit claims he does, then there’s no point in this guy suing him since he can’t possibly win unless God allows him to.

Prisoner sues God

A Romanian prisoner is suing God for failing to save him from the Devil.

The inmate, named as Pavel M in media reports, accused God of “cheating, abuse and traffic of influence”.

His complaint reads: “I, the undersigned Pavel M, currently jailed at Timisoara Penitentiary serving a 20 years sentence for murder, request legal action against God, resident in Heaven, and represented here by the Romanian Orthodox Church, for committing the following crimes: cheating, concealment, abuse against people’s interest, taking bribe and traffic of influence.”

The inmate argued that his baptism was a contract between him and God who was supposed to keep the Devil away and keep him out of trouble.

He added: “God even claimed and received from me various goods and prayers in exchange for forgiveness and the promise that I would be rid of problems and have a better life.

“But on the contrary I was left in Devil’s hands.”

The complaint was sent to the Timisoara Court of Justice and forwarded to the prosecutor’s office.

But prosecutors said it would probably be dropped and they were unable to subpoena God to court.

Welcome To The White People’s Happy Time Hip Hop Sing Along

I know that covering rap songs and turning them into country or folk songs is sort of an old gag, but I still think it’s funny, and since I know other people think it’s funny too, here are a couple more that I’ve just found.

Both of these tracks were done by
Jonathan Coulton,
who I know absolutely nothing about beyond the fact that he did a really nice job on them.

Have a listen to
Baby Got Back,
and
Bills, Bills, Bills,
which you’ll have to scroll down the page a bit to find.

Enjoy.

Steve, Don’t Eat It!

Here’s some nice random vomit-inducing fun for you.

I’m sure at some point we’ve all had this experience. You’re in the grocery store, and as happens every now and then, you come across something sitting on a shelf that makes you stop in your tracks, examine it and say to yourself or to the person next to you, “what the hell is that, and who in their right mind would want to eat it?” Well luckily for us sane unadventurous types somebody does eat it, and he’s even cool enough to describe the experience on his website in something he calls
Steve, Don’t Eat It!

Everything from Potted Meat Food Product to Silkworm Pupas are fair game, and he even tested out those Beggin’ Strips dog treats to see if they did in fact taste like bacon. His conclusion? Apparently they don’t.

I was laughing so hard by the time I got through all of the stories that I actually had tears in my eyes. Seriously, go read this stuff right now, just make sure that you’re not eating or drinking, and that you haven’t recently done either one.

Even More Odd Inventions

In keeping with the weird shit that people create and try to sell theme that we have going on around here this week, I give you StrangeNewProducts.com, a site that I found yesterday without even looking for it. What can I say, I’m just that good, or maybe that lucky. But either way, finding entertaining and relevant material without doing research or any other sort of work whatsoever rules.

The site is updated daily and features descriptions of all sorts of new products. Some are kind of cool, like the Sidekick Blood Glucose Monitor, and some are so completely stupid that they rival even mp3-playing breast implants, such as the Psychotronic Wishing Machine, which you really need to read about if ever you’re searching for a good reason to smash your head into a wall or find enough motivation to do it to someone else. There’s a lot of other neat stuff there too, so give it a look. It seems like a fine way to waste a few minutes every day.

Checking In, Saying Hi, Writing Things Down

I hope that everyone who celebrates it had a good Canadian Thanksgiving. Mine was great, thanks for asking. It was a good excuse for me to see my family, who I don’t see nearly as much as I’d like. It was also a good excuse for me to eat ridiculous amounts of food. The last time I can recall stuffing down so much dessert in a 24 hour period was last Christmas, but last Christmas there were 3 dinner gatherings, not 2. And through all of the eating and catching up, I still managed to learn something. That broken telephone campfire game that I’m sure most of us played as kids is a lot more fun when you’re playing with a buzz and when a couple of the people in the circle don’t have the greatest hearing.

