Contents
-
Categories
-
Archives
Blogroll
-
RSS Feeds
-
Meta
Puerto Rico Will Totally Swing it for Hilldawg
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
I’m actually totally shocked that Puerto Rico even has a primary. I mean, I know they’ve been in this weird pseudo-statehood for, like, ever, but when did we start letting them vote? It’s like getting investment advice from your cousin. You smile and say thanks but really deep down you know there’s no way in hell you’re gonna buy that Real Networks stock. Puerto Rico is an island in the Bahamas - quite a bit further away than Cuba, mind you - full of expat New Yorkers. Of course they’ll give it up for The Hillster and of course we won’t care.
And speaking of backwaters, Hilldawg sure can pick up the Appalachian hillbilly vote, you gotta give her that. And you gotta give Terry McAuliffe props for setting up Hill with shots of Crown Royal at her photo-op back in Indiana. That’s strategy. That’s looking three steps ahead. You can bet they were stompin and grinning in Wes Virginny that night, boy.
Not to say there’s anything bad about whiskey, mind you, though Jack Daniel’s is about the nastiest tap of fermented horse urine I’ve ever had the horrible pleasure of throwing up. You can bet Hill’s glad they have braille ballots for all those blind hillbilly’s. Hell, these days we all need the support of the Great American Spirits, from whichever distillery they may hail. Dark times are upon us and the political landscape is littered with rotting corpses of fallen integrity cast down under the shadow of Babylon. Even Hilldawg herself invoked the Bible in WVA, her Faith no doubt still singed from the fearsome bolt of white lightning what struck Bill’s testicles.
And it’s faith and the jaws of a pit bull that put Bill’s balls in her purse and Obama on the run. Now she’s got her lockjaw on the neck of the entire party, holding it tight by the windpipe until it gives in, breathless and exhausted. Hill graduated Wellesley. She’s not gonna let some Chicago upstart stop her from weaseling back into those fine White House bed linens. She will eat Obama’s children and then wash them down with a nice Chardonnay while once again digging her toes deeply into that plush Oval shag.
And Obama’s family will taste good because He is good. His flesh is soft and juicy with decency and vision. The media loves him. Dogs and cats trust him. 9 out of 10 college kids would obediently binge on Southern Comfort and get naked on the internet if it would help him get the nomination (Friday May 23rd: Mash&Flash ObamaNomiCon).
But what about the people that seem to really matter in this country (he said begrudgingly)… what about Middle America? What about those conveniently-timed news bits that tell us that blue-collar whitefolk won’t get behind The Hopester? That God’s people aren’t ready to see a black man steering the Ship of State. Maybe he’s not so electable… Maybe he can’t win Ohio or Nebraska in November… Maybe hip-hop’s just a passing fad… And they’ll paint him up to be the next Trojan Amadinnerjacket backed by his radical, America-hating cleric, Rev. Wright. Barak Hussein Obama? Seriously. It’s a really really hard sell in the the Steelbelt, let alone the Cornbelt. Hillzebub will set him up as the easiest target and the Republicreants will aim accordingly.
I don’t know… I admit I’m not so sure where the temper of the land lies right now. As a nation, are we more afraid of a black president or a female president? Will Henry McFarmer shun the HildeBama and give his vote to McCain even though Johnny boy sold his ass to Big Agribiz, like, eons ago. McCain is the most ridiculous heap of presidential meat I’ve seen in my lifetime. He’s the first liberally moderate conservative colostomy bag to give Bush the bird. The man is a paradox wrapped in an enigma wrapped in some sort of old, pale leather. I mean, his face is practically melting off his skull, it’s shifting so much. He openly claims he knows nothing about economics and yet was literally, like, number Three of the Keating Five. This will not pass while folks are stockpiling grains and ammunition against the towering credit meltdown. To the GOP, John McCain is like a leper with the last car on Earth: nobody wants to touch him but who wants to wait around another 4-8 yrs for the next bus? Most of them hate the guy. He has no loyalty. They fear and disdain him. He’s Howard Dean without the Forrest Gump demeanor. They’re just waiting for him to snap and go completely mental in eternal YouTube technicolor.
It’s not like the Republicants want the presidency anyway. The place is a mess. Economy imploding, health care out of control, food costs skyrocketing, the dollar plummeting, corporate corruption at it’s peak, masive over-extension in global wars, held hostage at the pump by evil Saudi’s… The list goes on and the smart money in the GOP wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot clown pole. The Republic is shaking under the weight of its decadence like Rome before it’s fall. When NBC is resurrecting American Gladiators it’s only a matter of time before we’re throwing scientists to the lions…
They figure, let the Democrits try to fix it. They can take the reigns for the next 4-8 more years and patch things up. Let ‘em get the economy back in line and ease the worries of the people, then drum up a ridiculous new scandal or frame a “terrorist attack” to run them back out of office. It’s like the Board of Directors choosing a new CEO. They can sit back in their fancy leather chairs with the little tassles and the built-in vibrating pillow and the ipod adaptor and the cup holder thing with the fridge under the thing and keep pulling in the profits and buying bigger and bigger gold fricken widescreens for their orbiting Star Chamber. Let the figurehead take the heat. All those industrial energy cronies gobbled up ridiculous assfuls of profit through the Bush regime de-reg and relentless hammering of the final nails into the coffin of the New Deal. Roosevelt you meddling fool! Everybody knows huge industrial corporate monsters can totally regulate themselves. They’re really quite concerned about families and global warming and kittens and are totally not selling their grandparents to the Nazis, or whatever. No. These people have no morals. None. They’re even pushing Polar Bear ice cream now. I shit you not.
