Really??!! A Jaguar SUV??!!
Even more disgusting is that it’s labeled as some variation on the F-type model.
I remember the introduction of the F-type sedans & convertibles a couple of years ago. Those are HOT cars!
But this? On overpriced, middle-class Mom-mobile with a stolen valor badge!
Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Moral Outrage
Pro tip for those of you used to being abusive assholes on the Internet because you think you can do so more or less anonymously – Reality is Real.
If you’re going to be driving like a lunatic and then flipping people off and screaming at them while you’re driving a company vehicle with the phone number is foot-tall letters on the sides and back – don’t be surprised if someone calls that number and lets your boss know that they have a psychotic moron representing their company in public. (This could be career-limiting.)
If you’re going to insult and verbally abuse people in the parking garage at work, you might want to think twice about it if you’re putting your car into a reserved parking space with your name and the name of your company on the “Reserved – No Parking” sign. (See above.) While having the reserved parking space might indicate that you’re the boss and no one’s going to tattle on you, it’s an excellent way to get a poor reputation in the building, and you might someday want to do business with or get a favor from some of those other companies. If their first thought when your name is mentioned is, “Why would I want to even talk to that asshole?” this could be career-limiting even if you own the company.
Finally, if you’re going to insult and abuse people in the parking garage and then park in your reserved parking space, you might consider that the people you’re insulting and abusing now know which car is yours and where it’s parked. You do the math.
Doesn’t it just suck having to be accountable for your actions?
Filed under Freakin' Idiots!
Because I’m obviously not busy enough, I’ve now got a second website.
It’s Paulietics.com.
If you read my Twitter feed or know me on Facebook, you’ll know that I’m pretty passionate about the current political situation in the United States.
For many months, as we’ve gotten deeper and deeper into our current quagmire, I’ve wanted to write on those topics. And I have, in small chunks, on Twitter and Facebook and so on.
But I’ve hesitated to put that on this site. This has always been my “fun” site. Okay, a few times I’ve gone off on rants when I’ve been really pissed off by something especially stupid in our society or culture, but at least 98%+ has been pictures, stories, travel, space stuff, NASA Socials, astronomy, personal stuff, and so on.
I didn’t want that to change here.
It occurred to me back around Thanksgiving that there was a somewhat straightforward solution. It just so happened that my sister-in-law was visiting and she made the pun that’s the site’s name, I checked and there were variants that were available, so here we are.
If you like what I write and how and would like to take a peek, I would appreciate it if you would do so. If you like what you see there and could spread the word (and about this site as well, of course) I would appreciate that a ton as well.
I’ll warn you, that will be a sweary site. Again, for the most part, I try to keep this site more or less PG-13. Give the situation and the topic, I don’t even think I’m even going to try over there.
Come and join the discussion there! Subscribe! Proselytize!
Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Moral Outrage, Politics
Nothing here that’s nearly as high or as low as today’s political news – probably why I’m reduced to trivial babbling.
Having said that, I’m finding that I’m getting a certain satisfaction from blocking EVERY SINGLE ADVERTISER that has an ad stuck into my Twitter feed on my iPhone app. I didn’t expect that.
When Twitter, in their infinite stupidity and short-sightedness, started dropping ads every 8th tweet, I was at first seriously pissed off. For a day or two I started deleting all of them out of spite, but it just made it tedious to scroll through my feed.
Then I switched to a different Twitter client, which was okay for a couple of weeks. There was a little bit of a learning curve, but I was fine after a few days. Then I discovered that there were all sorts of bad and weird things happening to the file structure in my iPhone picture roll whenever I saved an image or something off of that client app’s feed. Back to square one.
I initially went back to the official Twitter iOS app just to confirm that it would fix the file structure problem. (It did.) So for a month or so I just trained myself to just look past every single ad, and it worked to a certain extent.
Maybe I needed something to act like a never-ending game of Whack-A-Mole, if for no other reason than to vent some frustrations. I guess I could have gone and played a bit of “Doom,” but this way I also got to see my Twitter feed and get my news, so it’s a bit like multitasking.
Now I find that it’s just a reflex. The ads pop up like tin signs in a real-world obstacle course or live-fire shooting exercise, and I pick them off and send them to their doom. It’s not enough to delete them – I hit the down-arrow icon to bring up the options and there’s the one to block that advertiser. Not only will I never see that ad again (assuming that Twitter isn’t lying to me, which is quite possible) but I will never see ANY tweets from that advertiser or Twitter account again.
