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I hear this crap every day, and it’s pissing me off. Automatic transmissions are bad, ABS is bad, TCS is bad. Just quit it already.

First of all, I would consider myself an automotive enthusiast, albeit a light one… I grew up around things with engines on them, and my inner-geek is intrigued by the workings of all systems, not just those with LEDs and screens. I learned to drive in a manual transmission, and I got my license in a manual transmission.

I think everyone should know how to drive a manual, but that’s where it ends for me. Driving an automatic doesn’t make you less of a man – I’m secure enough in my manhood to get from point A to point B without feeling the need to grab some phallic control lever ever few seconds. Most of the people I see saying this crap are wannabe-racers who feel like they’re driving faster if they rev-out, slam the shifter through the gates and then grip the steering wheel as if they’re about to be rounded on the home turn.

I have to wonder about the genitalia-inadequacies of these types of people “I only drive stick-shifts”… the types of dumbshits who jack off into bags of random ferrari parts and disable the ABS on an otherwise okay vehicle. Don’t even get me started on that.

ABS is there for a reason, and even though every pencil-dicked retard will claim they can out-brake ABS for the most part they’re full of shit. You can’t modulate brakes at the same rate those little servos can, and while there’s some truth in the whole “more parts to break” theory, a well maintained ABS system works good in the majority of panic-brake situations.

Where are these people, unfortunately, right? I don’t particularly have a problem with an adult who owns a vehicle in full disabling (partially or fully) torque management systems. There are times when you might want that extra oomph (or to light up a pair of perfectly good tires) and if you’re a responsible adult who wants to inhale a couple hundred bucks in rubber who am I to disagree. Teenagers who don’t know any better, or adults who haven’t finished paying off their vehicles probably don’t want to be subjecting their drive-train to that kind of hurt.

Cars that parallel park themselves are a definite bad idea. I’m not speaking in automotive-luddite terms here either, but the inability to parallel park illustrates a blatant lack of understanding of the mechanics of driving.

While I’m quick to disown the “driving purists” who seem to want us all to go back to wearing aviation goggles while we drive, we must walk a fine line about understanding how to operate a vehicle… regardless of how “appliance-like” they get, because there’s no amount of technology that can make up for the fact that you’re still piloting several hundred pounds of metal projectile down the road.

But no, we’re not all still driving cars with drum brakes, manual-chokes, wood-spoke wheels and open-diffs. Nope, these “automotive-luddites” are perfectly content to use technology when they don’t feel “doing it old school” can help their manliness. Driving a stick-shift is what real men do, one wheel peels aren’t.

… put nude pics on the internet, other people can see them? Oh my god!

That’s what people are basically saying about Facebook these days. I’m not a big Facebook user, but I do have one – and full disclosure, I know someone who’s workin’ for them temporarily, though that hasn’t changed my outlook on the site.

Nope, apparently, there’s a bunch of really smart (HURRRRR) folks out there who have figured out that you should probably avoid using Facebook if you care about your privacy.

Wow – what an earth-shattering revelation. I guess it’s news to these folks, like you should avoid sunbathing if you don’t want suburn, or avoid working in an asbestos mine in 2009 if you don’t want Mesothelioma.

I shudder to think at the magnificent amount of idiocy it takes to think you can go post everything about yourself on the internet (on a “semi-private” site or not) and then be horrified when it shows up elsewhere on the internet.

Or better yet,the skanky girls (and guys) who put naked pictures of themselves on the internet in a locked photobucket, or something like that. They must rationalize it, “oh it’s only in my photobucket” or something. Stop thinking like this right now.

You’re not posting something “on your facebook” you’re posting it on the internet, using facebook. That’s what’s broken here folks, not Facebook’s care (or lack thereof) for your privacy… the expectation of privacy you have when you post your pixelated genitalia on the internet and the shock you have when it shows up “on the internet” is completely and utterly retarded.

Don’t post anything on the internet if you’re not prepared for everyone on the internet to possibly see it.

I’ve grumbled about this before, but I’m going to do it again. Indiana doesn’t allow you to hunt deer with a regular rifle (note well: I could be wrong on this, but I don’t believe I am).