To Republitards… Two words: Ron Paul. You’re the Republican Nader.
To Hilldawg, with love: get the most powerful spot you can in Obama’s cabinet and use Bill and all your connections & support to help turn this Republic around before we hit the rocks.
Obama: Keep playing it straight and honest but try not to come off too intellectual. Intelligence scares the ignant folk. And this July 4th, you better wrap yourself in the biggest American flag you can find.
And if you win… keep the kevlar close to your chest. We really need you.
Most Honorable Hatery
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Dr. N A “Cat Lover” throws the hatedown on the Cat Genie Self-Washing Self-Flushing Catbox:
An expensive way to smell poo, September 18, 200
Cat Genie takes the small unpleasantness of daily cleaning the litter and it saves it up and releases that unpleasantness as one big unscheduled, unpleasant inconvenience every week or two. Advanced monitors will ensure that the device failure will occur during the workday, as you prepare for your important meeting with your prospective client. Nothing like cleaning out wet cat poo in your nicest suit. Or, you may be pleasantly awoken in the middle of the night by the repeating three beeps of “there’s poo and hair in the hopper.” You will become more familiar with your cat’s feces every day as the cat genie gently fills your home with the aroma of baking excrement. Plus, you get to pay over $300 for technology that was “designed” and built for less than $2. The “processor” unit was designed in 1967 and allows all the functionality of the most advanced microchip devices of its era. It has both on and off modes. (Note: off mode available only while unplugged.)
Actually, the real reason for the high cost of the device is to cover the costs of all the customer support that they must provide and to cover the costs of all of the returned units. The question is not IF, but WHEN you will find yourself hunched over your cat’s feces floating in a pool of fetid water, picking small plastic pellets out of the opaque, pungent water with your fingers so that you can get the device put back together.
And your cats will thank you by depositing their love bundles beside the machine that’s half filled with water and beeping away forlornly if you happen to be away when it fails.
We have three cats, they had no trouble adjusting to the machine over about a week. The small plastic pellets getting everywhere in the house is not really any big deal. Roomba takes care of most of them well. We’ve now had the machine for three months. We received a replacement base last week for a leaky drain hose. We’ve called their customer service line enough times that we now know the “secret” diagnostic techniques of their experts. We don’t know if we’re going to keep it or return it. If we keep it, we’re definitely going to install an exhaust fan in the laundry room, and set it to a timer to go when the unit is on. For some reason there are little bits of poo that fall between the tines of the hopper, and they get slow baked every time the unit dries itself. The stench is really outstanding. It’s hard to describe. I’m a doctor, and I’ve rarely ever smelled anything so bad.
My recommendation is to wait for the next generation cat sanitation solution. That device will need to be a complete redesign to solve the myriad of problems with this unfortunate device. To say something positive, the customer support line is manned by kind, well-meaning kids who really do feel badly that you’re having a hard time with your mechanical poo soup maker.
If you do buy this device, get some thick rubber gloves and a couple of towels that you won’t use for anything else.
Freegan Backlash
Monday, April 21, 2008
Ok so maybe I was a little harsh on the poor Freegans. I work hard, I have a long commute. It’s frustrating to be guilt-tripped by perfectly healthy drop-outs whenever I go downtown to blow $45 on a thin faded retro-80’s t-shirt at Urban Outfitters. And yeah, I was a deadhead and had a dread or two in my day but I stayed in school and put my parent’s hard-earned money to good use. Sure I was privileged but I still had to take crappy service jobs to pay for burritos while my idealism and sense of honor was slowly chipped away by the crushing weight of industrialism. I swear, on the really hard days I can wail like Thom Yorke because my balls are so smashed by the capitalist machine. I too feel your pain, Freegans. I feel it deep in my choad.
Anyway, some crusty with a library card outed me on IndyMedia and now I’ve got a fricken Freegan tent city set up on my front lawn. They’re bringing in protest bands and calling it FreegRock. And yeah, maybe I need the fertilizer but the smell is brutal. I have to truck in Port-o-Johns to comply with the city zoning regulations. Every soiley in town is here and up in arms about my horrible intolerance of “alternative lifestyle sustainability”. I have to use a machete just to make it through the forest of nappiness to my new Audi (and you’d think the Steal Your Face sticker on my shiny new bumper would let them know I’m really one of them, deep down under the $250 jeans and designer shoes).
And these kids ain’t like tour used to be cause there ain’t no tour no more. No Hunter-Garcia anthems to root these punks in The Light. They’re scrappier and meaner and more faithfully representative of the USA Inc. kill-or-be-killed mentality so well-peddled by the media and it’s masters. True children of War, Aeon of Horus, etc etc. They’re pretty cute, really, but I was a punk too. Jello Biafra was practically a surrogate father. You’d think the DK sticker on the really quite remarkably shiny new - I mean brand-new - bumper of my A4 would inspire a little respect in the tremulous hearts of these reprobates. Don’t they know how deeply I rage against the machine? Can’t they tell I’m taking it all down from the inside, from the desk of my 16th floor window office?