Granted, the advertisers have ways around this. One of the last straws in the last week of December that pushed me over the edge into a “salted Earth” strategy toward Twitter ads was a series of hundreds and hundreds of ads from some conglomeration of accounts held by NBC/Universal. They were trying to motivate me about a potential blackout on my cable service if the big, bad, greedy cable company couldn’t come to a deal with the bigger, badder, greedier television company. Kill the ads from @MSNBC and you get one from @Bravo. Kill that and get one from @Oxygen. Kill that and get one from @Cloo. Then @SciFiChannel. Then @E!. Then @USANetwork. Ad infinitum.
The only thing that would make blocking these accounts better would be if the advertisers got feedback on how many people like myself chose to mute or block their account. Wouldn’t that be great? Some marketing VP (who’s never had a “real” job in their life) spends a million dollars to bitch at twenty million Twitter users so they’ll feel sympathy for THEIR greed and hatred toward THE OTHER GUY’s greed and hatred. Then he gets some analytic report that shows that 1,000,000 Twitter ads were delivered and 999,982 of them were immediately blocked without being read.
That would make me smile. I’m doing my part!
Filed under Computers, Freakin' Idiots!
What do they call someone who jaywalks at night in Los Angeles wearing dark clothes without even bothering to pretend to look to see if there’s traffic coming?
AN ORGAN DONOR!
If you are in the area and were waiting for a kidney, heart, spleen, or other vital organ, I apologize for being fast enough on the brakes to not have spread that particular freakin’ idiot all over the center lane of Ventura Boulevard. (If you were waiting for a brain, don’t worry, this guy didn’t have two brain cells to rub together.) I further apologize for inadvertently and unintentionally blocking traffic behind me so that they couldn’t run him over while they were changing lanes to both sides and shooting past me at about 50 mph.
Maybe next time.
Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Los Angeles
Let it be stated from the beginning that I feel bad for the driver and people in the Escalade and I’m very glad that it looked like no one was injured.
Driving out to the hangar in Camarillo today, we weren’t in “stop and go” traffic. It was more like a hyperactive variant, something like “skid to a halt and peel out.”
Where your typical “stop and go” traffic has you stopping for several seconds to a minute or so, then speeding up to maybe a crawl or just above for a couple hundred feet (at best) before slowly stopping again, we were in a cycle of suddenly slamming on the brakes for no apparent reason, waiting a few seconds, then accelerating back up to “maximum freeway speed” for a mile or two, only to slam on the brakes again.
After the first time this happened, I had put a couple of extra car lengths between myself and the car in front of me. This helped a lot when it happened the second time, but I was quite alarmed to see the person driving behind me not only tailgating, but texting while driving. When we hit the brakes the second time, I was quite sure that the texting asshole in the little blue sports car was going to spread me all over the road.
Somehow he didn’t, missing me by about the amount of the layer of dirt that I had removed going through the car wash last week. Since I had no desire to be anywhere near this clown, when traffic sped up again, I took my sweet time about it and left a HUGE gap between me and the SUV in front of me. Predictably, the little blue clown car took the first opportunity to cut around me on the right (we were in the fast lane) and then cut back in front of me closely enough to make me brake in order to avoid getting clipped by him.
Of course, just as he went past me back into the fast lane, traffic shut down again and he skidded to a halt behind the SUV, barely stopping. And apparently still texting, doing everything possible except driving his car with any sort of sanity or responsibility.
We all took off again and when the brakes lights all suddenly came on again – his didn’t.
Luckily we had only sped up to about 35 or 40 and he was tailgating closely enough so that when the Escalade started breaking, it didn’t have much time to slow down before he smashed into the back of it. Their relative velocity was low enough so it didn’t even look like any of the air bags had deployed.
As I was stopping behind them (and wondering if I was now stuck with the lane ahead of me blocked) they both swung over onto the center divider, leaving me clear to go. Which I did.
As I said, I feel bad for the driver and people in the Escalade and I’m very glad that it looked like no one was injured. As for the texting clown in the little blue sports car, well, Karma’s a bitch.
