Meet George Jetson

There are so many questions I have about this story. Where do I begin?

How in hell is something that is 1 foot tall weighing 200 pounds? I cannot imagine how you could pack so much weight into such a small space. No wonder when it is low on power, it returns to its dock to recharge. Who’s going to drag it there?

If it checks on your children to see if they’re doing their homework, how does it know if they are or aren’t? I assume you have to see what it’s seeing. And if you’re busy watching it, why don’t you just get up and check on them yourself? I’m sure you could be far more helpful with math than ten-ton one-foot Louie over there.

And how much does this one-foot wonder cost? They never mentioned that.

This is just weird. I’m having some serious IRobot visions. NS5’s anyone?

Please Read the Emergency Instructions in The Seat Pocket In Front Of You. No Really, You’re Going to Need Them.

This Brazilian plane crash belongs in an episode of Mayday. Let’s count the horrible happenings.

  1. The runway is dangerously short and nicknamed the aircraft carrier.

  2. It’s slippery when wet.

  3. It was newly-paved, but they didn’t bother to cut grooves in it to drain water.

  4. They never closed it, despite the lack of grooves being a, um, risk.

  5. Other planes have skidded off, but landed on grass without any injuries. Ya think that would have been a warning?

  6. It was raining pretty heavily when a plane tried to fly in.

  7. The plane missed the runway, crossed a busy highway and crashed into a gas station and a cargo depot.

  8. Everybody’s dead, and there’s no passenger list. Way to go, fellas.

Now, some director of engineering is claiming that this was not due to rain. Yep, whatever you say, chief. How much are they paying you to say that?

Wanna know something else scary? This is apparently the worst crash in their country’s history, only by a margin of about 35 deaths. They’ve had several other serious crashes this year.

And here’s the scary icing on the cake for me. I have friends who are going to Brazil in the near future! Let’s just hope they get home alive.

WWWWWWHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYY!?!?!?

Ok, why in the blue bloody christ is Peter Whitmore getting offered a plea deal? Why why why why why? Somebody tell me why! Please? Now!

Ok, now that I’ve got the incoherent brain-rattling rage down on paper, let me try and write like a rational human being. He kidnapped a kid from Manitoba, sexually assaulted him, caused another local kid to go missing, did who knows what to him, and before that, he had been convicted of sexually assaulting children. These convictions go back years! How many? Try going back 14 years, to 1993! He’s been busted, released, promptly re-busted, released, lather, rinse, repeat! Wanna see details of why this man should rot in jail forever? Read this timeline. If that’s not a dangerous offender, by christ I don’t know what is.

Dear old director of prosecution Murray Brown says he’s doing it for the good of these kids. I get that it’s hard to go on the stand about this, and defense lawyers can be assholes, but how is it benefitting greater society to give him a plea deal that is a life sentence allowing him to apply for parole in a measley 7 years? He’s already been jailed for 5 and that didn’t deter him. What’s another 2? I know it’s only the possibility of parole, but it’s still there! If you’re a dangerous offender, it’s a hell of a lot harder to get out.

The part that really burns me up is when Brown says he’s doing this plea deal thing to spare the kids from testifying. Then he says it would also short circuit a lengthy dangerous offender hearing. Uh-huh. That’s the real reason, isn’t it, Mr. Brown? Maybe the reason this bugs me so much is often times, when my dad wanted to do something, if he didn’t get his own way, he’d then say he was doing it for the sake of us kids. I know it’s a comparison to something much more trivial, but that kind of bullshit always bugged the hell out of me.

I’m finding myself without an ending for this post, except to say that if the families were promised that he would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and this is the fullest extent of the law, we have a sad justice system. But is this news to anyone? How much do you want to bet that when he is next paroled, he molests another kid? He’s only 36. He won’t be that old when he gets out.

Helping You Feel Better About Yourself

I’ve seen me some stupid people on Family Feud before, but I don’t remember anything that comes close to topping
these guys.

What I can’t figure out is how they made it to Fast Money. that means they had to have won, which seems impossible. And if they won, that means that the people they beat could very well have been worse, which also seems impossible.