So I’ve got this soiley flash mob of itinerant tax resistors digging through my trash every day (which actually makes it a lot easier to keep pumping out the waste from my ridiculously pimped-out and over-embellished existence), using my hose to wash and water their dogs (and these people have a lot of dogs cause I think they use them as food or perhaps to hunt for food or maybe just to flesh out the Road Warrior tribal image), and stealing my booze and raiding my stash and turning my cats against me (now they refuse to use the litter box because it represents a “cage of industrial conformity” or some shit). Dicks.
The worst part is I just received a letter from Bono’s press agent. The man wants to turn FreegRock into an annual event. Says they’re going to start selling organic, fair-trade, all hemp t-shirts. Wants to call the line “Brown” to bring global recognition to the plight of Freegtards everywhere. Gonna have a screenprint of a dumpster turned on it’s side with a cornucopia of first-world consumer leftovers pouring out in abundance. Apparently some Dutch industrial designer thought of the logo while he was in Reykjavik tripping on peyote with The Edge.
Meanwhile, I’m reinforcing my already-phenomenally-colon-cleansing sound system for the most brutally paintacular Valhallic pillaging of Norwegian deathmetal ever to be mounted and waged in the northern hemisphere. Ride Valkyries! Across the fields and farms of Freegandom! Reign down thy stabbing chords of Metal from on high! And may your halls of grandeur soon receive the cowering spirit of Bono himself!
Brothers. Sisters. We Don’t Need This Freegan Groove Thing
Monday, March 24, 2008
What’s that smell in the air? Unwashed hempen clothes? Sweat and patchouli? The corpses of head lice rotting in a knotted up dreadlock? The hidden magic of crotch rot and goddess crystals? Or is it just a stinking sense of self-entitlement and a casual condemnation of the very workforce these street kids are begging change from?
Old folks and midlife women, homeless on the streets: I will always try to give you my spare change. It sucks to be you and I acknowledge this. You made some bad decisions, had some tough breaks, and now you’re stuck on the streets with little hope of getting your life back together. The world has marginalized you and now you stink. I am privileged and have regular showers.
Lunatics and freaks: I sympathize with your plight, being kicked onto the streets by a soulless State bureaucracy losing budget to prisons and wars. I might give you a hand if you’re not too blatantly insane and scary. Reel it in if you want my spare change. And don’t stand too close. You haven’t showered in, like, years. Srsly. There is nothing quite like the smell of a long-since-bathed human being. I can’t even begin to imagine what the Middle Ages were like…
Healthy dudes and your dogs and dreads: Suck it. Get a job or move to a commune. 20-something chics looking for a handout before the next String Cheese show? See the aforementioned Sucking of It. Your parents love you and they want your life to be so much more than this. Trey will be OK kicking his narcotics addiction without you showing up to every jam band in the country praying for a walk-on. He has buttloads of money, siphoned off lost kids like yourself.
Dig this, young idealists everywhere: Life is hard work, no matter how you cut it. There is not an animal alive that doesn’t have to expend energy and make sacrifices every day of their lives to get by. The deal of civilization is that we traded being our own bosses for regular access to food and shelter, greater infant mortality, and near-centennial lifespans. These are not simply givens of being alive in the modern world. We are all participants.
The streets might be cool when you’re 22 but you’re giving away the most foundational years of your adult life. Your selfish laziness will pretty much guarantee that you’ll still be homeless when you’re 45, barely surviving on handouts, shelters, and any other meager social support squeezed out of my tax dollars. Your green utopia is only a beautiful dream. I want it too, man, but it’s not going to happen in our lifetimes. You give up any chance of empowerment and ability to change the system just cause you don’t feel like working. Dig: nobody wants to work. But we all do. This is the deal.
If you’re staying in the world, you need to play the game like the rest of us. If you’re really serious about dropping out, then find a good commune or co-op and get on the chore wheel. Be a real example. Or save your tour money to buy a plot of land someplace with friends. Then embark on the magical experience of feeding yourself, building your own shelter, and treating your own medical issues. You will dig, and till, and harvest til your back is breaking. You will fight both animals and disease. That’s what it takes to live completely outside the system.
We are all complicit. There’s no room for the traveling Freegan. You’re not “rebelling against the system, man”. You’re living right in the middle of it and only getting by on the trickle down from the rest of us. You judge me for the lifestyle my labor has afforded, then expect me to help you out. You condemn the modern world and blame me for perpetuating it. Do you really think I want to eat out of dumpsters? Do you really expect me to give up access to medical care for me and my loved ones?
As a wise man once said, I think it was Confuscious or perhaps the Buddha:
Suck. It.
RIAA Took My Baby Away
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
I’ve never understood why computers need teh internets to tell me what song I’m listening to. Even my toaster knows the difference between Steely Dan and Motorhead. My toaster sang backup on Ace of Spades. I have pictures of my toaster doing lines with Donal Fagen, ok? My toaster doesn’t have to call CDDB to figure out the damn song name. And forgive my ignorance, but why does CDDB run a remote checksum to lookup the info instead of reading the ISRC id on the disc? Am I missing something here? The stereo in my car can figure out song names from a cd but my computer can’t?