As I crawled past through the glass from the busted out headlights and tail lights, it looked like the little blue sports car’s front end was chewed up pretty well. The back end of the Escalade had some damage to the rear bumper, but the Escalade was high enough (and big enough) while the little blue sports car was low enough (and small enough) so I doubt the Escalade even had any damage to the rear lift gate.
On the other hand, if the texting clown had still been behind me…
Hissy’s small and zippy, with an emphasis on small. If I had stopped quickly right behind the Escalade and then gotten rear-ended by the sports car, I would have been squished like a bug in between them. It probably wouldn’t have been enough to cause serious injuries, but it almost certainly would have totaled my little car that’s less than a year old and hasn’t even had its first oil change yet.
This brain dead dude was, as they say, “an accident looking for a place to happen.” I’m just as glad to see it happen in front of me and to someone else where minimal damage was caused to innocent bystanders.
Some days it’s better to be lucky than good.
Filed under Distracted Driving, Freakin' Idiots!, Los Angeles
This image from Saturn was released by NASA and JPL today. It shows the moon Mimas 28,000 miles beyond the outer rings of Saturn and 114,000 miles from the Cassini spacecraft.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
You can read more at the JPL/NASA website here.
This image is spectacular, to say the least, and it has made its round on various websites today. On many of the sites I visited, the comments very quickly were spotted with (or deluged with) ignorant rantings about how the image was “obviously” fake.
Imagine that. A significant percentage of the population, and a particularly vocal percentage at that, consider this image and those like it to be “fake news.”
Meanwhile, a significant percentage of the population is absolutely convinced that articles about things like “pizzagate” are 100% factual, accurate, and true.
Imagine that. A significant percentage of the population, and a particularly vocal percentage at that, think it’s been proven to be true that Hillary Clinton and some secret international cabal are running a pedophilia and child smuggling ring out of the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor.
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have the stomach to do it, but I wonder if anyone has waded through the ignorance, hatred, filth, and outright freakin’ stupidity on these people’s web pages, Facebook posts, and Twitter rants to see how much cross correlation there is between the two groups. Maybe someone far smarter than me could write a ‘bot or app that could do the searching based on certain keywords so that no rational human would have to be exposed to that possibly fatal level of batshit crazy.
My gut feeling is that the correlation is disturbingly high.
This could be one of reasons we’ve got the problems we have.
Just guessing.
Filed under Astronomy, Death Of Common Sense, Freakin' Idiots!, Space
There’s gotta be a reason other than sheer cussedness and having some clown at Ma Bell thinking, “How can I possibly maximize the amount of chaos and confusion for the next hundred years?”
If calculators had numeric keypads laid out in this pattern…
…then WHY did touch-tone phones get laid out THIS way?
Googling it seems to lead to the answer, “No one knows!” Well, sort of.
Ma Bell actually did a LOT of research when they were designing the touch-tone phone. See this journal article, page 999 in particular. (The article isn’t 1,000+ pages – it’s only 19 pages in the middle of a long, long series of articles and issues that have their pages numbered sequentially.)
In essence, Ma Bell figured out that this was the best arrangement for a couple of reasons, then went back and asked the calculator and cash register folks (who had used the first design for decades) why they used the other arrangement. No one knew why, it’s just what some early big manufacturer did and everyone else followed along to be compatible.
The other explanation, which makes perfect sense once you’ve seen it, is that matching up with the old calculator standard and then overlaying the alphabet would either have had the alphabet scrambled and starting from the bottom, or would have had “ABC” on “7”, “DEF” on “8”, and so on. Both are terribly counter intuitive.
Filed under Freakin' Idiots!
C’mon, hasn’t this gotten just a little bit silly?
“Black Friday” was a gimmick started by Madison Avenue in about 2005 or 2006 to artificially create the impression in the American public that the only way they could ever have fulfillment in their lives, save more money than they ever had in their entire lives, and have whiter teeth and better smelling armpits than their neighbors was to get out of bed at 04:00 and get to a store by 05:00 the morning after Thanksgiving.
Stop. Think about that. Forget all of the panic that the merchants would love for you to be feeling if you’re not participating.
Is your entire holiday going to be ruined if you don’t get that big screen television for 35% off at 05:00 on “Black Friday,” instead of getting it for 25% or 30% off at just about any other sale during the year? Is your life going to be worthless if you don’t have all of your Christmas shopping done by 07:00 on the morning after Thanksgiving?
