Wednesday, May 31, 2006

The Village Sucks

Oh, M. Night Shyamalan, however you pronounce that crazy-ass last name of yours; first you wowed me by making Bruce Willis seem like a decent dramatic actor in The Sixth Sense, then you proved your mad directing skillz and Samuel L. Jackson attunedeness to me with Unbreakable, and then you pissed me off with the stupidly lame religiosity of Signs, despite the excellent first half (I blame Mel). But still, I knew deep down that you could be a great writer/director, if only you had free reign to create what you wanted to create.

Oh well, wrong again.

I mean, seriously - what the fuck? The Village is probably the stupidest movie I've seen in a few years, and yes, I did see Transporter 2. You had such promise, M, but then this shit, and that stupid American Express commercial on top of it. Thanks for letting me down yet again.

On the plus side, I've recently watched a shitload of House, and that show is awesome*. Take lessons, Shamalamadingdong.

* Anyone who, in Prime Time, can tell a cute little kid, "It takes one to know one, loser!" deserves my utmost respect.

Friday, May 26, 2006

Lessons in Ruthlessness, Part 1: Solving Homelessness

Today I’m kicking off a new feature: Lessons in Ruthlessness. I’ve always admired people who pursue some lofty goal – be it profit, power, or whatever – with complete and utter disregard for the welfare and feelings of their fellow man. I’ve tried hard to trade in the remnants of my conscience for large amounts of cash, so I look to these role models for inspiration and guidance.

Our first Lesson is quite a doozy, and it comes to us from, where else… Los Angeles. Two septuagenarian women, Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt, were arrested last Thursday on fraud charges. Their alleged crime? Taking in two homeless men, giving them a place to live, food to eat… and 19 life insurance policies valued at over $2 million. Two mysterious hit-and-run accidents later, and the women cashed in on their callous investments. Police suspect the pair may have run this brilliant scam before, and are now looking at past unsolved murders for links.

This story has it all: seemly innocent grandmothers revealed as greedy sociopaths; novel methods of making money off of vagrants; turning seemingly kind acts into startlingly craven schemes for bilking insurance companies. It takes a special kind of mind to look at a homeless person and see a gold mine. Bravo!

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

I Believe the Children Are Our Future

Most of these children will grow up to be worthless, ignorant assholes.

A few weeks ago I wrote about my disdain for old people. But my scorn for the elderly pales in comparison to my utter contempt for another segment of the population: children.

If there’s one single group of human beings that causes me the most aggravation in life, its disgusting, stupid, annoying, smelly little children. I see nothing cute or worthwhile about the little shits, and for the life of me I can’t fathom why anyone would want to spend time with them, let alone produce one of their own.

From the moment they are squeezed or cut out of the womb, they begin what for most will be a lifelong habit: crying. For months after being born, they monopolize the time of at least one otherwise potentially productive adult by demanding food, attention, diaper changes, bathing, and so on. (Those that don’t have the decency to snuff it before turning senile will repeat this dependency in their golden years, inflicting it on their own children and grandchildren, possibly for many years.) After this, the lucky parent(s) get to experience the joys of toilet training, teething, and cleaning up strained carrots flung on to walls during obnoxious and selfish temper tantrums.

Occasionally, you hear about some inconsiderate infant that just up and dies in its sleep. It’s a big medical mystery why this sort of thing happens, although I personally never rule out the possibility of a frustrated parent with a well-applied pillow. What a waste. All that time and effort expended to bring a fresh new life into this world and, poof, gone. At least the coffins are cheap. (I love that page; from the title (“coffins for children at discounted prices”) to the awkward blurb at the top (“Please accept our deepest condolences in the loss of your infant or child. So sorry.”))

Assuming the youngin’ has the sense to survive into the toddlerhood, its parents have a whole new world of fun waiting for them. This is the time when the little monsters are just clever enough to get themselves into large amounts of trouble. It was around this time in my own life that I amused my parents – and the local emergency room staff - by shoving an entire packet of sunflower seeds up my nose.

Children are very impressionable at this age. This is when they start to learn adult behaviors such as brushing their teeth, tying their shoes, and swearing loudly at the slightest provocation. If you are ever unfortunate enough to find yourself caring for one, use this fact to your advantage. For example, you know those little plastic thingies you plug into power outlets to prevent kids from electrocuting themselves as they stumble around the house? I’m going to invent one that is semi-conductive, so when some dumb little shit touches it, it’ll give just enough of a shock to make him learn a lesson. It’s not something he will do twice, that’s for sure.