As you might expect from such a wicked gang of feral douchebags, the music industry guards ISRC’s with the same zealousness they wield to prosecute small children for their lunch money. ISRC’s are used to keep track of artist royalties. If the numbers got out, geeks could track sales and distribution of music across the globe. They could spoof them. The artists could see _exactly_ how many of their albums are being sold, in concrete and online.
But ID3 is replacing ISRC as fast as CD’s are decomposing. So the RIAA will have to knock-over a lot of grandma’s to successfully outwit their own stupidity and short-sidghtedness as we all march past them into the new democratization of the marketplace.
so weak
Saturday, March 1, 2008
My attorney, Saul, tells me we’ve received C&D’s from both Apple and
the Vatican. I was supposed to golf with Jobso tomorrow but now he’s
all hurt that I dissed his little music store. I’m totally depressed,
head-down in a tumbler of Glenkiniche and a pint of Cherry Garcia.
Sent from mobile.
This Road Smells of a Fell Suckery
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
My commute isn’t very far - about 35mi - but half of it is over this treacherous 2300ft peak shat out by Thor himself after a drunken bender in some San Jose tequileria. It’s a 2-lane death race scored deep with asphalt gashes and black and grey streaks across the cement divider. An ever-changing impression of tragedy and carnage is written across it’s face by the iron tides of traffic. Connecting Santa Cruz and the South Bay, it’s a narrow pipe with a lot of traffic that can easily get jacked up by the slightest whimsy of tardation. Just about every day presents at least one moment of terror, hatred, anger, stress, tedium and despair at the sad state of humanity and the astonishingly lax standards of the Department of Motor vehicles. I can’t document all of these special little moments but I can identify some of the classes of common offenders. This will be a sort of partial taxonomy of vehicular tardery.
Fast Lane Slow Driver:
There are 3 sub-classes here. First is the anesthetized simpleton you might mistake for a lobotomy post-op were it not for the fact that he’s managing to hold on to the steering wheel in spite of a long strand of drool connecting his lip to the passenger seat. So maybe an anesthetized lobotomized simpleton with a fake driver’s license and an appetite for the open road, yucking at the pained commuters brake-stomping and jacking up to get around his slow ass. This person is simply too brain-dead to care. A common variation is the gray hair and knuckles that ran over your cat and parked on your trash can. Either nostalgic for the Model A they used to pedal to Knott’s Berry Farm or eager to embrace the cold shadow of the Reaper, they will mess with your world like a leaky pair of bladder-control Spanx.
Second, is the person gabbing on the cell phone about that skank on Rock of Love, swerving and drifting their 92′ Mazda, completely oblivious to the world around them because they’re so fucking self-absorbed in their own oh-so-important bullshit of the moment. Nobody else in the world even exists for them, much less matters in any significant way. You’d have a better chance getting their attention if you got their cousin pregnant and robbed a liquor store.
Third, is the vigilante driver who thinks it’s their duty as a citizen to force other people to slow down in the left lane. Like Bernard Goetz on Halcyon such types are far more annoying than threatening and typically create more danger on the road from the enraged motorists tailgating them and leaping around, mercilessly cutting them off, fist out the window. I’ve done it myself and it’s a beautiful feeling to leave these tards sucking my dust in the wake of a waving bird flying high. I’m an American, dammit, and I have no stomach for hall monitors. They pass straight through to my stool.
The Pointless Tailgater:
I’m driving 60mph but there’s a line of cars ahead of me as far as I can see. We’re all locked in and flowing fine but dickhead behind me in the WRX thinks he can muscle his way forward and magically split the sea of cars. Like, if he can just get within a foot or two of my bumper, then I and everyone ahead of me will suddenly understand the massive heft of his manhood and obediently step aside to let him pass. I hate these people. They are blind and stupid, always moving 5 steps ahead of themselves, riding the inertia of adrenaline without understanding the simple limits of physics. People like that generally end up riding that train straight to the morgue. They gonna fit your Subaru for a dirt nap when I hit my breaks and send you skidding into that embankment? I don’t think so, dink.
One variation is the pointless right lane passer that seizes upon any momentary opportunity to endanger lives just to eek out a one-car advancement in position. These short-sighted maniacs will tailgate until a space opens up to the right. With no thought beyond the moment they leap into the gap only to come up against a slower vehicle. Then they have to agitate behind the new bumper until the left opens up again to receive their over-eager rod. Meanwhile everyone around them is getting sketched and worried waiting for fuckface to blow his wad on a 5-car pile-up.
Big Dick Trucks:
Several years ago everybody was getting pissed off at SUV’s. Sure, they are huge, gas-sucking road hazards but most SUV drivers are either soccer mom’s or weekend ski bums. Most are fairly inoffensive creatures. But dudes who drive those jacked up Ford F350’s with the giant sticker of some awful, generic NuMetal band on the back window in case you didn’t realize from their backwards baseball cap and played-out tribal arm tatt that they are complete dicks who will die in the first wave… Those dudes suck and they vote Republican cause they hate minorities and romanticize war. I reiterate: you will die in the first wave. Like Nazi punks and mountain skinheads, you are fodder for the war machine. Inevitably, they’re driving much faster than anyone else and get all up on my ass with their cheesy grills cause, you know, they really gotta meet the bro’s to swill a case of Pabst and watch UFC . Maybe if you saved up for those penile implants instead of that ridiculous Hot Wheels car, you might find a decent woman.