It was nice to see the Leafs finally win a game on Tuesday night after a couple of shootout losses to Ottawa and a loss to Montreal on Saturday that I didn’t watch. I was one of the people who was upset before the season started about them not making a whole lot of big name signings, but I’ll say now that I’m pleasantly surprised at how well they’ve been playing. Even in losses, they’ve got quite a few guys who are all over the puck and creating good scoring chances. Now if they could only get a lead and hold on to it for more than a couple of minutes at a time, they might just have it made. But having said all that, there’s still a part of me that wonders if we could be in for another year like we’ve had in the past, where goaltending keeps them in a lot more games that they have no right winning, or even coming close in. I guess time will tell, but I’m going to make a really bold prediction here and say that we’re not looking at a cup contending team this year.

Man, has WWE been sucking more than usual lately or what? I can find good in wrestling where a lot of people can’t, but even I’m finding myself having trouble coming up with good things to say about the last few weeks of programming. I honestly think it’s some of the most boring and uninspired crap I’ve ever sat through, and I’ve watched a lot of wrestling in my life, a fair bit of it bad. The sad thing is that WWE, with the talent pool they have access to, should find it impossible or at the very least exceedingly difficult to put on horrible and unimportant shows week in and week out. Yet somehow they make doing so look absolutely effortless, it’s amazing.

Take Raw Homecoming for example. That show had an Ironman match between 2 of the best workers the business has ever seen, a Ladder match featuring 2 guys who’s names just about noone can argue come almost immediately to mind when the words Ladder match are spoken, and appearances from a huge list of legends that are rarely if ever seen outside of local independent shows or a WWE TV cameo now and then. But still, somehow, some way, the folks at WWE managed to turn what could have easily been an event that should have been talked about for months if not years to come into just another show, and not even a good one at that. A non-finish in an Ironman match? Ironman matches decide champions and end feuds, they don’t…whatever the point of that was, they don’t do that. The match was great, but in the end I felt let down, and after 30 minutes of Michaels vs. Angle, that’s not the way anybody should be feeling. The Edge vs. Matt Hardy ladder match was good, but it was over before it really had a chance to get started. You had 3 hours and an overrun, why not shorten something else, like one of the million pointless interview segments that accomplished nothing more than poorly advancing bad angles, or worse, wasting TV time on things that weren’t going anywhere beyond this 1 night? This show could have and should have been so much better than it was, and the fact that it didn’t even come close speaks to some huge problems behind the scenes in WWE in my opinion, for whatever that’s worth.

I got a call last night from one of those survey companies. No, I’m not upset about it, I don’t mind those. They’re sort of fun, they’re not trying to sell you anything, and those polls are one of the only ways you can get your government to consider listening to you, even if all you are is anonymous guy number 5423 in poll number X19. Who you are doesn’t matter, because you’re a voter, and everything related to voters and their feelings is measured in numbers, so politicians tend to live and die by them, changing their positions on just about everything under the sun based on each new set that lands in front of them. Ok, where was I? Right, the phone call I got yesterday.

It started out normal enough. The guy introduces himself, asks me if I’m over 18 and whether or not I’ve got time to answer a few quick questions, completely standard stuff. Then he launches into some questions about the province’s electrical system and my feelings on various aspects of it. How we should be generating our power, how important environmental concerns are when making such decisions, that kind of stuff. Then he hits me with one I’m not expecting.

“In the last 4 weeks, how many times have you shopped in an LCBO store, and how would you rate the service on a scale of 1 to 10?”

For those of you who don’t know what the LCBO is, those letters stand for Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which as should be quite obvious to hopefully everyone reading this, has nothing to do with hydro. I’d love to know how those 2 subjects found their way into the same survey, especially since they were the only 2 topics covered. It wasn’t a long, drawn out questionnaire on my feelings on all sorts of government-run services, it was hydro and booze, that’s all. That’s totally random and I’m overly curious about it. Why wouldn’t they have put the booze questions in a survey about health care, that would have at least made some sense. As things stand now, the only theory I can come up with as to how those 2 things became related is that lots of people drank beer during the big blackout a couple of years ago, and they would have had to get it from an LCBO location. I really should have asked, but I was kind of in a hurry and now it’s driving me nuts. Oh well, it’s my own fault for not taking the extra time to find out.

