Radio Is Stupid

I was just listening to the song “No Surprise” by Theory of a Deadman a minute ago. Everybody seems to hate that song, but I’ve been digging it since the first time I heard it. Maybe I suck, who knows, but that’s not why we’re here.

I noticed something about the radio edit of the song that I should have caught a lot earlier than I did. Whoever did the censorship on this thing must have been on crack. They cut out the word shit, but leave in fuck and bitch. What sense does that make? When did fuck become more acceptable than shit? I always thought it was the other way around. But whatever, my popcorn is getting cold so I’ll let somebody else worry about it, I just thought it was sort of strange.

In Case You Didn’t Know

I just got an email from someone who I thought knew better than to fall for this crap. He emails me and says, “Do you think this is real?” Below his excited message is one of these international lotto messages. Yeah, he won a million dollars and all he has to do is respond, give them all his personal information and pay some, um, well, legal fees. Yeah, right. It’s a scam. So I figured I’d explain why in case someone else reading this might have happened across one of these messages for the first time and was considering replying and handing over all their info.

Ok, let’s start breaking it down. First of all, and most importantly, if you didn’t buy an international lottery ticket, how do you expect to win an international lottery? You know how a lottery works. You buy a ticket, you enter to win. How come in this case, people throw the rules of common sense out the window? “It came to me in an email. It must be legitimate. They mention lawyers in it, it must be legal.” No no no! It’s like viruses. If it’s not expected, it’s likely trouble.

Next, how did they get your email address? If they don’t say how they got it, chances are pretty damn high that it was through illegal means or just random spamming. They didn’t find you because of some promotional technique unless they tell you what that is. For instance, “you deal with company X. We are one of company X’s affiliates, and as part of something you signed that allows company X to share information with its affiliates, we got your info.” Of course, you’d have to actually deal with company X and you would have had to have signed something that they refer to for this to be valid.

Next, how do you even know who this person is, and since you don’t know who they are, how can you just tell them all your personal information? Shouldn’t there be something a little more official or formal than, “send all your stuff here”? Doesn’t that make it way too easy for them to get enough information to, oh, say, commit identity theft?

And, don’t you find it a bit odd that you’re having to pay legal fees and they don’t even tell you how much they are or what they will entail?

Finally, this email came from the Netherlands. That is the place where a lot of these international lottery *scams* come from. So if it’s from the Netherlands saying ya won big bucks, chances are it’s big bullshit.

I was just so shocked that this person, a smart person in so many ways, fell for this. So please! Everyone! Don’t send money and personal information to people who claim you’ve one big international bucks. You haven’t, unless you actually bought a ticket. That stuff doesn’t just come for free. All that comes for free out of this crap is trouble.

No Thanks

I just learned something that I really didn’t want to know. Apparently you can rent sex toys. Yes, rent them, like you would a video or a car.

If you’re interested, and judging by some of the stuff that shows up in our search results more than a few of you probably are, have a look at
Rent-a-Dildo.com – Sex Toys Online.

Of particular interest to me is the
How It Works
section, where great pains are taken to not tell you how they clean this stuff before the next guy gets his hands and everything else on it.

Ug, I may never visit a second-hand store again.

All Things Pope

Remember a few weeks ago when I wrote about
The Incredible Popeman comic books and action figures?
Well, if that’s just not enough JP2 swag for you, perhaps you might be interested in your very own set of
A Pope for the Ages trading cards.

As for me, I’m holding out until I can buy a “My Pope went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” shirt.

I’ll let someone else make the joke about the soon to be released John Paul II commemorative breathing tube, because that’s just not nice.

Chain Mail Wisdom

Somebody sent me one of those tell the people in your life how much you love them chain emails today. I’m sure you know the ones, everybody gets them and they’re all pretty much the same. What would you do if one day you woke up and someone you care about was gone? Would you have any regrets? Anything you wish you would have said? Would that person know truly how you felt? Yeah, you know the ones.

The sentiment was nice, though I can’t help but think whenever I get one how much more it would have meant if the person sending it had taken a couple of minutes to actually sit down and write it on his or her own just for me, instead of blindly forwarding somebody else’s words to an addressbook full of people, words that have no doubt been around the net millions of times over the years. Maybe it’s just me, but when I know that these nice words I’m reading that were sent by somebody I care about are also at any given time being read by some fat guy in Iowa and everybody else this person knows, they tend to lose most, if not all of their meaning. It doesn’t take much longer to write your own email to tell me that you’re thinking of me, and I can’t speak for everybody, but I for one really appreciate the personal touch.

But that’s not even why I’m writing this.

Like most chain letters, this one had the standard set of instructions at the end. The ones that tell you to send it on to everyone you know so that they’ll all know exactly how you feel. But a line in this set really stood out to me. It said “pass this message on to everyone you know, including the person who sent it to you. IF you don’t, the sky won’t fall, but somebody in the world won’t be smiling.”

First of all, who worries about the sky falling? I know I don’t. And why should I be upset if only 1 person on the planet isn’t smiling? It seems to me that if we somehow managed to get the ranks of the non-smiling down to just 1 person, that would be a huge improvement compared to the way things are now. Think about it. There are somewhere around 6 billion people traveling around the sun with us. And when you stop and consider the kinds of situations that millions of them find themselves living in day after day, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that quite a few of them aren’t going to be smiling whether I send the email back to my friend or not. What would they care? I’m sure that if you were somehow able to ask those people what would make them smile, a hot meal or an end to the conflicts that threaten their very existence on a daily basis would rank far higher on the list than the fat guy in Iowa getting his chain letter back. So please, next time you think about hitting forward to pass on the nice letter, think about what it actually says, and think about how much more you could do to make the people around you smile.

Quote Of The Day

“White people…we CANNOT be black. It’s not possible. We cannot “wave our hands in the air, and wave ’em like we just don’t care!”

We, as white folks must “raise our digits vertically and oscillate them like we fear no repercussions.” We are corny, white people. Fuckin’ embrace it. We can’t “drop it like it’s hot.” White people all dance weird, kind of like Elaine from Seinfeld.”

Shawn M. Smith of InsidePulse.com.

Another Reason To Love Record Companies

It seems that the recording industry has found a way to pay off the settlement that came out of the price-fixing lawsuit that it lost a couple of years back. The labels have decided to
donate
all of the crap that nobody is buying to libraries and schools, leaving the poor librarians and educators to figure out what in hell they’re going to do with 20 copies of Christina Aguilera’s Christmas album among other greatness that they’ve been receiving by the boxfull over the past few months, greatness that they’re going to keep receiving until sometime around June of this year.

I don’t really have much to say about this story, I just found it interesting, and parts of it are pretty funny, like the woman who’s trying to play the optimist by saying that they’ll have more than enough Ricky Martin albums to ensure that everybody who visits the bookmobile gets one.

Just Shut Up

I’m not sure why
this news story
makes me so angry, but it does. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been able to figure out why anybody takes the time to give even a quarter of a shit what a fashion critic thinks about anything. I mean seriously, fashion critic has to be one of the most useless occupations on the planet. What purpose do they serve? What function do they perform that contributes to the betterment or entertainment of society? Their entire job is telling people that they’re clothes look stupid. Oh wait, they also get to write about the fact that people’s clothes look stupid. That’s all they do, and people pay them for it. It’s ridiculous. If you want to make fun of the way someone looks, become a comedian instead, otherwise just shut your stupid mouth and go away and stop shitting on one of the few truly well intentioned ideas that any government has had in a long time.