Note for the blind people: The video won’t start playing automatically when you click the link. You have to go into the Flash movie and press the replay button a couple of times before anything will happen.

>Are You There God? It’s Me, The Law

>Back in October 2005, I posted a story about a Romanian prison inmate who
filed suit against God,
claiming that the lord took bribes, didn’t help him in his time of need, and was in many other ways pretty much a no good scumbag. Well, after almost 2 years, there’s finally an update.

Prosecutors in Timisoara, where the claim was filed, have decided to drop the case because
God doesn’t seem to have a home address and they can’t locate him.

And before anybody asks, no, I have no idea how or why it took 21 months to sort this out.

>Clearing the Backblog

>Hope you folks like these random posts, because with all that time I didn’t write, I’ve created quite a, well, thought backblog. I’m sure I’ll be able to write something more focused soon. But until then, have a pile of thoughts.

Remember back in another random post, I said I forgot something? Well, I remembered it, and keep forgetting to write it down, so I’m writing it down now. What was it again? Just kidding.

Has anyone else noticed that, among all the phone drones out there, the Swiss Chalet delivery phone drones are the most humourless of all? I could swear they turned their human trainees into cyborgs to be more efficient. When they pick up the phone, they greet you with something that sounds like “hellothankyouforcallingswisschaletcanihaveyourphonenumberstartingwiththeareacodeplease?” Huh? What? Where? who? I’m still stuck at Hello. Even if you make a joke, there is no laughter, there is only “nextitemplease?” Everywhere you go, you’re going to get someone who sounds like a zombie, but this is a consistent thing with Swiss Chalet. I think the lady who sold me Chalet soup when I had that brutal cold was the last of the humans.

Can I mention how much I hate hate hate writing big collaborative reports? I mustn’t be a team player or something, because I can’t stand having to come up with ideas that we both agree on, and then wrangling them into something resembling intelligible english. For the past 6 weeks, I’ve been working up at the university doing an audit of various areas of their website to tell them how well they work with JAWS. The way it works is I work in tandem with a guy with functioning eyes, and when I have a problem, he tries to tel me what he’s seeing in comparison to what I am. Then, we have to write a big report to explain it to the powers that be. Seems simple enough, right? I wish!

Every time he gets his hands on it to edit in his input, the input he adds is either riddled with errors and redundancies, cannot be called decent sentences, or all of the above. I spend more time editing the jabber than adding new input. I showed it to Steve, and after the third sentence, Steve was confused beyond belief, and he knew what I had been doing for the last six weeks. Fixing the report was so brain-sapping that I said to Steve that my brain felt like it needed to write blog posts for nourishment. Well, we know how many of those got created, don’t we? If only we always got what we wanted.

Note to anyone about to take a plane anywhere: Do not watch the show called Mayday before you go. You’ll wonder if flying is such a great idea. That show is fascinating, but lord you realize how much human error goes on, and then you wonder why there aren’t more crashes. Air traffic controlers that don’t seem to understand the gravity, ha ha, of “we are out of fuel,” engineers that are eyeballing up parts to see if they fit and they don’t, pilots punching the wrong entry points into their autopilot and, quelle surprise, getting lost. Ug. You wonder how good an idea it is to put your life in their hands. *Tries to remember* did I watch Mayday before I went to San Rafael? I know I thought about things in it through the whole plane trip. But maybe I’m just neurotic. But the show makes you realize how rare a true mechanical failure is. they’re most often caused by human error.

And because people love dog stuff, I figured I’d throw some more doggy tidbits in. I learned yesterday that Trixie is not a fan of being splashed by a truck driving through a puddle. She backed up, spun around and shook her whole body to get the water off. I just couldn’t stop laughing. Yep, I’m heartless.

Remember when we called her Visa? Well, now she’s upgraded to Visa Gold because she really goes out of her way to be, well, in ours. Holy crap. Silly girl moves and ends up more in the way than before.

