• just tore-ass down Memory Lane in a souped-up Fuckyoumobile #
• Was standing right next to Guy Mezger and didn't even recognize him. Also, apparently nobody else here at the M-1 event likes ties either. #
• …except Ian Freeman who just walked by. #
• So Ian just pulled Mark Kerr aside to get an autograph (for a friend). Kerr's a huge dude but I pictured him being bigger. #
• Oh hell, if I'd known I was going to be on live international TV tonight I would have shaved the beard. #
• @Bullshido sitting here ringside at M-1. Fedor and Mousasi are about to do their exhibition fight. #
• @Bullshido. Mousasi is wearing a red belt and fedor is wearing a blue belt. Huh? #
• @FightLaunch in general or at M-1 last night? KC's scene has been going strong since the blackout days in the 90's. Good fighters here! in reply to FightLaunch #
• Judging in Topeka. Figures that someone would schedule a boxing event on the night of the UFC. Wonder if I can get a p-b-p on my phone… #

• Taking my daughter to see Inglorious Basterds. Good family fun. #

It is incredibly difficult to sit down and compose a coherent post on little more than half a cup of coffee and sheer willpower. And the latter seems to be much more effective than the former.

“Social justice” is a phrase that I’ve seen popping up a lot in the past few days, usually related to left/liberalism and especially within the context of health care. Come to think of it, the guy in my last blog post used the phrase as a part of his denunciation of liberal politics.

So whenever I see a trend like that, whether it’s a genuine emerging phenomenon or just a random fractal blip on the cultural canvas, I do what I can to get my head around it. I mean, it’s not like as grownups we get a vocabulary hand-out to study every week for the test on Friday.

The problem with the term “Social Justice” is that the concept of “Justice” is mostly subjective. And given that the term originates from Liberalism (which is generally anything but, these days), anything with the word “Social” appended to it in that context tends to mean “Government-run and supported by heavy taxation” in my experience.

So if I were to draw a picture of “Social Justice” as espoused by those most likely to use the term, it would probably involve Robin Hood in a cheap suit sodomizing an entrepreneur through his back pocket in a public square in front of a crowd of hippies, celebrities, and slackers. He’d have a briefcase in one hand, and his other would be a fist triumphantly raised in the air.

But being as it’s still early in the morning I’m not even going to pretend I’d attempt to construct an actual image for this. Anyway, feel free to let me know if my picture of “Social Justice” is incorrect.

Oozies This comes from Chicago Gun Rights Examiner, Don Gwinn, via a blog entitled The Breda Fallacy.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) – The crime curbing effort has collected over 1,600 guns over the past 2 years and city leaders said this is another successful year.

Mayor Byron Brown said, “We will get anything from long guns rifles, AK-47’s, oozies, so we have gotten those assault weapons.”

And all those weapons are good for a pre-paid credit card, with assault weapons collecting 100 bucks.

I’m not even going to deal with the ridiculous notion of how law-abiding citizens turning in legally owned firearms somehow curbs crime, or the idiocy of the term “buyback” given how the guns never belonged to the government in the first place. But really? Are you that goddamn ignorant that you think “Oozie” is perhaps a slang term for a type of firearm, or worse, the actual spelling of one?

It took me three seconds to do a Google search on the word “Oozie”, and two of those were spent sipping luke-warm coffee. The first 4 results included an Urban Dictionary definition of a Burmese elephant rider and a jazz club or something. Right below those, Google helpfully asks “Did you mean UZI?“.

There’s no excuse for this level of ignorance and lack of fact-checking if you consider yourself a journalist, or even an intern hoping to become a journalist. But it’s symptomatic of the same ignorance when it comes to firearms reporting, and why there’s such a decidedly hostile slant against the amendment that bumps up right next to the one that allows journalism to exist in the first place.

From now on I’m going to refer to journalists who incorrectly report on firearms issues as “Oozies”.

• Best coffee in KC is at The Big Biscuit in Independence. If only they had wifi… #

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I had a brief conversation with someone today over IM that went like this:

Phrost: is it trolling if you mostly agree with what you’re posting, but just dial it up 10 notches?
Person: i’d call it quasi-trolling
Phrost: we need to invent a word for it
Phrost: Ogreing?

I’ve take a bit of time today, in between other things I’m working on, to engage in a few “conversations” of this nature over Facebook. I pretty much meant everything I said, but expressed it in a manner that undoubtedly came off as if I’d downed a pot of coffee and had a swarm of bees up my ass. Or in other words, like I just got back from the gym, which was the case.

But for the most part, the tone of the posts was a little test in an ongoing experiment I’m conducting over Facebook, to pressure test my own network. The worst that can happen is that I lose a friend or two, which in itself isn’t so bad because if anyone I know doesn’t have the character to stand up to “lively” discourse, they’re better off not reading my status updates anyway.

