Tag: stupid is as stupid does

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It’s the little things…

Curmudgeon mode: ON

Ever notice that sometimes it’s the little things that are most irritating?

“Big things” are sometimes—sometimes—less of an irritant than little things. Threre’s a BIG difference between the death of a loved one and someone pulling out into traffic and driving slowly in front of folks who have sonmewhere to go. The death of a loved on isn’t irritating, though. And, really, we all know that we and our loved ones will die one day, but there’s no excuse for pulling out into traffic and driving slowly… (I just irritated myself by misspelling “traffic”. Twice. Ick. Misspelled “driving” too. *sigh*)

🙂

One of the “little things” I find to be irritating is when I ask someone why they did such and so and they essentially tell me, “The King of Spain told me to do [something completely irrelevant to your question].”

Huh? I didn’t ask you about [something completely irrelevant], I asked you about such and so. And what does your stated reason have to do with anything under the sun?

It’s as though with their answer they were saying,

1.) “Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah [fingers in ears], nahhhht listening to you.”
2.) “You’re so stupid, you’ll never notice my answer is complete nonsense.”
3.) “Huh? If this is Tuesday [or Wednesday, Thursday, Friday… etc.], I must have my head up my… ”
4.) “Hey! Ever seen my impression of Edgar Allan Poe on Prozac? ‘Pretty bird… ‘.”

…or any combo of the above.

*sigh*

If someone doesn’t want to answer a question, the honest way to deal with it is, “I don’t want to answer that.” If they don’t understand the question, “Could you rephrase that?” If they didn’t hear it, “Could you repeat the question?”

Babbling nonsense is insulting.

But slowly, very slowly, I am learning that pointing out to such people what they have done is useless, a complete waste of my time. (Not a waste of their, cos they’re already doing that.)

Well, since it’s August and I’ve already seen Christmas products out in one store (yep: there’s another rant), perhaps I can let Bill Engvall talk about some “little” irritants and a program to address them:

Here’s Your Sign Christmas
I took my son to the mall the other day to see Santa Claus
The woman in line behind me says “hey is that Santa Claus up there”?
I said “no ma’m, it’s a Kenny Rodgers stunt double”
Here’s your sign
The other day I bought a wreath to go on our front door
as I was walking out the store a man stopped me and said
“hey, are you going to hang that on your door”?
I said “no sir, it’s a Christmas toilet seat cover, got the idea from Martha Stewart”
(Chorus)
Here’s your sign, Here’s your sign, Here’s your stupid sign
You acted dumb, so have some fun and wear your stupid sign
Oh! Here’s your sign, Here’s your sign, Here’s your stupid sign
you lost your mind, so pay the fine and wear your stupid sign
I hung those little Christmas lights on my house, you know the kind that blink on and off
My neighbour comes over and says
“Bill how do you get those to blink on and off like that”?
I said “I’ve got my son inside plugging and unplugging it, plugging and unplugging it”
Here’s your sign
I took my family to buy a Christmas tree the other night
When we walked onto the lot this guy walked up to me and says
“hey, y’all here to buy a Christmas tree?”
I said, “no sir, my son needs to go to the bathroom and these trees looked really inviting”
(Chorus)
Here’s your sign, Here’s your sign, Here’s your stupid sign
You acted dumb, so have some fun and wear your stupid sign
Oh! Here’s your sign, Here’s your sign, Here’s your stupid sign
you lost your mind, so pay the fine and wear your stupid sign
Here’s your sign, Here’s your sign, Here’s your stupid sign
have no fear when you’re spreading cheer during Christmas time
The other night my family and I were walking through the neighbourhood looking at all the Christmas decorations
when we came across this house that had a manger scene
now there was this whole group of people looking at it when I overheard this one guy say
“hey, are those the Three Wise Men”?
I said “no sir that’s ZZ Top doing a farming concert
(Chorus)
Here’s your sign, Here’s your sign, Here’s your stupid sign
You acted dumb, so have some fun and wear your stupid sign
Oh! Here’s your sign, Here’s your sign, Here’s your stupid sign
you lost your mind, so pay the fine and wear your stupid sign
Here’s your sign, Here’s your sign, here’s your stupid sign
(have no fear when you’re spreading cheer during Christmas time)
And finally my wife and I were in a grocery store the other day and I heard a woman ask the clerk
“do you know what time Midnight Mass starts on Christmas Eve”?
And in the holiday spririt I walked over and said “Here’s your sign”
Happy holidays everybody!
Curmudgeon mode: OFF (maybe… )
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Think on this and get back with me…

From The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald:

‘But if you want me to know you again, ma’am, for certain sure,’ said Curdie, ‘could you not give me some sign, or tell me something about you that never changes – or some other way to know you, or thing to know you by?’