A common variant is the contractor. They drive their trucks with a similar repressed angst of trying to prove to the world that they’re really tough and totally not-gay but they look a bit scruffier, are usually older, and have a large array of racks over the pickup bed typically filled with just about nothing. They are often the fastest, most reckless and tail-gating (ass loving?) dicks on the road.
Real trucks:
These are the guys the latent Ford wannabe’s wish they were. Unlike the Big Dick trucks, big rigs are a fact of life that must be accepted. They bring us food and alcohol but we can still hate on them, for they foul up a commute like Bill O’Reilly fouls up the Irish gene pool. They are big and slow, they drift out of lanes that can barely contain them, and they twist and jack-knife at the slightest defensive posture. On a 2-lane mountain road a single slow-ass Safeway truck can back up traffic for miles. Then you get the other rig going 35 mph that wants to pass the rig going 30mph and suddenly the tubes are clogged like Rosie O’Donnell’s colon after a night at The Outback meat buffet. That’s totally nasty, I know, but the point remains: Big rigs will totally spak up your commute in less time than it takes a trucker to snort another key bump of speed.
A variant of these are commuter buses. Those pleasantly seatbelt-free death traps that lumber on through rain and wind, their human payload in total self-denial about the reliability of this cast-off municipal requirement and the skill or sanity of its sleep-deprived and drug-addled driver. Another variant is the independent hauling company and it’s 30yr old random flatbed over-filled with junk, struggling to grab another foot of pavement on it’s death march up to the summit. All three of these vehicles in the Real Trucks category are the most likely to break down due to age and/or negligence and take a lane completely out of commission for hours before they send a park ranger to put a slug in their block and lay them to rest forever in that great junkyard of the sky.
These are just a few of the common stereotypes that mess with my commute. It’s a fact of life and part of my ridiculously huge corporate salary so I mostly just deal and choke down that ball of stress deep into my secret place. Sometimes I get all zen and just flow, or I try to pretend the cars around me are mindless bots in a video game just blindly following some low-level AI script, in hopes that I can peacefully detach and regard them as mere obstacles to manage. But this line of reasoning fails because video games piss me off. In fact, such characterization makes me wish I had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher mounted on the roof of my car (I’m pretty sure Audi offers this option but you have to pick it up in Ingolstadt), cause if it weren’t for the thin blue line and the small retreating lump of humanity in the pit of my stomach barely restraining me from wanton barbarianism, I would go completely sickhouse on their asses and frag every one of these motherfuckers.
But I should really stop typing this on my iPhone and pay attention to the road…
iTunes I Hate You, Let Me Count The Ways
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Aside from a litany of complaints continuously stewing in the darker pits of my mind, I continue to use iTunes. So, my special lady friend bought me a kick-ass iPhone for Valentine’s Day. Setup and activation was surprisingly easy and painless. And the thing makes me want to touch it. Gently, while glancing furtively at it’s electrostatic sheen…
Anyway, I moved a bunch of music onto it and then tried to make a ringtone. However, since the music biz is a seething hive of fuckwit sphincter lickers they do not allow you to just make ringtones out of any old song. You have to go to the iTunes store and purchase the corporate rings. Even if you already ripped the store-bought CD or, in many cases, even if you’ve already bought the song from iTunes you need to buy the other version to use as a ringtone.
And all this might be somewhat palatable in a “well, I guess that’s just the way it is” bend-over-and-take-it sort of way. But so I tried to play by their rules and found some official Clash ringtone songs on iTunes (and yes, I know the brutal irony of having an iPhone ringtone of The Clash, Joe Strummer turning in his grave, etc…). So I buy the official iTunes corporate approved ringtone-able song, download it and then try to Convert To Ringtone and it says it “can no longer be made into a ringtone”! So iTunes has mislead me and sold me content that does not function as advertised. Most likely because some dick at the label decided they didn’t want these songs to be available as ringtones anymore. They have effectively censored the public ringtone channel.
You see… the record labels suck fonchy ass and blow out steamy gusts of suckiness. It’s a vicious cycle. Their lazy business model that worked last century <cough> is dying and they don’t have shit. So they monetize every possible point of entry to their product. Furthermore, they are so bent on pushing their corporate drivel flavor-of-the-month that they’ve come to regard mobile ringtones as a broadcast channel similar to radio. You’re playing their licensed song to a public audience, which is a strict legal no-no without the labels getting their cut. Just like radio stations and restaurants need to buy a license, so do you if you want to use a song as a ringtone on your iPhone.
Like all Apple products, I want to love it so much. And I do. Really. I’m rubbing my iPhone gently against my thigh as I type this. But they piss me off so much with their painfully-restrictive-but-beautiful design interfaces and passive-aggresive corporate tardery.
[UPDATE] They perpetrate even more mad ass-suckery! So, to make a ringtone for your iPhone (at least, to do it by the Apple prescription) you have to buy the ringtone-enabled version of the song for $.99, then, in iTunes, edit the audio file to chose the portion you wish to use for your ringtone, THEN you have to purchase the edited version from iTunes for another $.99!