You see, as I posted previously, the “Social Drift” of Facebook both concerns and intrigues me. One possible method of combating this, I believe, is such pressure testing, or rather, “ideological sparring”. Going full contact with your views is definitely not the best way to keep “friends”, but as far as I’m concerned it is the best way of separating the wheat from the chaff on your friends list.

Just be careful you don’t say something you genuinely don’t mean; that’d be trolling.

• @Halfrican83 paleo diet; lay off the mac and cheese in reply to Halfrican83 #
• Internet's out at the house. Headed to the only place closeby with decent wifi. Trade-off is being surrounded by senior citizens and kids. #

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I generally consider myself to be a fairly easy-going guy. I’m about as high-strung as an unsprung bungee cord; rated to handle even the heaviest loads without snapping. And in my line of “work” this is undoubtedly an excellent trait to posses. Sometimes though, I do get into situations where the load rating is beyond the manufacturer’s recommended guidelines.

I paid a shitty latte’s worth of rent on a booth with an outlet nearby at a local chain coffee shop. The wifi here sucks more than a roomba programmed by Cyberdine, with the latte itself running a close second. Still, I figure, it’s a fair trade for the illusion of ambiance and a clear head to crank out some words. Too bad that wasn’t to be.

Shortly after setting up shop and getting my fingers primed to tap out English, a couple of evangelical christians in their late teens/early 20’s decide to take up residence a couple of tables away and have an obnoxiously, deliberately loud conversation about Jesus, the supernatural, prayer, and related subjects.

Whatever, I think. I’m easy like Sunday morning and I support free speech even more than I do the other 9 amendments in the Bill of Rights (especially the one about not having to let soldiers crash at my house, which I know would fucking suck having been one myself; nasty bastards).

So music is my anti-christ, and I queue up a playlist of Dethklok songs, to drown the twits out so I can think. Yes, death metal (or even a tongue-in-cheek tribute to it) is less distracting than the babble of people infected with the jesus meme.

Unfortunately, the black noise isn’t enough to overpower the bulk of those turkeys’ gobbling. Fortunately, a glare or two over my shoulder in their direction and they relocated a few tables away. All’s good in the hood, as they say (and by “they” I don’t mean anyone in particular you goddamn racist).

The ironic thing about this is that even Christ didn’t want his followers making a big public show of their religion. Matthew 6:6 reads: But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (King James Version)

Whatever. While enduring all of this and trying to make some headway on the book, I had to deal with the additional aggravation of the shop’s wifi signal going in and out on me. To me, this was worse than the knucklehead christicans, as I at least had the option of sacrificing my hearing to drown those bastards out. But every time the connection would drop, not only could I not save what written (since I’m using Google Docs) and research the odd factoid, but the damn music I was streaming would cut out. So I’d go from thundering guitars and cookie-monster vocals* (about coffee, oddly enough), to “…well what Jesus really wanted was for true Justice!“. It was like I was a battlefield detainee and Andy Kauffman’s zombie had been hired by a Gitmo interrogation squad to DJ directly into my head so I’d admit I once picked up a hitch-hiking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the way to the gym.

When the coffee ran out I decided to pack it in and head home. (I’ve actually been finishing this up from my living room, since the “ironic thing” paragraph.) Now as an avowed “Dick”, I was obligated to say something, to someone. My first inclination was obviously towards the Hitler Youth Twins, to make some kind of snarky request that would call their attention to the obnoxious volume of their conversation. But when I thought about it, that was unnecessary. I’d already glared at them, they’d moved a few tables over, and it most likely wasn’t their fault they were unable to overcome being groomed from birth as douchebags. I guess I could have insulted their parents, but I don’t think that even Harlan Ellison could have come up with an appropriately brief rebuke in that situation that would have, at the very least, still maintained some sort of dignity on his part.

Besides, I wouldn’t have gotten through to them anyway and more than likely would have just made the employees there uncomfortable. Seeing as I’m often at that coffee shop to burn a cigar and watch the sunset, and that I enjoy my coffee without extra helpings of counter grime and roach parts, the logical and productive choice was to bring up the shitty wifi connection instead. Which I did, only to find out that they’ve got fucking bandwidth filters that choke streaming content because of assholes coming in to play online games.

As I sit here wrapping this up, I genuinely don’t regret not** saying something to the Vienna Sausage Choir. But I do regret paying for that shitty latte.

*Credit: Brian Posehn
**Double negative, I know. Deal with it.

• Sitting at the Power and Light watching the goober parents walk by w/their goober kids on the way to see the Jonas Bros. #

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