Wow, I didn’t realize this while I was writing, but I suppose this story kind of has a bit of a moral to it. Slow down, take your time, and ask questions. It’s the only way you’re ever going to learn anything.

And on that happy note, I’m going to take a few minutes and learn a little about what my lunch options are. I’ll talk to you all a bit later on.

It’s Completely Useless, But Somebody Will Still Pay For It

A company called PG Tips has created what is probably the first, and hopefully the last,
SMS tea kettle,
a product that they hope will “revolutionize tea-time.”

The concept behind the kettle, which the company is calling ReadyWhenUR, is simple enough. Whenever you want to boil some water, all you need to do is send a text message to the kettle’s phone number that says “switch on,” and it will do so.

But though the concept is simple, I don’t see how the execution could possibly be the same way for a number of reasons.

First of all, you have to fill the thing with water yourself, which means you would have to go to the kitchen and lay your hands on it before you could even consider using the “convenient” texting feature. At that point, why wouldn’t you just plug it in? It would probably take less time.

Then you still have to grab the mug and ingredients and make the tea yourself, and you also have to watch for the kettle to boil because it isn’t capable of messaging you back when its done, nor does it have a whistle, which is one of the most basic tea kettle features in history.

So lets recap. It doesn’t fill itself, it doesn’t make tea, and it doesn’t let you know when it’s finished, but it does have a phone number and an understanding of the English language that consists of an amazingly impressive and astounding 2 words, and it probably comes with an inflated price tag too. I’m sure that at this point I’m not the only one who’s thinking wow, I can’t wait until next year when these things go on sale. I’ll be buying one for everyone I know. But seriously, if this is what our so-called “wired world” is going to be like, count me out.

For Its A Jolly Good Person

The following bit of stupidity was sent to me this morning:

Hi All of you wonderful volunteers:
There is an Agency Fair being held at Stone Road Mall for Thursday, October 13, 2005, 10:00am – 2:00pm.
We are in need of a couple of volunteers that can person the booth at stone road mall see the following details:
1. 9:30 Set Up – to 12 Noon
2. 12 Noon to 2:00 and take down
If two people are able to offer a couple of your hours to person this booth please let me know by today end of the day..thanks…

If that isn’t an example of political correctness gone absolutely insane, I’d love for someone to please explain to me what is.

“Person a booth”? “Person?” What the hell is that? Have we truly reached the point where it’s no longer acceptable to use the word man? And if we have, why do we have to use person instead? Why not ask for a couple of people to work the booth, or maybe to staff it? Well ok, perhaps to some sick twisted pervert staffing the booth would involve having sex with it, you know, the whole staff of life thing, but that’s a stretch, and we can’t just go making up new words because now and then a few crackpots might interpret something in a way that we didn’t intend for it to be interpreted. Or maybe we can, I mean after all, we’re already personning things because somebody has a problem with us manning them.

But that’s my point. If we find new words for things because a few people don’t like the old ones in some cases, where do we stop? How do we as a society determine who’s interpretations are valid and worth looking into and who’s are just flat out stupid? In short, where do we draw that line? Or maybe a better question would be should we draw that line at all? Perhaps it would be considered discriminatory by some if we did.

But wherever and whenever that line is eventually drawn, and for the sake of the sanity of the sane it had better be drawn soon, I hope that I never have to turn on my radio and hear the announcer say that there’s a classic from David Wilpenises coming right up after the break because he’s not allowed to say Wilcox anymore, or that I never have to turn on my TV and catch a rerun of the Penis Van Lesbian Show because there’s no way that saying Dick Van Dike could possibly be appropriate under any circumstances.