‘No, Curdie; that would be to keep you from knowing me. You must know me in quite another way from that. It would not be the least use to you or me either if I were to make you know me in that way. It would be but to know the sign of Me – not to know me myself. it would be no better than if I were to take this emerald out of my crown and give it to you to take home with you, and you were to call it me, and talk to it as if it heard and saw and loved you. Much good that would do you, Curdie! No; you must do what you can to know me, and if you do, you will. You shall see me again in very different circumstances from these, and, I will tell you so much, it may be in a very different shape. But come now, I will lead you out of this cavern; my good Joan will be getting too anxious about you. One word more: you will allow that the men knew little what they were talking about this morning, when they told all those tales of Old Mother Wotherwop; but did it occur to you to think how it was they fell to talking about me at all? It was because I came to them; I was beside them all the time they were talking about me, though they were far enough from knowing it, and had very little besides foolishness to say.’

It was precisely this kind of allegory that led Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and others to draw inspiration from George MacDonald’s works.
Posted also at Whistling in the Light
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Idiots! Dolts! Speech-impaired Piscines*!

(*Dumb Basses)
Who am I talking about? See this story (yeh, it’s all over the place).
Worm strikes down Windows 2000 systems
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A fast-moving computer worm Tuesday attacked computer systems using Microsoft operating systems, shutting down computers in the United States, Germany and Asia.
Among those hit were offices on Capitol Hill, which is in the midst of August recess, and media organizations, including CNN, ABC and The New York Times. The Caterpillar Co. in Peoria, Illinois, reportedly also had problems…
Idiots. Dolts. Doofuses, one and all. I mean, what’s so hard about hitting “patch Tuesday”? The vulnerability this worm depends on was patched by all non-brain-dead Win2K users before this thing was ever seen “in the wild.” CNN, ABC, NYT and “offices on Capitol Hill” are to be expected to have idiots for IT guys, though. But Caterpillar? Gee, how can they stay in business if their IT department’s that incompetent?
Anyone in IT who, after years and years of “shrink-wrap betaware” from Microsoft and almost weekly discoveries of vulnerabilities in their products, does NOT take every opportunity to review and patch the MS products their company uses should be fired. With “extreme prejudice”. Removed from the gene pool as too stupid to reproduce.
Dumb. Simply too dumb to be allowed to pollute the gene pool…
A small number of computers in an administrative office at San Francisco International Airport also crashed, but they were not essential to the airport’s operation, spokesman Mike McCarron said._*_
“Crashed”—not a word you’d want to hear associated with ANY airport’s systems, is it?
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Tell the Copyright Office to take a hike

But do be a tad more polite about it…

Rich, over at The English Guy, cites a Nikolaos S. Karastathis (NSK Blog) post about the plan the Copyright Office has to implement a copyright pre-registration site that will ONLY work with Internet Exploder.

Nikolaos links to the specific notification by the Copyright Office and suggests writing a letter (the Copyright Office won’t accept emails on this). Below is the letter I’m sending. They require five copies to be sent. May I humbly suggest sending eight? Five to the Copyright office and CCs to your congresscritters (representative and senators)? Oh, and do note the CCs on the copies sent to the Copyright Office…

🙂

Oh, and spread the word, eh? Locking a fedgov website down for ONE company’s product smacks of something a tad fishy. Maybe the Justice Department should look into the monopoly aspects. *LOL*

Office of the General Counsel

U.S. Copyright Office

Copyright GC/ I&R

P.O. Box 70400

Southwest Station

Washington, DC 20024-0400

Dear Reader:

At this Web address: http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2005/70fr44878.html I just read that the Copyright Office is planning to implement copyright preregistration via the web ONLY for those using Internet Explorer web browser.

