I’m going to take a stab at putting something on here every day. Honestly, I probably won’t follow through on this because I’ll find myself straining to have an opinion on extremely trivial and mundane bullshit.

Kind of like Classmates.com.

After oh, let’s say 5 years of being pestered by these bastards I finally decided to sign up for the minimal subscription to view the people who’d signed my profile or some such. Whee. I could have spent that $15 on all kinds of things that would have provided more gratification; like a dozen boxes of thumbtacks to roll around naked on. Yeah, I ended a sentence with a preposition, what.

TL;DR version: 4 of the 8 people who’d “signed” my profile page had absolutely no connection to me whatsoever. These people I assume are plants by Classmates.com that trigger the “Hey hey hey! You’ve got people who want to talk to YOU YOU YOU” type emails that have been spamming my inbox over the years. That might sound all “tinfoil-hat conspiracy-ish” to you, but having worked for two different Social Networking companies I have enough first-hand knowledge to know better.

As far as the other 4 go, 3 of which were people I had barely known and one was an Army buddy I still keep in touch with every so often. So Classmates.com was batting .150 for people I gave a shit about.

I did have an email from a girl (well, woman now I guess) who I vaguely remember running against for 8th grade student council president. We both lost, to the cute girl who promised in her campaign speech to get rid of detention hall and secure the lunchroom borders. Or something. What’s funny is that we actually had a back-room conference with the principal after her victory to confer about her unethical promises and pandering*. I really had no objections since I ran on a platform of “I get to stand up in front of the school and be a jackass for 5 minutes for my own personal amusement”.

Anyway…

So yeah, I certainly didn’t get my $15 worth out of Classmates.com. And to top it off, I was spammed with more goddamn offers for crap I didn’t need as a part of the sign-up process. What the hell? I was already giving you guys my fucking money, and you felt the need to try and squeeze more out of me?

Were I Gene Siskel I’d give Classmates.com one big, desiccated middle finger up for being a waste of bandwidth and the single biggest disappointment as far as Social Networking sites go. Hell, it’s the granddaddy of them all and had the potential to be what Facebook is today. Instead, it’s a festering pit of pop-ups, spam, and things we should leave behind.

*She’s probably working for Karl Rove now although I can’t be bothered to log back in to that site and find out.

Really, not joking.

I have 42 unread private messages on Bullshido. Just figured I’d share that.

Why didn’t the bad guys just shoot Robocop in the mouth?

For the record: I do not support violence against police officers, or robots. I did however, recently read (more like “listened to the audiobook while commuting”) “How to Survive a Robot Uprising“. But I’m pretty sure by the time the robots start coming for us, most of the information in there (such as using their limited sensory equipment against them to avoid getting robowned), won’t do much good.

We do seem to be slipping down that slope, on the inner tube of technology, pretty damn fast. That’s why I’m making this blog post now so when the robot hive-mind sifts through Archive.org in the year 2037, they’ll see me as a loyal supporter and spare me the coming holocaust while my neighbors get turned into fuel.

Never hurts to think about the future.

Ever since W.J. McBride’s closed there hasn’t been a shepherd’s pie in this town worth a damn thing. I’ve been trying to find an “Irish pub” here that served a decent plate of it and as of last night I’m 0 for 2.

I’ve got things to do so I’m not going to elaborate very much, but what kind of freaking Irish place serves risotto?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great looking Irish pub, and the band was playing “Whiskey in the Jar” and such, and our bartender was cool. But my wife’s fish and chips came in a metal vase/basket, and the “pie” was basically a round “cake” of ground beef under a matching hockey-puck of what tasted like instant potatoes, all resting in a puddle of some kind of sauce.

Shepherd’s Pie is one of those meals that’s supposed to stick to your ribs, put hair on your chest, and make you gain 10lbs before it even gets to your table. This version, however, was more like something served by a French chef whose Irish boss is banging his wife. It’s almost as if the chef resents having it on the menu to such a degree that he felt the need to create a hostile parody of the dish in the same way that Satanists parody the Catholic church with their Black Mass.

I don’t consider myself to be a restaurant critic, and frankly don’t care for hoity-toity food-as-art. I’m still pissed about the $300 bill from Picasso’s in Vegas for some goddamn pigeon and a thimble of rice. But the appeal of Irish cuisine is that it’s basically celtic comfort food. And this dish was about as comfortable as a Jewish family at a Farrakhan rally.

