fwaggle.org

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.

So my mother in law was havin’ mystery chest pains the other night, so she had to go to the hospital. They checked her out and it wasn’t a heart attack or anything like that, so she had to stay overnight for observation. We were in a hospital way too far away, and my wife wasn’t about to leave her mom, so we stayed over.

Luckily, the new bits of Ball Memorial Hospital are sweet. There was a sofa bed (that we didn’t realize converted until it was too late) and everything was just far more comfortable than it could have been (I think the nurses are probably trained to kick people out when they come in dragging a bunch of Samsonite luggage and having a toothbrush in their mouth though). The best part is the Wi-Fi, which meant as far as work goes it wasn’t a complete loss, I got to squeeze some in.

The downside? I went to pay some of our bills, and Paypal thought our account was hacked and locked it all up. They even took the liberty of filing disputes on our behalf to two of our datacenters. Great!

Don’t get me wrong, if someone logs into my Paypal account from a strange IP address and starts buying shit, I’d truly appreciate this countermeasure. But don’t you think that maybe, just maybe… Paypal should disregard it if you’re going on there to pay companies that you’ve already paid? Every month, we send the same amounts to the same companies around the same time of the month.

Thanks a lot, Mr Paypal hacker, for paying all our bills for us with our money! You saved me so much trouble! Luckily, after making my way through the level 1 Indian call center, the disputes department lady was very helpful and restored everything very quickly.

Seriously, every time I go there (you’d think I’d learn) I come away disappointed. Yesterday we were out shopping, and my mother in law had to pick up a prescription and it was taking a while because the pharmacist is a sister-slamming redneck, and I had a leftover gift card from Starbucks’ that my wife won in a contest.

So we go over there and I order some stupid mocha capresso venti crappacino like I always do. It tastes more sugary than usual, and as usual it’s gone in about 60 seconds. I paid (well, I didn’t, the contest runners did) nearly five bucks for something I could have made at home.

I think after we run out of gift cards I probably won’t bother going back.

Continuing my train of thought from my previous article, but off on a tangent as usual:

This is just my personal opinion, and some might disagree… but RVs are for road-trips, extended stays away from home while you visit far off lands… not camping. Camping is supposed to be roughing it, just you and the elements. If your campground allows open fires, bringing a coleman stove isn’t even canon, you need to cook in a heavy skillet over an open fire, damn it.

“RV camping” is basically almost the same as “hotel camping” – it’s not really camping. You’re away from home enjoying stuff, but I just don’t consider it camping.

It’s no secret to most people attempting to keep up with search engine optimization that Google and other search engines only really score you well if you’re linked from relevant websites. The downside to this is that spam comments looking for a home tend to gravitate to relevant posts instead.

I can understand, because of it’s powerful search engine, that when you post on Twitter about a certain subject you’re bombarded with spam tweet responses. But how the heck are people doing it with blogs?

Google’s Blog Search looks practically useless for that purpose, because almost none of the articles that are spam magnets on my site appear in those searches. I posted an entry called “Updated WordPress Plugins: Profit” and I was immediately inundated with spam comments about profit and banking.

I post something about feeling overweight and unhealthy and Akismet’s beating away comments about the current best diet pills with a heavy baseball bat.

It seems to take less than 24 hours for them to start pouring in too – so I’m left wondering exactly how the heck they’re accomplishing it.

I read a post a while back about the town I live in, which basically said that everyone here were ratty people and even though you have to drive through it if you’re heading along SR-18, there’s no reason you have to stop.

It made me laugh, because this place is pretty back-woods. At least it’s not one of about four cities who won’t stop arguing over who’s the Meth capital of Indiana – I have no idea why you’d want to lay claim to this title, unless the government funding for police is based off how likely someone is to call the police when I buy 5 gallons of anti-freeze, some stove gas, and a couple bottles of sudafed… because apparently changing coolant in your vehicle before going camping while you have a headcold is a crime.

At least it’s not Marion, IN… if we’d bought a house there I might very well have hung myself in it – it’s more or less everything I hated about Sacramento, and you have shitty weather.

I have nothing against the majority of the people who live here, but there are a few of them that piss me off. The trailer-park-without wheels across the street is a pretty good example – whose idea of outdoor furniture is the front seats torn out of a car that rusted in two.

Then there’s the fact that most of them seem to think there’s nothing more to life than procreation. I’m not going to insist that everyone wait until they’re married, but can we at the very least wait until you graduate high school? Your genitalia will still be there.

Perhaps it’s because of the wealth of government assistance you receive when you have a kid and no job – because I do so love standing in line behind you while the clerk has to figure out what you can and what you can’t buy on your food stamps card, while I’m staring blankly at your ugly three month old kid who’s in the bottom of a shopping cart wedged between two slabs of Aquafina and a bag of ice.

Yeah, I love that.