Archive for April, 2010
get in your car, everyone’s dying! »
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
I watch the local news. I don’t watch the local news closely. The former is because I don’t have cable, the latter because it’s universally terrible.
Exhibit #328: Piles of dead people on the roads.
There’s an epidemic of drivers and their passengers ending up dead around here. (If fourteen people out of millions is an “epidemic.”) The local news is on the case.
Of course, it’s not that drivers would have been better off not being idiots. Instead, the state needs to interfere to make the roads safe (for idiots to risk their lives on).
Monday’s newscast used a lead-in that amounted to: “What are officials doing to keep you safe?” Here’s the write-up about Sunday’s fatal fender-bender out in nowheresville (which they were alluding to).
Briefly, one sixteen-year-old driver was out two and a half hours past curfew with two more people than permitted. The other was driving with a revoked license. And the roads were wet.
Those jerk officials better get on it. It’s entirely their fault.
Local “journalists” could blame the number of cars on the road or how many trucks, fueling our consumptive needs, share it. Hell, we could blame drivers for being idiots.
Instead, carmakers make cars easier for idiots to drive. They give the illusion of safety and fill their cabins with audio and visual distraction.
Brilliant.
We don’t hold idiots accountable; we provide them tools to increase their idiocy. Local officials did all they could to keep these idiots alive.
Thanks, local news, for really hitting the issue where it counts.
One caveat. This is only one example. I’m sure the other accidents were caused by state-employed men in reflector vests directing teens into oncoming traffic while they sexted.
Note: I realize I’m getting heavy on posts about stupid drivers. If you’re tired of reading such things, get me cable. (Seriously, buy me cable.) Also, I am not counting myself outside of the idiots. In fact, as an idiot driver, I feel it’s my duty to call out my co-idiots on a regular basis.
Photo courtesy Car Insurance Tips Blog
I don’t want to meet Steve Jobs »
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
I’m a Mac convert. Their products are beautiful, somewhat top-of-the-line (at least upper quarter) and expensive. It took me years to buy my MBP and I’m in like with it. Still, Mr. Jobs is a dick.
You can all look back on all the finer points of his large security entourage, his staged conversations with other demigods and that he wears turtlenecks. (Only turtlenecks.)
I don’t need all that. I just need this one answer to a question from the recent OS 4 keynote.
Q: How do you close applications when multitasking?
Scott Forstall (Senior VP): You don’t have to. The user just uses things and doesn’t ever have to worry about it.
The Holy One: It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it.
To elaborate: the OS actually has a task manager (so his developers “blew it”).
“You click, hold the icon and quickly delete. It’s as simple as any other part of the interface. You don’t have to think about it.” This, an answer that promotes the product and doesn’t vaguely paint everyone else as an idiot.
Can you imagine a conversation with He Who Knows? I don’t even use half the hyperbole in a typical month Our Savior lays down in five minutes (and I’ve tried… hard). The Great One’s iPad, a tablet based on years of systematic improvements to the iPhone, is “magical.” Really? (::facepalm::)
I will piss off a dozen Macheads out there but I don’t want to meet I Am. He’s just an IRL Gregory House, a toolbox tolerated for his brilliance. (Which in his case is still debatable.)
That said, if Gregory House ran Apple I’d have bought my MBP a hundred years ago. (See what I did there?)
Note: This was written on the ninth; I totally forgot about it. I’m so good at this. Hope you enjoyed the pointed commentary related to something nearly a month old.
the thing about metered ramps »
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
The idea is sound: when there are too many cars on the road, setting ramp entrances to set intervals maintains the flow of traffic. It decomposes in practice (read: “free” market).
Why? (People are stupid, impatient dolts?)
Most are on their way to Very Important Things in their Very Cool Cars texting in their Very Smart Smart Phone. Someone inevitably prematurely accelerates.
Some Guy smarter than most of your family spent weeks away from his, in front of a humming set of circuits. He calculated when the light should stop blinking yellow and how long between each flash of green.
Then boom! some dim hits the wrong pedal or can’t be bothered to wait. The next person (like Pavlov’s mutt) can’t help but jolt forward when faced with the splash of green.