Hate. You. Guys.
Would You Like Some Ass With Your Coffee?
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
I guess it should make sense. I mean, it’s a coffee shop in a university town. I shouldn’t expect any particularly high caliber of service or hygeine from these cast-away Lit majors slumming it to pay off their Staffords. But seriously, girl: I really don’t need to see your billowy waist fat waddling out from under your way-too-small Urban Outfitters retro disco t-shirt. And to the angry tattooed hillbilly taking my coffee money, it really really doesn’t help my morning when I have to repeatedly avert my gaze from the gaping ass crack leaping out of your way-too-loose Levi’s.
Seriously, I’m calling the health inspector and my attorney.
No Senor! Don’t Eat That!
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
So I’m in Mexico, on an island off the Yucatan peninsula, innocently approaching the continental breakfast on the table of the hotel restaurant. And nice hotels in Mexico, mind you, aren’t typically like nice hotels in the U.S. or Europe. They’re… more damp. And loose. And porous. I mean, it’s really hot a lot of the time and you gotta have regular siestas to cope. And make sure your brothers and cousins all get hired. And man it’s fricken hot, maybe we should wait til later in the afternoon to finish up that drywall, eh ese? Those tourista putas won’t notice the crooked walls or the gaps around the electrical outlets.
Anyway, I’m lounging under the warm and lovely Caribbean sun snacking on sweet breads and raising my glass of fresh-squeezed island Oj to my mouth and I notice 2 little pieces of rice floating on top. But, like, the bigger piece has a black dot on the end and, uh… Does rice usually move and pulsate like that? I mean it’s, like, all peristaltic and undulado.
Shit. No way. No. Fucking. Way.
Look away. Try to refocus. Maybe it’s just a tequila hallucination. Nope, it’s still there. Still white and semi-transparent and STILL FUCKING MOVING.
And with surprising lucidity I think to myself, “Wow, I’m really glad live maggots float” cause, like, my fresh orange juice is a little too fresh, you know? I mean, sure this is Mexico and all but, Dios Mio! Fucking live maggots in my fucking OJ??? This is, like, seriously scarring me just trying to wrap my delicate, sheltered, and all-too-civilized head around this shit.
So I call the waiter over, “Senor! Muy malo.”
“Oh my god”, he says in accented English (I was really hoping for the characatured “Dios Mio!” or “Ay Caramba”, hands all Home Alone) and sweeps the cup away returning with a full glass of the supposedly-pasteurized and really, pretty-certainly maggot-free variety. Or at least the maggots are dead and not floating, or probably mashed and pulverized in the factory ahead of time to avoid offending las touristas.
And you’re probably thinking, “Boy, I’d really like to take a steamy dump after a bowel-quivering experience like that!” And you’d be right because who knows what other nasty parasitic larvae these savages have slipped you and which really ought to be immediately evacuated through a hefty intestinal purging. They’re probably greedily snacking up half the glorious arrachera baseball tortas you traveled 5000 miles to eat again.
But then you’d realize that, in Mexico, you’re not supposed to flush toilet paper down the toilets because, apparently, their fragile and tenuous grasp on civilization hasn’t quite mastered the concept of indoor plumbing. I mean, they have it, right? But it just doesn’t quite do what you’d expect, coming from, you know, the 1st world.
We’re all well aware of the intestinal horrors wrought by Mexican tap water on our oh-so-cultured foreign GI tracts. But now grok the palatable suckage of wadding up your bumrags and dropping them in the wastebasket where they can rot and fester and ensure that the fetid stench of your ass burgers enjoy an unchallenged and even encouraged longevity baking in the heat and humidity of your non-ventilated and unconditioned so-called restroom, gently wafting under the half-inch gap of the bathroom door into your bedroom. Now imagine looking in the waste basket of any public or shared bathroom and getting an eye full of chocolate ass rashes gleefully scraped across oh-so-many anonymous rice paper toilet wads.
What’s the fucking point? you’d say. What’s the fucking point of plumbing a building with water pretty much laden with e.coli and god knows what other green-apple-splatter-inducing nastiness? And what’s the fucking point, you’d say, of having a septic system cruelly incapable of accepting the one and only soft tissue salvation for your poor, bruised and hurting, burning Montezuma sphincter?
And you’d be right, of course.
Corporate Cafetorium Tardery
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
I’m just back from Mexico, trying to wade through the craptacularity of daily life in NorCal. Mind you, I’ve got some things to say about Mexico, to be certain (Uh, no flushing toilet paper? Are you kidding me? Why the hell do you even have plumbing?). But that will have to wait a bit while it all settles in and precipitates up to an appropriate level of hatery. Lotta threads to keep straight in ‘ol Duder’s head…
Anyway, my brilliant corporate overlords, in all their unquestionable wisdom, decided to dump a few hundred grand (at least) into a remodel of an already plenty adequate cafeteria because, apparently, what the working slumps really want from their daily gruel dispensary is fancy fake wood chairs instead of real plastic chairs, and - sweet lord allmighty! please move that salad bar over at least 15 feet to the left, and would it kill you to throw up some sort of retro-looking distressed facade so we can feel as cool as the SF office? My god, people. Google has, like, 40 _free_ restaurants. I’m sure most of them suck but they probably have at least one decent kitchen so Sergey can properly get his blintz on.