It’s bullshit. They know it. You know it. I know it.
And thousands and thousands of people go do it anyway. Every single morning television show, local and national, had some reporter in the store this morning, interviewing Santa and talking to shoppers who hadn’t woken up yet. Every news show tonight had some juicy footage from East Springfield [Insert State Here] showing housewives trampling each other to save $2 on that sweater or $5 on that coffee maker.
The next year, if Store A opened at 05:00, Store B had to open at 04:00. The next year it was 02:00. Then it was midnight. Then it was 22:00 on Thanksgiving night, then 18:00 on Thanksgiving.
Then stores started staying open on Thanksgiving. Then they started opening at 05:00 on Thanksgiving. Then 03:00. Then midnight.
But they still called it “Black Friday.” And they still do, despite the fact that there were countless stores that had “Black Friday Week” sales which started on Monday. Except, of course, for the ones that actually started last Monday and run for two weeks. Or the ones that started November 1st, the freakin’ day after Halloween, and run all month.
But they’re still called “Black Friday” sales.
WHO. CARES!
How in hell did “Black Friday” end up in Australia and Europe? They don’t even HAVE a Thanksgiving holiday!
What if they had “Black Friday” and no one came? What if middle managers all across retail America forced their employees to show up at truly ungodly hours on Thanksgiving only to find that there were no crowds in the parking lot at 01:00 trying to get in, no rush to get items you didn’t want and didn’t need but to get them at 50% off?
As a society we reacted like trained monkeys. When Corporate America said, “Jump,” we asked how high on the way up. Does that conditioning go both ways? If “Black Friday” was statistically normal compared to the other 364 days of the year, would it collapse the economy, cause the stock markets to crash, and lead to the next Great Depression?
More importantly, if we all decided to not play the game, would the retail chains have “Black Friday” the following year, hoping that the “normal” sales year was a freak?
Would they get it by the third year?
Not to worry, we’ll never have to find out or test our theories. Box sets of Adam Sandler’s entire movie collection on Blu-ray are available for $37.99, but only between 03:00 and 03:15, so let the stampede begin!
Filed under Freakin' Idiots!
In Los Angeles, the “rolling right on red” is commonplace. If you’re coming up on a red light with the intent of turning right (which is legal once you stop, traffic is clear, and it’s safe to proceed) a lot of folks just slow down (-ish) and roll through after a quick glance to see that they’re not actually going to T-bone you. The expectation is that you will watch out for them, stopping before you rear-end them after they pull out in front of you.
Good little neurotic Catholic-educated boy that I am, I don’t do this and don’t have a lot of respect for those who do. But I’ll watch out for them. I’m nowhere near sanctimonious enough to actually get into a car accident deliberately, no matter how much the freakin’ asshole other driver may deserve it.
Today was a whole different kettle of fish.
On the way out to the hangar, between my house and the freeway, about five miles, I had not one but two freakin’ idiots run through red lights without even bothering to slow down or look. I can understand the one guy (not forgive, just understand in a snarky way) since he was busy texting while he was driving so it’s no big surprise that he sailed right through the light. He probably never even saw it, let alone noticed if it was red or green.
The other lady didn’t have that “excuse” but had enough attitude to make up for it. A half block after I had to stand on the brakes and swerve into the other lane to avoid her, we were stopped at another red light. (I assume she stopped at this one only because other people in front of her had stopped.) She noticed me glaring at her, rolled down her window, and just yawned and rolled the window back up when I recommended that she drive by the same rules as the rest of us.
Okay, I might have opened the conversation with a suggestion that she should begin by removing her head from her ass. It seemed like a reasonable request at the time.
There’s an old Don Henley song (“If Dirt Were Dollars”) that talks about vacuous, brain-dead people like her. “She just looked at me / Uncomprehendingly / Like cows at a passing train.” Aside from the truly clever use of “uncomprehendingly,” the lyrics are perfect for describing people like this.
Never a cop around when you need one.
Tomorrow, we’re expecting to get our first good rain storm in many, many months. If you think people in Los Angeles were driving like blindfolded morons today, just wait. You haven’t seen anything yet!
Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Los Angeles
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We Love The Stars Too Fondly 