Are you sure that’s wise? Internet Explorer is the least standards-compliant major web browser. It is also historically the least secure—in fact, Homeland Security has recommended people switch!— most “attacked” by malicious users and is available for use ONLY by Windows users. In fact,

“… market dominance is not the only reason for the Microsoft browser’s disproportionate share of attacks. Art Manion, Internet security analyst for US-CERT, the operational arm of the National Cyber Security Division at the Department of Homeland Security, says IE’s unique features increase its online vulnerability.” [PC World Magazine online, “Is It Time to Ditch IE?” October 2004)

Anyone who is competent can build a secure website that does not require the use of proprietary, non-standards-compliant software such as Internet Explorer. Standards-compliant (W3C-compliant) browsers abound, and standards-compliant websites can be read and interacted with by users of all popular web browsers, including Internet Explorer.

I urge you to maintain openess at the Copyright Office and eschew the use of unsafe, proprietary, non-standards-compliant software such as Internet Explorer as your benchmark.

Sincerely

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Conspiracy of dunces, part X

Slip-slidin’ into my point. Just hold on…
I ran across the following statement in the comments section of another blog. I’m excerpting it here and removing it from the context of the discussion there for illustrative purposes only.
“Conservative blogs may counter the liberal MSM propaganda machine with facts and reason, but all you’re doing is preaching to the quire [sic].”
Now, this is more than just irritating; it’s an example of a lack of literacy. That’s “choir” not “quire”. quire: “24 uniform sheets of paper; a section of printed leaves in proper sequence after folding; gathering.” “Preaching to the choir” is the equivalent of attempting to convert those who are among the most faithful, the choir, in a church.
It could help “counter the liberal MSM propaganda machine” if the facts and reason presented are literate. Of course, in a society where reading is mostly limited to a different “echo chamber” filled with semi- and sub-literates produced by prisons for kids (AKA “public schools”), a characterization that sometimes fits the blogosphere as easily as it does the “MSM,” literate argumentation may well not be enough.
Now, is the material presented in what the writer above calls the MSM any more literate? No. The self-appointed media elite are almost uniformly subliterate manufactured morons who are unmoored from the history, literature and culture of 2,000+ years of Western Civilization. I say “manufactured morons,” because most of them have some basic native intelligence but are crippled by stupid schooling and a dishonest viewpoint that refuses to address its own preconceptual biases.
Here’s a simple set of filters to apply to any argument:
1.) Is it linguistically sub-literate?
2.) Does it rely on fallacies of reasoning?
3.) Does it ignore or twist history?
4.) Does it ignore or twist contemporary facts?
If any of the above applies, simply pass on by. There is simply too much informed and reasonable argumentation available to waste time arguing with people who refuse to reason. And people who refuse to spend the time and effort to learn how to argue honestly will waste your time daily if you let them.
(Interestingly, “quire” was once also spelled “choir” but “choir”—”a company of singers, esp. an organized group employed in church service”— in the sense of the phrase where “quire” is misused above has never been spelled “quire”.)
Nitpicking? Perhaps, but it illustrates a common problem: people with seriously hampered cultural referents and no desire to reason or argue their case from fact using fair and sensible rhetoric.*
Jeff Goldstein, speaking about the Cindy Sheehan circus, makes much the same point:
“…I long ago realized that these folks have traded in honest evaluation for an ends-justifies-the-means political worldview—one in which emotional talismans like Cindy Sheehan are used (in this case, voluntarily and actively) in lieu of argument to ward off the evils of Bush’s America.”
When scoundrels use dishonest means to affect those whose crippled mental and moral capacities are unable to see through—or seeing through, unable or unwilling to reject—their dishonesty to achieve their ends, what does this say of their ends? (Yes, I am speaking of politicians darned near universally, Mass Media Podpeople, Loony Left Moonbats and their cohorts in crime among such as the ACLU.)
*rhetoric: here used as “the art of making persuasive speeches; oratory; the art of influencing the thought and conduct of an audience.” It’s sad that the art of well-reasoned persuasive speech and writing is no longer thought of as rhetoric, since so many have come to use it to refer to the opposite, instead: overly-emotional bombast. *sigh* Indeed, that now seems to be the preferred definitions in some dictionaries, unlike the two-volume set I grew up with (and still have), in which persuasive, reasoned discourse was the preferred definition. Pejoration of terminology has, in this case at least, followed a pejoration of thought and practice.
(pejoration: depreciation; a lessening in worth, quality; semantic change in a word to a lower, less approved, or less respectable meaning)
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Another one of those quiz thingies

I found this at Soliloquy… one writer’s thoughts. Hmmm… Nancy and I both tested the same on this lil quiz.