Also, remember how, in the mornings, she’d get up and flop like a fish on the rug? Well, now she’ll do it on the bare floor! Trixter, doesn’t that hurt? But if you’re having fun, knock yourself out…well, don’t do that. That’s what I’m afraid will happen! She also will shake her whole body, but she’ll be right next to the couch, so she’ll wack right into it! One day, she decided to shake her head the way she does, and I heard a loud click! Dad said that was the sound of her head hitting his knee! Ouch!

I have learned to respect that thumpy tail and its distructive power. We had to more firmly attach the basket we have on the door to catch the mail because she had wagged into it so hard! That, combined with her womping her head off it made it all crooked.

I wish I could record the noises she makes when she dreams. Sometimes, she wags her tail in her sleep. Other times, she makes these itcy bitcy barks. I have to wonder if she’s having a good dream or a nightmare. If only I could speak Trixie.

Next week, the guy who does followups for the school, who is also the guy who interviewed me last year, is coming to see me and see how Trix and I are doing. He’s coming at 5 at night so we can walk through Friday rush hour. Really putting Trixie and I to the test, isn’t he? I’m a little nervous, a lot excited, and a little nervous all over again. I want to hear him say that we’re doing well, I pray I haven’t let some things slip, I want some pointers on some things, and I hope he doesn’t think those things are stupid. Hopefully I’ll have a story or two from that.

I think that’s about it. Holy crap that was a huge post. Hope it wasn’t too long and drawn out.

Hello? Is This Thing On?

Writing this, I wonder if anyone’s still reading. We both screwed off for a good long time. 15 days? eek. Have we ever done that before? I’m too lazy to scroll through the archive and check. But I think it’s pretty rare. So rare that Ann Adams, the sweet lady that she is, wondered if we were ok. Yep, we’re ok. We just got busy for different reasons, and the computer made a meal out of my last attempt at a post. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to save the post as the computer freezes, rebooting the computer, seeing the file you saved, breathing a sigh of relief, then opening it, and all you see is c:\blog.txt. Nope, that wasn’t the post. So rather than writing that one again, I figured I’d do a random thoughts one to get me going. *hits save first.*

Something has been puzzling me for a while. I went to the store to get Trixie a tug toy. She ripped Babs’s old tug toy in half, and then gnawed the everloving hell out of one her puppy raisers gave her so the rubber was hanging off and revealing hard plastic. So I thought I’d better get one made out of rope or something. I went into this store, and the first few tug toys they showed me were stuffed animal-like things with springy legs. I didn’t want them because I thought she might get at the stuffing. But I especially didn’t want the one that looked like a chihuahua!

What is that? dog-devouring practice? “here, killer, have a tug Schitzu. It’ll get ya all nice and strong for the real ones.” Then they see the neighbour’s yappy little bichan frise and they think “Ooo! a tug toy that moves on its own!” and before you can say sit, Gurrgurrgurrgurr yipe! Yipe! Yipe! What in christ are the makers of toys thinking? Are they hoping for a lawsuit? I was lucky enough to find a tug toy that consisted of a rope with knots at each end. I’ve never heard of a living knotted rope, so I think I’m safe.

I must be really nuts because I had another weird dream about a random dog following Trixie and I home. This one was worse, though. Not only did it follow us home, it mauled Trixie so badly that it broke one of her legs. In the dream, I was with another girl and her dog, and we came upstairs and the dogs were playing. Suddenly, I thought the play got a little rough, so I came over, and found myself sandwiched by 3 dogs! Three? Um, uh-oh! Here we go again! Like in the other dream, I tried to pick up the phone, but they wouldn’t work. This time, every phone I tried to use, including my cell phone, yammered ads at me. Lucky for me, my parents showed up and took Trix and I to the vet, who yelled at me, demanding to know what took me so long to get there. This must be because Trixie got an eye and ear infection dealt with, the ear infection probably being caused by another dog licking her ears and me not getting them wiped out well enough. But man! Two dreams about random dogs following us home? Weird!