I could get a muzzle loader, but that doesn’t sound like my idea of a good time – Nor is bow-hunting, though I respect how many it makes some folks feel. Nope, where I come from, I didn’t know anyone that didn’t hunt deer with a rifle.

I asked an Indiana native about it, and he said that the preferred method here is sitting in a treestand, waiting for a deer to walk underneath (or within range of a 12ga slug), and then blowing it away. Apparently hunting with a rifle “wasn’t sporting” in this particular guy’s eyes.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t drive around in a motorhome with jars of my own urine and a sniper rifle (I’m Australian but not that Australian) – but how is sitting in a treestand any more sporting?

Apparently if I pick up enough private property for it to be considered “safe” I’m allowed to do whatever the hell I want, I just need to get rich enough for that to be an option.

Yes, I realize the title’s flame-bait and yes, it’s partially in-jest.

One look at any arbitrary list of music I like shows that I’m hardly a connoisseur of fine music, in fact I’d say precious little of the songs I’d rock out to in my underwear in my bedroom mean anything of value to our culture as a whole. Discarding the whole “butterfly effect” thing, the world probably wouldn’t be a terribly different place if Offspring never existed.

But you know what? I’m okay with that. I don’t base my music tastes around the cultural significance of the work, or even around the politics behind them (which pisses off a fair few “all punks should be anarchists” types, believe me!) – no, I can still enjoy some of Goldfinger despite the fact I almost couldn’t disagree more with the lead singer’s stances on “animal rights” (I’m an animal welfarist, not an animal rights supporter – there’s a subtle difference, mostly when it comes to Ted Nugent).

So when having some form of discussion with a friend recently, he wound up showing me his last.fm page. At this point, my knee-jerk reaction was to fire up the common troll: “You gotta be high to listen to Pink Floyd”.

Now I wasn’t intending to berate SouL for his music tastes – everyone likes something different. Where this comment actually stems from is from a history of belligerent Pink Floyd fans (though ‘floyd are by no means unique in this respect – the various subcultures are heinous for this) who basically insinuate that you either like ‘Floyd or you have no taste in music. Personally, I’d rather go down to Tijuana for a back alley colon cleansing than listen to Pink Floyd.

The worst offender was a guy that worked at the tile factory I worked at fresh out of high school. He had a degree in Philosophy, and still wound up slinging around hot chunks of terracotta – in other words, he’s exactly the kind of person to get condescending when it comes to music.

His basic position was that you either liked Pink Floyd, or you were a neanderthal with no culture. The fact that I was too young to experience the educational system pre-”The Wall“, paraphrased from his opinion, basically meant I had no hope of every knowing what a deep and meaningful song could be like.

So that’s why now when I hear someone who says their favorite artist is Pink Floyd, I just can’t help myself.

So we were coming home from Muncie, and we were about a third of the way home when some guy jumps on the brakes at an intersection, in the left hand-turn lane with his left turn signal on. “No problem,” I think. “There’s a passing/right-turn lane!” So I move over after only having slowed down about 10mph.

Next thing I know, this douchebag flips his right turn signal on, and tries to make a right (from a stop in the left turn lane) instead! I hit the skids, and managed to swerve into a gas station at about 30mph, with the front tip of his car narrowly clipping the rear bumper of mine – not enough to cause any damage but enough to polish the plastic and show he’d been there.

So we stop in the gas station, away from the pumps (lucky there was no one at the pumps or I might not have been able to stop in time!) and the guy’s about to drive off. Sabs starts yellin’ at him like “where the hell do you think you’re going?” so he stops and winds down his passenger side window.

The guy is basically acting like it was my fault, that I nearly “blindsided” him and that he’d done nothing wrong. “I changed my flasher,” he said – as if a half second (one blink) of turn signal is enough before you stomp on it. “We didn’t even hit,” is the next piece of trash that spews over his hillbilly jaw.

After I explained that we did, in fact, bump vehicles… he gets out and checks the back of his Durango and goes “Well it doesn’t look like YOU hit me, so I’m leaving.” Presumably he was late for a Pabst drinking contest or a monster truck rally, or it was time-overdue for his girlfriend’s hourly beating.

Lucky, no one in our car was hurt and there was no damage to my vehicle – but I was pretty ticked off at his insistence it was my fault.