Season = Winter
You’re Most Like The Season Winter…You’re often depicted as the cold, distant season. But you’re incredibly intelligent, mature and Independant. You have an air of power around you—and that can sometimes scare people off. You’re complex, and get hurt easily—so you rarely let people in if you can help it. You can be somewhat of a loner, but just as easily you could be the leader of many. You Tend to be negative, and hard to relate to, but you give off a relaxed image despite being insecure—and secretly many people long to be like you, not knowing how deep the Winter season really is.

Well done… You’re the most inspirational of seasons 🙂

?? Which Season Are You ??
brought to you by Quizilla

Interesting. Oh, yeh, I did sub in a different winter pic for the one the lil quiz thingie had. Pop on over to Nancy’s and I think you can see why. Not me at all, at all.

🙂

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Where’s the Beef

Check my sidebar: has John F. Kerry really released his records, yet? I didn’t think so…

Same story, umpteenth verse. Ya hoped it’d get better, but it only got worse.

Are we living in a Loony Tunes world or what? I feel like Pete Puma in “Rabbit’s Kin“. Ya know the schtick: “three or four lumps of sugar?”—”Nah, sugar gives me a headache.” Jean Fraud sKerry’s promised this and promised that and always fails to do as promised—usually by parsing plain English in so tortured a way as to “unpromise” what he’s said he’ll do.

I feel like Pete Puma. Jean Fraud sKerry’s saccharine sourpus gives me a headache. “No! No! I don’t wanna drink the KoolAid!!!”

*sigh*

Just give it up, John. Accept the fact that the legend that you are in your own mind is the legend of a loser. Just let those records go.

See Cao’s Blog for more, including this statement by Cao:

“Some of us still expect our elected officials and representatives to behave like civilized people with a moral compass. In other words, I still expect people to look at me and tell me something that’s the truth and not a lie. Do we as a nation have that strong of a deficit of decency that we’re becoming a nation of liars and it’s acceptable to lie?”

A serious question indeed.

Consider joining these bloggers in the Free Kerry’s 180 Blogburst. See Cao’s Blog for joining in.

Aaron’s cc
And Rightly So!
Atlas Shrugs
Balance Sheet
Cao’s Blog
Cathouse Chat
Christmas Ghost
Civil Issues
Conservative Friends
doubleplusgood infotainment
Doughnut Holes
Euphoric Reality
Flight Pundit
Fundamentally Right
Furry Press
GM’s Corner
Gribbit’s Word
House Of Wheels
i-imagery.com
Infinite Universe
International House of Conservatism
Jackson’s Junction
Jay Howard Smith
Kender’s Musings
Lifetrek
Moonbattery.com
My Vast Rightwing Conspiracy
NIF
PBSWatcher
Pirate’s Cove
Pooklekufr: The Kafir Constitutionalist
Power and Control
Private Radio
Progressive Conservatism
Ravings Of A Mad Tech
Reasoned Audacity
Republican Vet
Right in Philly
Rottweiler Puppy
Shades of Gray
Something…and Half of Something
Stop the ACLU
Tall Glass of Milk
The Babaganoosh
The Creative Conservative
The Dark Citadel
The Paragraph Farmer
The Pulpit Pounder
The Sunnyeside Of Life
Think About It
third world county
TMH’s Bacon Bits
Uncle Jack
Villainous Company
Web-Nuts
What Attitude Problem?
Where’s Your Brain?
Word Park Blog

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Quick (Blog) Flog

Here’s a blog you oughta take a look at: Committees of Correspondence

Well-written, some clear thinking: a good read. Oh, and jump on the bandwagon he’s touting to boost Winds of Change‘s linkage above that of the Huff—ing.ton Pist, eh? (Yeh, I deliberately misspelled it to lessen the chances of a web crawler giving any boostage to the site.) And if you like what you read there, definitely blogroll him, ‘K?
BTW, as often as I’ve mentioned we may need a 21st Century “Tea Party” his blog’s title gave me a real belly laugh. Up the Revolution, man!

🙂

[edited 08/16/05]