And in other dog news, news that I’m horribly behind on writing up here, Barbie has made it home from GDB with her own black lab named Rosamae. There’s a picture up on her blog if ya wanna see. And my final bit of doggy goodness, if you just can’t get enough guide dog school fun, *listens to a large groan from readers which is outdone by a cry of nooooo! from Steve*, Jessica is at GDB training with her woofer, Newmar. I’m sure you’d get used to calling him Newmar, but that sounds like an alien planet or a factory or something. Sorry, Jessica, he sounds like an awesome woofer, but the poor soul got quite the name. I’m sure he’s already grown to suit the name for you, though.

Ok, ok, enough dog things. Moving on to….the TV. I saw a couple of commercials that made me sit up and take notice. One was for a deodorant that provided…prescription-strength sweat-protection. What? People need prescriptions for this? How the hell much do they sweat? Maybe more people who ride the bus should get that.

And then there was a commercial for a truck that was supposed to be always ready for fun. It’s name was the Dodge Avenger. Yeah, because an avenger sounds like such a party animal. It sounds like something that would run you down when its driver was having a fit of road rage. Nothing should be called an avenger, unless it’s an army tank.

And what is with the commercial that seems to be only people singing the alphabet to a rock tune? Is it some kind of literacy thing? All I know is I’m walking around singing the new rocky alphabet. Thanks for the refresher. I didn’t need it, but thanks anyway.

Now that I can use a bunch of functions on my phone, I do things I never thought I’d end up doing, like, texting. I looked at people writing messages on their cell phones and thought, why don’t you just, er, call them? But I’ve realized that sometimes a text message is more efficient, in theory at least. But when you’re me, and take…forever..to..write…a…message, maybe the efficiency is gone. I now sort of understand why the silly codes you see everywhere were created. But I will not use them. Here I am looking for ways to capitalize letters and use real punctuation. The English language means too much to me to give in to the dark side!

The English language means a lot to me, and so does my ability to speak French, but apparently I’m losing it. The other day, I had the opportunity to speak French, I opened my mouth, and no sound came out. I ended up caving and speaking English. I felt so bad. Damn it I didn’t want to lose it, but it appears it’s slipping away!

And I think that’s about it for now. I will write more stuff, sooner than 15 days from now, hopefully.

You Left Your Dog Where?

I cannot even remotely understand this story. Here’s a short summary.

Guy, his wife and his guide dog go camping in a Wal-Mart parking lot (what the hell?).
Guy ties his guide dog to a tree.
guy and wife leave the next morning, each thinking the other had put the dog back in the camper (again, what the hell?).
Neither did.
guy is very lucky, because nice delivery man rescues dog.
Police reunite guy with dog.

How in christ do you forget your guide dog? How does that even work? I can understand losing your dog if the dog somehow runs out of your house when you’re answering the door. I can understand something terrible happening to the dog if you somehow lost control of him/her and he went out into the street. But this is just stupid! He’d had this dog for at least four years. After having your furry friend either near you or attached to you in some way, you just don’t forget him! It would be like leaving your kid at a gas station. I know it happens too, but in that case, what do we say? Wow, that’s stupid!

Hopefully I never end up leaving Trixie somewhere. If that happens by some bizarre chain of events, I’ll really have to eat my words. But until then, I’ll just shake my head and be glad that it ended ok.

For Stressed out Geeks Everywhere…

Wow. The USB gadgets keep getting weirder. This one reminds me of a toy I had when I was a kid. It was called the revenger, and people would attach it to their car’s dash. then when fellow drivers pissed them off, they could press one of 3 buttons and it made noises of a death ray, a machine gun or dropping bombs. So they could feel like they were obliterating the idiot driver who just cut them off in whatever way they saw fit.

Now, you can have a similar experience with the USB stress panic button!

It looks like some ordinary piece of technology, but if you flip up the lid, there’s a giant red button. Slam it, and either watch a simulated bomb explosion or pretend you’re punching your boss. And if you’re afraid you’ll get caught screwing around, it has something to quickly flash up on the screen that looks like a spreadsheet.

And these people want people to pay $17 U.S. for it. Wow.