Nevermind that the menu hasn’t changed in, like, 8 years. Oh it’s Monday: Mongolian fire pot with too much rice! Wednesday: dry turkey and undercooked veggies! I swear you could set your watch by the decay rate of the overly-preserved and bleached breads in the sammich trough. Nevermind that the food is still the same bland, boring, undercooked fare that seems mildly interesting for like the first few months or so before the pattern of repetition emerges and the palette recoils. Nevermind that the so-called creativity comes from remixing the week’s leftovers into bizarre Lovecraftian terrors. Mmm, pork curry soup! My nightmares will never taste the same!
Because what’s really important to employees is a steady, reliable tedium of expectably boring but reasonably nutritive food-like substance. And exposed wood support beams. With some of those cool little lo-pro halogen lamps.
Seriously. To any other corpwits looking to mix it up a bit in the food court: remodel the menu, not the cafeteria.
When Countrywide Comes To Town Mothers Pull Their Children Close
Friday, January 18, 2008
A pox! A painful, itchy, oily, oozing, genital chaffing, zit swelling, rashy, messy pox on Countrywide, Citibank, Merrell Lynch, HSBC, and all the other short-selling, profit hording assmunchers that are sticking it to our economy and our working class. They knew, you can bet. They knew the risks, obviously (did they really think all these poor saps would be able to keep up their payments???). But they knew they could make a buttload of cash in the short before it all came down. That’s how it works these days. Do whatever it takes to make your quarter look good so the shareholders don’t rebel and run your head up the flagpole to see who sets it on fire. Gotta hit those numbers, you know. Gotta keep up the growth or the Street marks you for dead. Meanwhile, average Americans are getting hosed cause some zealous realtor wanted to make sure she’d get enough commissions for that new Mercedes so of course she can get you into that new 3 bdr even though you can’t possibly imagine how you could carry a $500,000 mortgage. “I know a lender that works with buyers like you.” In my Dad’s neighborhood people are literally fleeing in the night, lawns covered in abandoned furniture, cause they’re 3 months in default and their house is worth half what they paid.
And all the punditry and media coverage only seems to care about the drama of ever-sliding numbers and what bullshit solution-du-jour is being bounced around by eager-to-please candidates and the lamest of lame-duck presidents (Tax refund? Give me a fucking break. What a great way to pay off debt: spend more money! Just an electioneering token…nothing more). But nobody in the media seems to be asking the hard questions and demanding some accountability from the banks. When are the heads going to roll? “Well, we can’t make the banks pay for their mistakes cause that would make the economic crisis even worse.” Which is the typical response whenever anyone suggests that, you know, maybe we should make laws against this sort of thing since we clearly cannot trust the corporate overlords to worry about anything other than their bottom line. Maybe some of these CEO’s should see some real jail time. Maybe we’re screwing ourselves with this whole idea that corporations should be allowed to exercise free trade and that the system will correct itself. Well, when it does it’s usually not the CEO’s that suffer. It’s the rest of us. And heaven forbid anyone suggest that maybe, just maybe, we could take a little bit off that ridiculously ginormous snipe-hunting defense budget ensuring all those fattened defense contractors have gold-lined coffins. Banks, defense contractors, and energy concerns have taken over our Democracy. Make no mistake. These swine will fuck us all.
Solution:
1) Establish and enforce strong consequences for corporate malfeasance and all activities that threaten economic stability and public welfare.
2) Tax the top revenue channels heavily. No more corporate welfare.
3) Cut defense spending. Stop using war as an economic foundation.
4) Campaign Finance Reform. No more lobbying. Equal air time for all qualifying candidates. No paperless machines.
Of course, any incoming president that wants to enact these steps maybe ought to double their security detail and invest in a nice pair of Kevlar pajamas…
Phil Collins Sucks Ass But “In The Air Tonight” Sucks Awesome
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Jimmy Page made a pact with the devil down at the crossroads. Phil Collins made a pact with lame down at the suck farm. Back in the day (way back, like in 1974), when he was with Peter Gabriel’s Genesis, Phil Collins was like a crazed drumming octopus hopped up on prog rock and methamphetamine. Listen to The Raven from the epically punk-annoying and Tolkien-snorting Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and you can hear that God intended for Collins to be, and to contentedly remain to be, a totally kick-ass drummer.
Though he managed to churn out some decent songs post-Gabriel and post-Genesis, nothing in his now-so-painfully-cut-with-saccharine catalog can touch the depth and power of In The Air Tonight (possibly cause it’s basically a Peter Gabriel song). The haunting track from a-then-distraught Collins was showcased in the 1984 pilot for Miami Vice - one of the premiere media venues for 80’s pastel fashionry and budding MTV papstars. It gets my hair big and full of Aquanet just thinking about it.
A young Don Johnson had not yet hit the rocks and cashed in on, then gone broke on, Melanie Griffith; and a surprisingly weary and pockmarked Edward James Olmos was honing his skills as a silent spokesman against hard living and poor dermatological habits. It was a heady time of Latin struggle, drug empires, men looking tough in sport coats, and un-modified women twisting their healthy, well-fed bodies to some of the most awful pop music ever created.
