“…The Age of Knowing How to Do Things”

The post title is the “hook” of a commercial I just saw for some sort of erectile dysfunction drug I’ve forgotten (never even saw) because of the hook and the setting. You see, the premise was that the featured guy in the ad knew how to get his truck out of a mud wallow he’d driven into. Problem was, he didn’t know jack shit about how to drive his truck, hauling the horse trailer, because he drove right into the mud wallow he got stuck in instead of driving on the high spots on the two-track he was on.

Ignorant dumbass. The hook should have been, “The age of not even knowing jack shit.” Knowing how to cause oneself to get stuck in the first place trumps knowing how to get oneself out of a mud wallow once one screws up–out of ignorance and stupidity–and gets oneself stuck.

Anywho… The huge disconnect between the ad’s hook and the circumstances completely destroyed any suspension of disbelief, killed any hope of me actually watching enough of the thing to actually hear the name of the drug.

(Of course, it’s the stupid ad writer who doesn’t know jack shit.)


BTW, if one doesn’t already KNOW to avoid driving a vehicle–especially while pulling a trailer–it helps to not be stupid and to actually think about one’s driving…

Consider the DMV (and Some People Think It’s a Good Idea to Have Government Manage Health Care?)

Sarah Hoyt posted yesterday about her experiences with “gummint bureaucrappy” (my neologism applied to her descriptive narrative on bureaucracy), and that prodded one of my two active brain cells to simulate something like life.

Her youngest son had to trek (with Mom, for reasons Hoyt skewers) to the DMV for his license.

“…which will then be mailed to him, in a week or two…”

Good Sharkey, Colonel God! That’s worse than I’ve experienced from any DMV in 40+ years’ experience driving! Most recently, it took me 15 minutes and I walked out with my new license. BUT, it did chap my gizzard that for the VERY FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, thistime, although I have a 40+ years’ easily-trackable record with four states’ DMVs (20 years in this state alone), THIS time I had to have my birth certificate to “prove” I am me. (WTF? How does my birth certificate prove that I am me, unless the whorls on my baby footprints were to be matched up with my adult footprints?) The funny thing? (No, not “funny ha-ha” but “funny gag-gag”.) My birth certificate was temporarily unavailable (long story), so I sent off for a duplicate (yes, a photostatic duplicate that was as exact a duplicate as can be produced, as comparison with my original later demonstrated). To obtain it I had to include a scanned copy of… my current driver’s license.

So, my (then) current driver’s license was all I needed to obtain a duplicate birth certificate… which was needed to renew that driver’s license.

Complete, absolute and total paper-shuffling B.S.

I draw from this sort of thing–and from Hoyt’s post, to which you can surely add your own examples–an extended lesson:

Governments cannot run without some form of bureaucracy, but since bureaucracies are subject to both Parkinson’s Law and Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, perhaps that’s an argument for anarchy. *heh* The bureacrappic anarcho-tyranny that is now strangling our economy, castrating our liberty and aiding in stultifying society is certainly the most potent argument against surrendering health care to the “tender mercies” of yet more “gummint bureaucraps”.

Just sayin’

I Really Need to Get Off My Lazy Butt…

…and check into configuring the Amazon Cloud Player differently, but I figure I can Get Around to That Real Soon Now (or maybe defer it until after the next Procrastinators Anonymous meeting… although I think that’s been postponed again. ;-)). Still, since it randomly selected one of my fav Beethoven symphonies (OK, they’re all favs, but this one is one of the “fav-er-er” ones *heh*), I guess it’s OK for now anyway.

MSOffice Spellcheck: Terminally Stupid

Try as I might, I canNOT train MSOffice’s spellcheck in the differences between “affect” and “effect”. Dumbass subliterate M$ programmers seem to refuse to allow “effect” to be used as a verb. Of course, most people can’t discern between the two words, but one might think that fixing a spellchecker’s mistakes would be allowable for a user to effect.

(Yet another reason why I generally prefer OpenOffice/LibreOffice, although I have come to prefer and migrate back to Outlook 2010 from the “open[er/ish]” Thunderbird mail client.)

*sigh* This Is What Happens When People Interfere with Evolution

If it weren’t for people interfering with evolution, tomorrow could be a Much Better Day with many, many thousands of people who ought to be living in “Assisted Computing Facilities” (“Here, dearie, let me make that mouse click FOR you… “) having locked themselves out of Internet access via their own stupidity. But no, the dumbasses HAD to warn ’em… *grumble, grumble, gripe, complain*

Internet blackout looms for thousands: What you need to know

Dumbasses! Just think of the bandwidth NOT freed up because of warnings like this!

I Just Hate It When This Happens

In a blogpost critiquing the easily mocked Eric Alterman’s assertion that conservatives are largely unsuccessful in penetrating the domains of academia and journalism because they “lack professionalism” the author sums up with this statement:

Just a reminder, when you tax socialists : you’ll get less of them.

In one short sentence two glaring punctuation errors, one orthography error and one misused word leap off the page to assault my eyes. The comma should be a colon; the space after “socialists” is a glaring orthography error; the colon should be a comma and “less” should be “fewer”.

But then, “professional” journalists, who supposedly have editors checking their work, often write prose as bad as that, so it doesn’t affect the post’s argument as badly as it otherwise might.

Preparing for TEOTWAWKI

Yeh, the dreaded “TEOTWAWKI“. *meh* It could be as simple an ending as NO MORE COFFEE!!!

While that may seem a simple thing, it’s really much, much worse than a Zombie Apocalypse or Nuclear Winter, either of which can be handily survived with the application of enough COFFEE!! (Well, and beer, but I’m not going there right now.)

So, several BIG freezers paired with an adequate power generation method is a must. Oh, and loads and loads and loads (and LOADS) of coffee beans in vacuum sealed bags (with oxygen absorbers included).

But. Unless one really likes “cowboy coffee” or its equivalent, or has a nice French press, coffee filters will be a Very Good Thing to have on hand. In truckloads. Yeh, yeh, I know all about those metal mesh filters. Fuggetaboutit. Just not good enough. Besides, coffee filters are useful for tons of things, so having as much coffee filter stock as toilet paper stock (oh, wait–you are hoarding toilet paper, aren’t you? Why, after TEOTWAWKI, it’ll be the new “gold standard” in “money”. Think about it) when TEOTWAWKI hits might be a Very Good Idea.

Of course, then one would need a vault of some kind to store these riches against the slavering hoards of coffeeheads who’ve been turned into zombies by caffeine deprivation. And then there’re the alligators in the moat and the guard cheetahs to remember to stock feed for and the pillboxes with computer-run 7.62 mm GAU-17/A gatling guns and the…

Nothing’s too much in protecting one’s coffee supplies.


 

 

 

 

TEOTWAWKI: The end of the world as we know it

I Really Need to Ameliorate My Tinnitus

Sometimes it’s so distracting I mishear background stuff. For example, a TV commercial I heard as,

“Introducing the evil 4G

The sheer noise level of the tinnitus is really that distracting a times.


I don’t watch much TV. This was while sharing some “being there” time while my Wonder Woman was watching one of the (very, very) few TV shows she watches via our cable subscription.

Evo 4G