This is also the time of life when children are most blatantly annoying to other people. For some reason, parents feel it’s a good idea to drag their insufferable offspring into public places like supermarkets or restaurants, where the little bastard’s tantrums can annoy total strangers. Anyone who has ever been stuck on a long flight with a screeching tot knows just how intolerable they can be.

If a child can survive the common perils of being a toddler (getting trapped in old refrigerators, choking on razor blades in apples given to them by people like me, being shot by fellow students in kindergarten, etc), they enter the exciting pre-teen years. This is when the child has just enough mental capacity to really begin to inflict evils on the rest of society. Recall that preteen girls are responsible for the popularity of Titanic - I don’t think I need to say more about their repulsiveness.

Now, most intelligent people already realize what a terrible emotional and financial strain it is to have a child, and through the use of birth control, being gay, or just plain not getting laid, they avoid reproducing altogether. This is a good idea for an individual, but for society it’s been disastrous: only the stupid are breeding. In particular, Catholicism is one of, if not the, fastest growing religions in the world, largely because they forbid birth control and have a secret cure for homosexuality. Thus the population is quickly being overwhelmed by people with a genetic predisposition for foolishness and gullibility. This is one of many reasons I have given up hope for the future of humanity.

How can we prevent the further dumbening of the gene pool? Far be it from me to suggest that smart couples begin having children; I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. Instead, we should somehow trick the dumbasses of the world into raising the children of the smart. Here’s my initial plan:

  1. Develop a virulent disease that renders its victims infertile.
  2. Inoculate worthwhile people against that disease some Sunday morning, while the undesirables are at church.
  3. Unleash the disease at NASCAR events, Ashlee Simpson concerts, Justice Sunday III, Republican fundraisers, etc.
  4. Once the infected realize they are all infertile, they will be clamoring for donor sperm and eggs for IVF. Those of us that are still fertile will get a large amount of cash for our gametes, as this will now be a seller’s market.
  5. The dumb will then raise a generation of children with a genetic predisposition to intelligence, while the rest of us can enjoy life knowing someone else is tending to our worthy spawn.

This plan may well be too little too late to save humanity, but it might at least slow the decline.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Martha Logan Just Needs Some Deep Dicking

The season finale of “24” last night was kinda lame. Sure, a lot of people died, some of them via an all-too-rare knife to the throat, and RoboCop got gunned down in cold blood. Sweet. We also learned that it takes President Logan less than five minutes to fuck his wife, including the time to change clothes afterward. I understand that it’s been a stressful day, and you are on a tight schedule, but damn - no wonder that bitch is so crazy! I bet Aaron would treat her right.

There was a whole lot of stuff that happened last night that didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. What the fuck happened to Wayne Palmer? Why did Jack bother to kidnap President Logan if he wasn’t willing to at least shoot him in a kneecap? Or maybe slap him around a little? How can a bug the size of a rabbit turd transmit a signal halfway across LA? Why was Jack released by the Secret Service? Isn’t kidnapping the President, regardless of how big a prick he is, at least a misdemeanor? How did the Chinese get Jack from that industrial park to a ship in the middle of the ocean during a commercial break? Why did Chloe marry that asshole in the first place? Was it his fake English accent? How did RoboCop not notice that his gun had no bullets? Was he too busy trying to remember his Russian nuclear submarine training?

Anyway, it’s done, and we won’t be getting a fresh Jack Bauer fix until January 2007. In China. Great. At least they’ll have a hard time working in some obnoxious cougar-related subplot involving Kim.

SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read the above stuff if you haven’t watched last night’s episodes yet.

Monday, May 22, 2006

Bitches, Leave

One of the few nice things about living in Buffalo is The Beast, the local satirical newspaper that I mentioned a few days ago. Their newest edition is now online (PDF), and among other things, it contains this great little graphic:


RoboCop, where are you? Oh right, you're about to get your ass kicked by Jack Bauer.

Friday, May 19, 2006

All of My Friends Are Cynical Assholes, Too

Its performance review time where I work, when we try to remember what we’ve done over the past year in order to justify our piddling raises. One of my co-workers was asked to list his top ten accomplishments for the year. Here’s how he replied (details changed to protect the guilty):

10 accomplishments since last review

1) Reworked [Big Product] solution paper after Marketing embarrassed us in front of [Big Customer] with their version.

2) Wrote a great [Big Product] white paper before it was totally ravaged.

3) Came up with a kick ass training that explained [Big Product] in a way even a sales person can get.

4) Represented [Company] at a number of tradeshows, providing a highly professional face to the customer. I provided a deep understanding of our products and the customer’s applications, even when hung over.