Too many of these renders the meters useless and proves to Some Guy his life is worthless. Which is a shame, because he seems nice.
Similar happens when a lane closes on a freeway. Some Very Important Douche has to wait until the last fifty feet to merge. More do the same and traffic slows to intermittent stops.
Of course, these law-abiding observations come from someone who recently got another speeding ticket and would rather bus an hour than drive twenty minutes. Take them with a grain of salt.
so many reasons to hate the suburbs »
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
I get it. We were afraid of brown people, looking for cheap housing and lived in our cars. Why not sprawl, right?
Things are different now and we need to call off this failed social experiment. Its detriment far outweighs its benefit.
The same faux-patriots that hate other cultures, crave war and ignore the poor saturate these once-desirable puddles of white that encircle metropolitan areas. They must be stopped.
I read somewhere that if we all lived with the population density of Brooklyn, the entire nation would fit into New Hampshire. The driving between these vastly separate locations has us dependent on nations we label enemies.
Does that make sense?
Whatever, maybe I’m just fuming over the absurd of yesterday…
HOOOOOOOOOONK!!
At first I think the giant beige (fact: color of evil) SUV is upset because I left the trail for the road after it ended. I’d just come through another intersection, though, so SUV had to hold a grudge.
Stopped at the next light, an interchange with a heavy-traffic local highway, SUV rolled down the window.
She’s about sixty but doesn’t look a day under seventy-two. A thick cake of something meant to conceal them accents her abundant wrinkles. Her eyes —
“Get off the road!” (She doesn’t even let me take in her whole horrifying face before screaming at me.)
It’s a road bike. I’m stunned, so it sounds like a question. Which is stupid because it’s obviously a road bike.
“I don’t care if it’s a road bike! Get off the road!!”
Umm.
I couldn’t do anything but laugh as she sped off to her probably-very-important somethingorother. I sighed, clicked in and went on my way.
… But yeah, that’s maybe why I’m so anti-suburb today. I don’t necessarily feel safe on my bike in Uptown, but I know the people there have seen a bike. Some have maybe even taken a drivers’ test in the last decade and had to answer bicycle-safety questions.
Maybe.
Photo courtesy Streetsblog (also: what the — !?)
Kleenex hates the planet »
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010
There’s no other explanation. Sure, profits are probably important but their last unholy product offering cannot be justified by money alone. They simply hate the planet.
Earth, Gia, Heaven, Our Home: whatever you call it, Kleenex is trying to kill it.
Sure, they use virgin growth forest and refuse all attempts to persuade them otherwise. But tiny noses can’t be bothered with carbon dioxide; they’re fragile! (also: aww, babies.)
The (debatable) softness of their tissues aside, this is deplorable.
What the hell?
I have family that worked in one of their plants in Kimberly (hey, that’s part of their name… go figure). I’m not saying a company based on unsustainable production of wasteful items is necessarily bad (yes I am) but there’s a line.
They didn’t cross it:
- … by replacing cloth diapers with tons of disposable ones. Literally, tons of waste is created (50 million diapers tossed/day) but the convenience and sanitation makes sense.
- … by replacing whatever woman used before Kotex… You know what? Never mind that. Thanks.
- … by selling the convenience of disposable facial tissues over handkerchiefs. Painting them as unsanitary was only slightly evil. (Ignoring idiotic practices.)
They did with this pathetic fear-mongering. The ad has a split screen between their towel-rack hanging dispenser and a standard cloth towel. (I’d show it to you if I could find it.)
While hands of varying size and sex grab a single towel calmly on the right, the towel on the left is brutalized (even by the dog?). Numerous despicable acts are thrown at it, just shy of laying raw chicken on it. A simple laundering will cure all (but that’s so hard!).
Kleenex knows there’s a huge market for lazy idiots. Please, dear readers, don’t become a part of it. The idea that your own towels will give you grotesque diseases is horrifyingly inane (unless you’re a lazy idiot).
In a public setting, I don’t care if you waste the wattage to use the air dryer or the paper (using it or your own handkerchief to open the door). That probably comes to an environmental wash but not in your home.
Because you’re not idiots and you’re not lazy. Right?