I don’t generally have too much patience for idiocy, and the hype surrounding the new movie “Avatar” is getting to be just that. Apparently people are considering suicide because they discover that the moon “Pandora” upon which the movie is set… doesn’t actually exist.

The cultural pull of works of fiction these days just astounds me – it’s not the movies’ faults (even though I’m no fan of James Cameron), it’s the impressionable idiots that go watch them.

But look out, there’s a chance we might just find a world out there just like it. At which point people who feel like it could go live in idyllic tranquility! Huzzah! Yeah, that’s a bit overly-optimistic of human nature. If you’ve ever shown any laziness tendencies, you will not survive on such a world.

Let’s just completely disregard the fact that the fictitious moon is set in the Alpha Centauri system, our closest celestial neighbor (I think? I could be wrong on that) which just happens to be about ~4 lightyears away. That means even if we perfect that pesky little detail of near-light-speed travel, it’ll still take four years to get there. That’s not exactly “look in the phone book for long distance movers, and then start booking flights” kind of distance.

It’s more or less probably never going to happen in any lifetime the majority of us will be remembered in, so it’s a waste of time even pondering it. Even if we could reach out to other hospitable worlds – should we really subject the poor place to our parasitic tendencies? The dream of working hard to live the good life is about the only thing keeping us from devolving into complete anarchy (well that and massive military power) and then we’d never get anything done.

But hey, if that’s enough to make you depressed enough to want to off yourself, I say go for it. Because dog knows we don’t want impressionable idiots like you breeding.

People tend to like it when I rant, so I figured I’d indulge the folks out there with a rant about something pretty bloody important to roughly 50% of the population out there… the penis, or more specifically one very specific portion of it.

When we found ourselves pregnant, my wife and I talked about all different kinds of scenarios and one of them we discussed was if we were to have a boy, would he be circumcised? My wife was pretty well indifferent on the subject, and I was close to, but I leaned in the direction of preferring not to do it.

Why? Well for one thing, it’s not fuckin’ reversible. I figure if our kid grows up and hates his foreskin in the future, or in the (incredibly unlikely, where we live) event he wants to marry an orthodox jewish girl, he can make the decision himself. After all, it’s his dick he can cut it up however he want.

Also, despite what the first hit for google on the subject might tell you, there are almost zero proven health benefits to doing so.

I’m not bitter about it, but here’s a novel aspect of looking at it. Historically, circumcision was often done to curtail masturbation in boys. Essentially it was seen as a way of reducing sexual pleasure to curtail deviancy. There’s another group of people out there who arbitrarily mutilate a kid’s genitals to prevent deviant behavior…

… some tribesfolk do it to young girls, because they think it’ll prevent promiscuity. This is seen as a grossly inhumane practice when backwards folk cut bits off little girls for no good reason, but here in the west it’s done all the time to little boys and most parents put more thought and effort into getting a car insurance quote than they do deciding whether to mutilate their kid’s junk.

I can certainly understand trusting your doctor and taking his word on what’s best and not giving it too much thought, they were only doing what they thought was best for their kids with the information they were given. But some of the crazies out there who vehemently defend their choice are just straight up fuckin’ hilarious – here’s some of the awesome reasons my wife’s heard behind it:

• It protects from STDs. One lady even went so far as to claim, unsourced, that uncircumcised males were 60% more likely to contract “STDs”. Not entirely sure which of the STDs happen to really, really like living under the foreskin, or who came up with the 60% figure, but any idiot that does more than 10 minutes worth of research can see there’s zero accepted evidence for this statement, or any of the other alleged health benefits.
• They’ll get teased at school, or will feel different from other kids. I know how I was raised, and while I’m by no means an expert on parenting I fully intend to do my very best to ensure my kid understand that his penis is supposed to stay in his pants during school hours. He shouldn’t be showing his off, and he certainly shouldn’t go out of his way to look at other kids’ equipment.

  Since people on this subject like to make unsubstantiated claims, I’ll throw one out too: based on my limited experiences, communal showering after PE is one of the leading causes of mental trauma amongst pubescent boys. Boys who can shower after PE without having to look at each others goods are, in my uneducated opinion, going to grow up healthier. Aren’t unsourced claims awesome?

