T-13, 1.18: 13 Things that Tick Me Off

[Another list from The Curmudgeon’s Corner *heh*]

Rant: ON

Yeh, yeh, I know: “tick me off” is just a bowdlerized version of what I really mean, and that’s the first item on my list:

#1: Dulling down expressions for po’ widdew babies’ neo-victorian sensibilities. “Shit,” as one dear old saint in my church once told me, “isn’t a dirty word. What it refers to is dirty.” And calling things by names that are less than accurate is an insult to genuine attempts to convey meaning. Some things really are vulgar, and they ought to have their nature reflected in properly vulgar terms. (Unfortunately, there are no terms vulgar enough, even scatological enough, to express the nature of politicians *spit*.)

#2: “Feb-YOU-ary” Come on! It’s Feb-RU-ary, folks! Read the word! 😉 Learn to say it; it’s not that hard to GET IT RIGHT! Worst offenders: people who talk for a living, “news” readers, politicians *spit* and Academia Nut Fruitcakes, etc.

#3: Using a singular verb with a plural subject. Dumbass Mass Media Podpeople lead the way here, followed closely by politicians *spit*, Academia Nut Fruitcakes and just about anyone else with influence in the public arena. “There’s problems” is simply the way an illiterate non-English speaker might attempt to grunt a sentence. There ARE problems (“There’re problems”) that may be more serious than this, but few are more irksome… or more indicative of complete, dunderheaded lack of logic or in fact any reasoning going on.

#4: “Gay” to refer to sad sack, often angry and beligerant homosexuals. Nothing gay (happy, carefree) about the class. While I’d grant that there may be some gay homosexuals, there are plenty of gay heterosexuals as well. Ceding the word to people who angrily, stridently and beligerantly claim it as their own is an offense against the English language, common sense and against genuinely gay people.

#5: And take Maccultists. Please. I have nothing against folks using Macs. I’ve used more than one myself, in times past. But the Macrophile religion is just too much for me. Maccultists are worse than Scientologists or Mormons (though not–yet–as bad as Muslims) when it comes to attacking anyone or anything that casts aspersions upon their religion or religious icons and when it comes to lying about their own superior system and the failings of other systems. Give it a rest, folks! It’s just another OS option, now–you no longer even have a unique hardware platform, now that Apple is selling Intel PCs. But… by the same token, people who are Windoze cultists or Linux cultists are almost as bad. Just not usually as rabid.

#6: As always, politicians *spit* What Mark Twain said of Congress, that America is without a distinct criminal class, “with the possible exception of Congress,” can pretty well be said of politicians as a class, nowadays. *sigh*

#7: “Educators” Hey! Whatever happened to teachers? I’ll tell you what has happened to teachers: they’ve become an endangered species as more and more NEA-protected petty bureaucraps take up station in America’s classrooms and participate in the progressive enstupiation of the American citizens of the future. (Yes, I know there are still some teachers left, in fact many, who are condemned for their sins [of attempting to teach] to play Sisyphus, striving against the fall of night… Blessings upon their heads!)

#8: Neighbors who think their vehicle runs better if they sabotage their muffler, so that they sound louder than a C-130 doing touch-and-gos out side my bedroom window… at 3:00 a.m. Would like to book a trip to the Seventh Circle of Hell for them…

#9: May I mention politicians *spit* again? No? Well then, how about liars? No, I don’t mean someone who fibs and regrets it and attempts to make things right and avoid lying again. Sure, we have all failed to be really honest from time to time. But there are those whose whole existence is bound up in lies. They’re the lind of people who would see nothing wrong with cheating at solitaire (or any other game), who apparently believe that they excrete vanilla ice cream. You know some of them, I’m sure. *sigh*

#10: That tiny lil piece of popcorn that just will NOT come outa hiding, no matter how much I brush or floss… until it decides to emerge juuuust at the “right” moment to be inhaled… prompting oneof those monumental coughing jags. I hate that.

#11: Products that come with instructions in Spanish, French and Japanese. *sheesh* The things were manufactured for export to the U.S. Spanish, French and Japanese instructions should go somewhere else. For that matter, as for immigrants (legal, see #12) shoud heed these words. Or go home.

#12: Illegal aliens and darned near any other pet fake victim of people with more time on their hands than they have the IQ to know what to do with. What part of entering the country illegally, stealing IDs and using forged documents to steal jobs from citizens and legal immigrants shows any respect whatsoever for the country they have invaded?

#13: President Bush with his “read my lips: no amnesty for illegal aliens” lie. I mean, what part of NOT having to leave the country and get in the back of the line BEHIND applicants who seek to enter the country legally is NOT an amnesty? “Significant penalty”? Pay up to two of seven years back taxes, work at a job (taken in the place of a citizen or legal resident) and behave themselves from that point on a “significant penalty”? Heck, I’d like to be “forgiven” a few years’ taxes. Can I apply to be an illegal alien if Bush and Friends get this amnesty put in place? And hey! Can I also get free health care, etc., just by applying for resident illegal alien status?