Sure, you might laugh at those examples now, but take a look back through history and realize just how much language has changed, and then look to the present day and realize how many people want to change it even more, and how much those people want us to give up for the sake of being non-offensive and inclusive. When you stop and think about it, what I’m worried about might not be quite as far fetched as it seems, and that’s pretty sad.

Thought Stew cooked up in the Mind of an Insomniac

Well, here I sit. It’s 6:00 a.m. and I’ve been up since 2. Yea great joys. So I thought I’d babble about some things that have been on my mind. Sorry for not being around lately, life has been keeping me very busy. Not uninspired, just tired.

First of all, not being able to sleep means you’re likely to see some really annoying infomercials if you have the TV on, which I did. This one commercial came on that was trying to sell something that would help you lose weight. Nothing new there. But this thing was just wacked, and makes me think if we continue on this path, we’ll all de-evolve into slabs of stone from inactivity. They call it a sauna belt. It’s a belt that you strap to the area of your body that you’d like to be less, well, roly-poly. It heats up, making you sweat and apparently lose weight. It actually makes a point of saying that you can lose weight, an inch per hour, while making no effort. Ok, how lazy are we getting that someone can shamelessly sit there and say that? Then again, it is late night TV. But it sure makes me wonder if this is just one big scam. If you’re sweating, aren’t you going to get thirsty? And if you’re thirsty, aren’t you going to drink water, and then….put the weight back on? And if you’re not drinking water, aren’t you dehydrating? And if you’re losing all that sweat, enough to lose an inch an hour, where is it going to go? I don’t think I want to hang out with anyone wearing one of these things. I also noticed they never mention how much it is. Wonder how much these people would try and soak people for who want to buy this thing?

On the topic of useless things, I got thinking about something I had to use as a kid. Does anyone else remember the abacus? Probably not. I think there are only a few of us around who were actually subjected to that thing because our teachers thought it was a good idea. Well, maybe some teachers could actually teach it so it was, but mine sure couldn’t.

Ok I think everybody knows what an abacus is, right? Apparently some chinese math wizzes started using them before they had calculators and loved them to death. The thing consisted of a huge number of columns of beads, each containing four beads. The beads could be pushed up from the bottom to represent numbers. Above the columns was a row of beads. These could be pushed down and each of them represented 5. The far right column and the far right bead in the row represented 1’s, the next column over represented 10’s, the next column over represented 100’s, etc. So if you pushed up beads from the bottom you could make 1, 2, 3, 4, or 10, 20, 30, 40, or 100, 200, 300, 400, yada yada yada yada bla bla bla. Now, the beads on the top could make 5, 50, etc. and if you added beads from the bottom, you could get 6 to 9 of whatever you wanted.

Bored yet? Well hopefully I will make my way to a point soon. It was an ok concept when they were teaching students how to count. I could understand that. You count how many beads and you can sort of physically see numbers to a point. But where it became a curse of doom is when they started making me multiply and divide. Ok, Say I was multiplying 34×10, or whatever random cursed numbers the teacher threw at me. You’d put 34 on the left and 10 on the right and have a pre-set number of columns free between them..and put the answer there. Anybody see a problem? You basically had to do the math in your head. The abacus just became a place to display the answer. Maybe my teacher was just a dope, but I swear to god that’s the way I was taught. At this point, I just wanted to hurl the abacus across the room because it was serving no purpose whatsoever. At least when people multiply and divide using pencil and paper, they’re doing it in smaller chunks and the numbers on the paper actually help. I just want a calculator at this point.

And here’s a weird phrase. “Catchment area.” I’m starting to volunteer at an organization and that’s the phrase they use to describe the area that their organization covers. But doesn’t catchment area make you think of a rain gutter or some kind of drip-catching tray? Maybe I’m just weird, but wouldn’t district or region be simpler?

And that’s about all I could come up with, isn’t that sad? Hopefully Steve can come up with something better later.