5) I worked diligently to ensure that Marketing and Engineering fully appreciated the customer’s perspective - in product requirements, product development and in marketing efforts. Since [Company] rarely considers the customer in its decisions, this is a valuable service.

6) Brought my considerable technical and market knowledge to product development efforts. In discussions about future products I have provided valuable input on technical features and market realities that have utterly escaped product management.

7) Resolved a number of customer issues quickly and efficiently. With all of the problems our products have, this is important.

8) Quickly learn and adapt to new technologies and products. I quickly learned the [New Big Product] product and acquired most knowledge the first time as opposed to needing it repeated a millions times like some.

9) I developed several new and easy to use user interfaces for the [Other New Big Product] product even though they where completely ignored by product management and engineering. These user interfaces where shown to [Big Customer]’s UI engineering team and they agreed that my design closely followed [Big Customer]’s own design criteria.

10) Managed to maintain a reasonably positive attitude despite the daily, no, hourly onslaught of corporate political BS, management missteps, widespread gross incompetence and overall lack of motivation and morale.

Monday, May 15, 2006

Fuck You, Bush

Ok, Mr. Bush. You've fucked over the environment, turned the Bill of Rights into your own personal roll of Charmin Ultra, given ridiculously unnecessary tax cuts to rich assholes, replaced science with moronic superstition, crippled useful government agencies, turned the civil rights of women and gays into craven political tools, needlessly invaded a foreign country and then royally fucked up the aftermath, protected white-collar criminals at the highest levels, packed the Supreme Court with mindless flunkies, killed New Orleans (and, ultimately, Girls Gone Wild), made torture the new default policy of this once-great country, and basically embarrassed every citizen who ever thought democracy was worthwhile. And all the while, I really haven't given a shit because, in truth, it never really affected me in any significant way.

But now you've gone too far. You've preempted "24" by almost 20 minutes. And worse, you did it to talk about fucking immigration, a topic which I could not care less about.

God dammit, Mr. President... I need my Jack Bauer fix! How much abuse do you think the country can take, asshole?!?!

Friday, May 12, 2006

We'd Better Start Testing Their Curlers for Steroids

I'm not a big sports fan, and I usually find hockey to be among the least-watchable things on television. But I do like beer, pizza, and chicken wings, so when my co-workers went out last night to get drunk and watch game 4 of the Buffalo-Ottawa playoff series, I happily joined in. Just my luck, the Sabres got beat and will have to try to win the series on Saturday. Whatever, I got tanked on the cheap ($4.50 for a pitcher!) and had some kick-ass pizza. I hope they make it to the Stanley Cup finals, so they can get crushed on national TV and once again reaffirm Buffalo's perennial loser status.

So imagine my surprise when I came into work this morning, disgustingly hung over, and headed over the The Beast's website. Those crazy motherfuckers perpetrated an awesome prank wherein they got the mayor of Ottawa to agree to send some tech jobs to Buffalo in exchange for the Sabre's throwing a few of the games in the series. Its good to know that our neighbors to the north are just as corrupt as our own politicians.

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Israel’s Welfare Queens

I heard a funny segment on APM’s Marketplace the other day. When Israel was first set up, they found themselves short on ultra-Orthodox rabbis, thanks to the Holocaust. For some reason, they decided to subsidize the few hundred remaining rabbis so they could study the Torah all day. I suppose this is the kind of thing you have to do when setting up a new country, sort of the like the three-fifths compromise, except with stupid people instead of slaves.

Fast-forward 60 years: now the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel numbers a staggering 650,000 people, about 10% of the population. I guess those rabbis like to fuck like rabbits. Somebody noticed that they were paying a large portion of the country to sit around and read instead of doing something productive, so the government cut the subsidies. Of course, all of these guys have started whining about it, because now they have to get – gasp – jobs!

So when you start getting worked up about entitlements in the United States, take a step back and realize just how much worse things could be. At least we aren’t subsidizing a huge population of idiots with stupid beards and hats.

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Look Out, Ladies!

Like most other pathetic single people in this country, I have tried a few online dating services. Nothing good ever came from them, most likely because I would never date any woman stupid enough to be attracted to someone like me based solely on a few lies in an online personal ad. But lately it occurred to me that maybe I just wasn’t being honest enough, so here is my brand new singles ad, coming soon to a dating site near you (click to expand, unless you can read the 0.005 point font):

Monday, May 01, 2006

Home Sweet Home

I'm back in Buffalo, and back at work. In retrospect, I guess urwrong was correct in pointing out that a bad week in Vegas is still about 4000x better than a great week in Buffalo. I'm still too exhausted/drunk/disoriented to do much of anything at the moment, but hopefully I'll be back to my usually bitchy self in a day or two.