I guess I could go on, since I’m in a curmudgeonly mood, but I guess I’ll not… for now.

Rant: OFF

Noted at the Thursday Thirteen Hub. Unfortunately, this TT is apparently the last TT. So be it. Thanks for the (short for me) ride!

More OS fun

Well, lunchtime rolled around, made some phone calls, etc., cooked a bite and then…

Aw, heck, why not? Wiped a hard drive on a “play” machine, installed the xfc-enabled KDE-based Xubuntu 6.06.1 (cos I’d already determined that 6.1 didn’t like installing on that box), then used Synaptic Package manager to d/l and install the Edgy Eft (6.1)-based Ichthux Linux distro over the Xubuntu install.

And it took less time overall than an install onto bare metal of XP-Pro.

Continue reading “More OS fun”

The Enstupiation of America

[Another re-run, this time from last September. Why? Because I’m feeling lazy, and because it needs to be said again. ]

Woman Pays $14,000 to Lease Rotary Dial Phone

The part that gets to me is the comment by a family member:

Strogen’s family is outraged by AT&T’s actions. Strogen’s granddaughter, Barb Gordon said “It’s taking advantage of the elderly. People our age wouldn’t even consider leasing a telephone.” Gordon also expressed her anger and pointed out the obvious that “If my own grandmother was doing it, how many other people are?”

“Taking advantage of the elderly”? How long has it been since everyone who’s paid any attention at all (and has more than as many as two active brain cells) has known that leasing rotary phones (or ANY phones, for that matter) from Ma Bell is unnecesasary? Sure, the woman’s in her 80s now, but she was only in her 50s or 60s when such information became common knowledge. Anyone stupid enough to pay a $10/month rental/lease fee for a piece of throwaway technology really ought to be paying that money as a fine for stupidity. Heck, I have working landline phones that cost less than $10… ten twelveyears ago.

But no, our society wants to put bumper guards on life, now… and that’s making us ever more stupid and incompetent. In our economy of abundance and our society of cocooned ease, we are breeding whole generations of incompetent, lazy nincompoops and whimps (or over-reacting hyper jackasses). As a small example, the other day a young nephew of mine asked about some DOS commands so he could play around on an old computer his family had aquired. Almost stumped me. Windows (and Linux, for that matter) are so graphically-oriented, so easy, that I rarely use DOS commands any more, rarely write batch files, rarely even see the command line.

Enstupiating ease. That’s a critical danger to our society. That and cocooning, bumper-guarding children throughout childhood and adolescence to the extent that they never grow up to be really competent adults but sheeple who always need someone else to take care of them, instruct them in how to do things. Incompetent at learning or doing nearly anything on their own.

Filled with an always present undercurrent of fear.

Take a “discussion” I had elsewhere with a gal who prides herself on being a swimming inbstructor (for nine whole years! woo-hoo!). Her claim to expertise? She is the ONLY swimming instructor she knows or has even heard of who can teach someone the breast stroke in half an hour!

Gime a break! When I was eight, I saw someone doing a breast stroke in the public pool we frequented. I thought it was cool, so I did it too. (And yeh, if my lifesaving and WSI instructors years later are to be believed, I apparently did it right.) A few minutes later, I “taught” my six-year-old brother the breaststroke. How? “Hey! look what I can do!” “I can do that too!” “Show me.” So he did. Simply by copying me.

Big stinking deal.

But no, not today. Today, apparently it takes instruction by a professional for today’s incompetent whimpy kids to learn an idiot-proof breast stroke. And it takes (apparently) 30 whole minutes to do so. Gee, people really are getting stupider by the minute. Growing up, I never met anyone (who already knew how to keep their head in the water) who couldn’t pick up the breast stroke in under 5 minutes, “instructed” or not.

And so it goes. “Education professionals” (filling positions that formerly would have been filled by teachers) are talking (again) about how training wheel teaching methods (oh! That’s another experience! I never knew there were such things as “training wheels” as a kid. Just got put on a bike and pushed off… ) can cripple students’ intellectual development.

Yeh, it’s all talk.

*sigh*


Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Right Pundits, Bumpshack: Where the News Always Bumps!, Perri Nelson’s Website, Big Dog’s Weblog, basil’s blog, Stuck On Stupid, The Amboy Times, The Bullwinkle Blog, Cao’s Blog, Conservative Cat, Conservative Thoughts, Rightlinx, stikNstein… has no mercy, Blue Star Chronicles, The Pink Flamingo, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Quote for today

Over at Scobelizer, an interesting discussion about vaporware, “boiling the ocean” and cool internet niche apps brought up the quote for today by one of the commenters:

…remembering everything and doing anything useful with that data are two different things. Just ask the CIA.

Of course, one could as easily have said, “Consider the Congressional record,” eh?

Tongue in cheek… /OTA Wednesday

Yep. In addition to the YouTube video posted below, it’s OTA Wednesday. You know what to do.

Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

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Linkfest Haven, the Blogger's Oasis

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.


In honor of the discussion about Diane’s new Mac going on over at The Trouble with Angels

*heh*

😉