Then you get the in-story video montage, the Miami streetlights bleeding across the glowing black of Don Johnson’s speeding Ferrari, the heavy knowing looks between Crockett and Tubbs, and the low synthetic electro drum machine pulsing beneath distant distortions and the lonesome call of one Mr. Phil Collins. It builds, collaged with Crockett’s failing marriage and the death of Tubb’s brother in NYC. And builds to the breaking drums tearing the whole thing in half and stacking it up two stories higher. I can feel it coming in the air tonight. Hold on. Shit is going down in Miami, and you 80’s whitebread motherfuckers don’t have a clue.
And then he prayed to the altar of lame and the rest is history. Very wealthy and famous history.
IPhonery
Monday, January 14, 2008
Kay this time I really am “moblogging”, as the kids say. From andrea’s iphone. It sux but I want one. Bad. But I’m holding out for 5g so I can use it in Tokyo. Those people are fricken un-sane for the datas. They need wide pipes to satisfy their virtual girlfriends. Like I need a narrow finger to use this touch keyboard…
What a Time To Be Alive
Monday, January 14, 2008
I’m so Web 2.0 it’s not even fricken funny. This post is from my iPhone. Seriously. Actually I have a piece-of-shit Blackberry that I’d gladly risk a cracked screen if I could chuck it at Steve Jobs’ head for a free iPhone. And honestly, the thing is such a POS that I wouldn’t even dream of writing a post like this in it’s totally suckworthy bullshit UI. My fingers and eyes would bleed simultaneously thus rendering any moblogging nigh impossible. I mean, the tiny little keys would get all caked with blood and tears.
So I’m really just posting this from Sucklook on my waste-of-plastic corporate uniform ThinkPad. But if I had an iPhone (Jobso?), you can bloody well bet I’d be sliding my calloused fingers across that silky-smooth multitouch teasing out all the mislaid marketing errors and poorly-crafted feature decisions. I’m pretty sure blood just, like, wipes off multitouch with a little bit of spit.
{Somehow the Sucklook-to-WordPress moblog mangled the text a bit. I’ve now manually fixed it but clearly need to work out some bugs in the oh-so-friendly-and-dated WordPress workflow.}
Dear Japan (part 1), maybe if you stopped eating up all the Eels…the cats would return
Monday, January 14, 2008
This is a long-overdue rant about a trip we took to Japan in October 07. Ex-post-hateo, if you will.
1) So what is the fricking deal with your eel-o-phelia, Japan? I mean, as I chose to spend untold thousands of dollars on a month-long vacation in your country, I obviously really dig you, your cuisine (in theory), your culture, art…blah blah usual disclaimers…but…I have to know… WHY EEL? I could see it as a weird sushi delicacy, but OMFG it is a practically ubiquitous staple. Clearly you have gone ga-ga for the stuff. And its not like you are short on alternative sources of protein. I mean, you candy it and sell it in gift shops. Sweet Eel? Its a gross bony sea snake, and its just not for human consumption unless under extreme starvation circumstances. I know these things are culturally subjective and all that pap…but no…not this time. The Pythagorean certainty of the foulness of eels is an elemental of the universe, with no beginning and no end.
2) So where are all the cats you keep saying Hello to all the time? Spend a couple weeks in Tokyo and you’ll see 22 million people in a massive urban hive, a generous helping of little useless dogs, and NO LIVE CATS. I mean none. No cats on rooftops, in windows, in yards, crossing the street…you do, however see cartoon imagery of cats everywhere (the most famous of which does not even need mentioning), so there is an obvious love of and fascination with cats…but no live cats. We did see a few live specimens for sale in a Ginza department store - but they were - get this - $2500 each! So obviously if cats are commanding such prices, they are very very scarce. Further evidence was found when we were out shopping for music one evening, and came across a fairly large selection of what can only be described as Kitty Porn. Basically these are DVDs of cats…just sitting around and being alive. Nothing special, no production value, no special LOL CATZ antics…just Fluffy napping in the window caught on the Handycam. And these are commanding $18 - 50 per video. These are not even YouTube-worthy pet videos. But there is a market for them, clearly.
So Japan, I think the writing is on the wall. Its as clear as the eel on your donburi. You eat eels (and candy them, and give them as gifts, and all other manner of abomination), and you desire cats, yet cannot have them. Its time to choose. Your eel-consumption and resulting cat-lack has become unmanageable. You feel that hard, cat-free surface under your ass ? It’s rock-bottom. You want to have cats? Its simple. No more eels. You are cut off. From today on, if you resist the siren song of the eel, you may in your lifetime (or mine) be again granted the company of live cats. Cats are funny and fluffy and generally cute and hilarious companions, and I assure you it will be worth the sacrifice. Perhaps you could increase your sea-urchin or mackerel consumption for a while to start…I have heard it helps with the shakes. But the first step, Japan, is admitting you have a problem. And from here on, just take it one eel-free day at a time.
McHaterey’s
Monday, January 14, 2008
Okay. That didn’t take long. I’ve horked this nice McSweeney’s theme from Scott Wallick. Soon I will modify it slightly then claim it as my own creation. All hail the internets!