• Dad and boy should have matching equipment, so boy  doesn’t grow up self-conscious. What the fuck? When your kid is old enough to compare, that’s when it’s time to stop being naked around your kid. Even if you decide that cutting bits of skin off your kid’s most sensitive areas without his say-so isn’t abuse, surely showing your junk off to a kid old enough to comprehend what it is would be!

So think about that for a second, think that for any reason behind male-circumcision you can come up with, tribes-people can make the same case for allowing female-circumcision, a practice which in the west is almost universally abhorred. The practice is no more or less barbaric because of the gender it’s being done to.

I really do – I have been faithful to AT&T for the longest time – in fact if you add up the concurrent times we’ve been AT&T customers, they’ve more or less gotten well over a decade of service out of us. I became pretty good friends with one of the higher level techs after helping to track down a nasty routing issue, but I don’t particularly want to bug him with the lame, inane bullshit that goes wrong.

… but unfortunately it’s been happening a lot. Even as I write this, our internet’s failing and causing Wordpress to hang up. Their PPPoE server is routinely kicking us off, again, and I’m sure when I call them up to bitch about it tomorrow they’ll insist I go through the “reboot router and call back” crap they made me do the last time this happened.

I even overlooked the fact that they yanked my Yahoo! Photos pro, then offered 3 months Flickr Pro… then decided that was too insulting, and gave us all permanent Flickr Pro – only to remove that a while later (Yahoo! insists it’s AT&T’s fault, AT&T passes the buck right back).

I was reading about how due to the success of the iPhone and iPhone 3Gs, AT&T’s network is overpopulated in a few cities and they’re trying to “incentivize” (their word, apparently) users to not burn up so much bandwidth. As another blog so eloquently puts it, they’re penalizing people for liking the product.

It’s like all their half-sane executives are down chilling in puerto morelos hotels hitting on college students that got lost during spring break. I wish they’d start looking after their customers instead of just concentrating on their bottom lines.

I – someone who’s kneejerk reaction when we needed broadband was just to call AT&T – actually called Comcast today. And Insight. And what really sucks even more than our crappy ADSL is that neither of those companies service this town.

The laziness of comment spammers is really starting to piss me off – I’m sure most of us are guilty at spamming every once in a while, under the most liberal of definitions of “spam”. Why, a while back I went through and found every single blog post I could find that mentioned Mumble and drummed up awareness for the up and coming 1.2.0 version – because it addressed most of the complaints people were griping about.

Was I necro-posting? Absolutely. Was it maybe spam? Sure, you could see it that way. But at least I made an effort to be on-topic about it and posted something remotely relevant.

However – and god bless akismet – I’ve been bombarded with just complete and utter crap. If you leave an on-topic comment I’ll probably leave your link up regardless of how garbage your site is (because mine’s not the greatest) – but when you write a comment that’s littered with a bunch of different names for slimming pills and your comment says something like “this is very interesting to me and I have bookmarked your site and will become a regular reader” on quite possibly the most boring post on my site… no it’s pretty obvious all you want is the link.

… and you can’t have it.

You know what I hate?

It’s this game, that some cops do. Not all of them, I fully acknowledge there’s plenty of good cops out there who just want to keep their community safe… but there are some people out there who are complete and utter douchebags and seem to think it’s okay because they put on a uniform every morning.

The game I speak of is where the cop says something untrue, and expects you to agree with them just because they’re a cop. You’re sitting in your car in a parking space snacking down on a donut, and the cop knocks on your window with his night-stick. He asks if you just came out of that store over there that sells weight loss products, to which you reply no. “Yes you did, I saw you” is what he says.

How many of us have been there?

The cop will basically get away with calling you a liar, often repeatedly. They make leaps of judgment, using their authority as a pry-bar trying to get you to crack – to make up for them not actually having to do any real police work.

They do this with impunity, because “cops are always honest” despite the fact we’ve seen evidence to the contrary many, many times before. You want to show him the box of donuts you’re half way through killing, and ask why you would possibly have been in said weight loss store… you want to ask where he learned the skills required to be a detective… you want to tell him to piss off and stop calling you a liar…

But what you end up doing is finding the meekest way to get out of the situation you can, in the hopes he doesn’t make your life worse in some way – because even the most honest citizen is always doing something wrong, and everyone has a fear of authority when they’re put on the spot.