Note: There’s inappropriate language within. I’m sort of annoyed. This never happens.
The fuck? (A video of Chicago police holding down [assaulting?] a man after he photographed another incident of excessive force.)
Dear cops: We’ve had encounters in varying forms and I know most of you are just “doing your jobs” but this sort of thing is abhorrent (sorry… it means, basically, “shitty”). (more…)
George W. Bush has a book coming out. I’ll let that sink in.
Now, with his decision-making and demeanor, I bet you’re surprised he could legibly write his name. I am too. But computers are glorious machines and maybe he learned how to pay someone to type.
I suggest you read the excerpt highlighted by The Awl. (I’ve been working through my noted items in my reader and finally got to it.)
First, I have to make note of his being baldist. I get that he should fear or loathe Dick Cheney (everyone should) but even for him this sounds hurtful to the hairless:
But he and the bald man had kept in touch. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being bald bothered me. My idea of baldness came from the movies. In the movies, the bald were always trying too hard, like they wanted to make up for their lack of hair. My friend Karl was that way. At any rate, a bald man in my house was not something I looked forward to.
That’s cold, Georgie. Cold. (Granted, I have friends who probably meet my presence with trepidation.)
Second, you’ll note from that little bit and the passage (if you read it), he writes like a prepubescent. Cool narrative style, right?
Unfortunately, (if you read the passage; seriously, did you read it?) this story can’t take place more than seventeen years ago, so he’d be forty-six, at the youngest. That cool narrative turns into a depressing look at his capacities.
(Sigh.)
Generally, it’s a poorly written, glossy portrayal you’d hear in an octogenarian blogger’s memoir about his first Christmas memory. If that story included homoerotic architectural sketching with a weak-hearted, grunting uncle full of booze. (Which, I think you’ll agree, would be awesome.)
This is how he decided to run for the Presidency? Is it that easy? Along those lines, this is a story about his decisions and there aren’t any. What’s the point? (That’s rhetorical.)
If this is any indication of the rest of the book (I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be), it saddens me it was even put to print. That Palin, Beck and Bush can sell so many versions of their ignorance is telling of where our nation is heading.
I’m looking forward to November.
Photo courtesy New York Times
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’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.
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:
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?