Is there any “Irish” place in KC that can get it right?

The video’s a bit (a lot) too “generic preachy suburbanite white indignation” for my tastes, but the song is awesome. Maybe it says something about me that when I first heard it, I took it more as a message of empowerment than, as the video seems to imply, the fact that some people seem to have too much power. But screw it, if I listened to music on the terms of the artist I’d have very little left to actually enjoy.

Although Kanye West is still a simpering douchebag.

Anyway, here’s the song: “No Handlebars” by Flobots.

I actually started writing this several weeks ago, and am only now wrapping it up; partially in order to ensure it doesn’t just sit here unfinished, partially because I haven’t posted anything in a while.

When making an argument for something that seems either novel or extreme, it always helps to use the words of people better than yourself. So I’m going to quote Robert Heinlein:

Those who cling to the untrue doctrine that violence never settles anything would be advised to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

That’s a great quote, and I’m using it because it’s on the top of my head, not that it’s specifically relevant to this post.

What I’d like to attack (yes, the word choice is intentional) here is the notion that the concept of violence is so completely abhorrent that it should be discussed in the same tones and with the same palpable unease as accompanies discussions of minority issues by well-meaning but guilt-ridden members of the majority ethnic group in this country.

The reason this notion is idiotic is simple: life itself is violent. Violence is not only a necessary part of life, but a fundamental part of it. The act of eating, including not only the sourcing of the foodstuffs that reach your plate, but the act itself, is predicated on violence. Just chewing your food is a violent act by the dictionary definition. The house you live in was created by violence. Trees were murdered and habitats destroyed so you could park your doughy ass in front of a TV without getting rained on. Virtually the only thing you can do to avoid participating in this chain of violence is to somehow will yourself into nonexistence. And even that act, were it possible, could be considered violent.

It’s not that violence should be considered good for its own sake. Frankly there is nothing that could be considered good for its own sake. Ideas, concepts, and philosophies, are good or bad because of the effects they produce, not on their own merits. In fact, without the effects caused by putting these ideas/concepts/philosophies into action, there is no merit in the first place; just the suggestion of merit, something equally ephemeral. (Tangentially, this is why Communism is not a “good thing”.) This kind of defective thinking forms the root for many problems I’ve noticed, but applies specifically to the concept of violence.

For example, when someone is shot with a firearm, there is always at least a flicker of the suggestion that firearms should be banned. Why? Because the firearm called seductively to the assailant to caress its trigger while the barrel was pointed at a potential victim? Obviously, no. People take actions that have effects. The causes of these actions are ideas (often half-baked, ill-reasoned, or downright maniacal), but ideas do not take the physical form of action without a person to carry them out. Neither should the actions, and the tools used to accomplish them, be put on the same chopping block of judgment. Tools, like ideas, exist without merit or judgment until human intention is applied to them.

It could and will be argued that simply by being available, certain tools designed to inflict violence (for good or ill) increase the likelihood of misuse. But this still doesn’t address the true problem which is the intent behind their misuse, and reflects a sense of moral laziness or lack of fortitude required to address the illness instead of its symptoms.

Violence is not always necessary. Ghandi’s march to the ocean for salt is an example of this. However, the weak-minded (or hearted) pacifist will take examples like this and use them to justify wholesale abdication of violence. And this is just as asinine as a mechanic who in a pinch, had to use a wrench in lieu of a hammer, deciding to forgo the use of hammers entirely.

A: “Hey, what’s going on?”
B: “Not much; it’s Monday”
A: “Great.”

Is it just me, or does everyone else have a mental pull-down menu of responses for nonversations like this?

I just realize I need to refresh this list a bit. People at my job are probably just as tired of my quasi-sincere “..it’s Monday” or “…it’s Friday” shtick as I am of uttering it.

As a society, and people who work in a busy corporate environment especially, we should simply adopt a “Nod and Grunt” policy which should save about 180 seconds out of every day. It’d be much more efficient to nod and/or grunt at someone to acknowledge their presence than to mumble inane crap.

From LegoRobotComics

Protip: If you forgot to bring your cup to jiujitsu, don’t play half guard.

Your future children will appreciate it.