A Big crush

This story is just weird, not because of what it is, but the way it’s being reported.

A girl in a high school in Scotland was walking down the hall, and bent to pick something up, I’ve heard shoe in one place and pencil in another. But what she’s picking up doesn’t matter. What happened was 25 other students crashed into her. Nobody was seriously injured, a few bumps, bruises and sprains, but nothing horrible. But the headline sounded like it was the Hajj! I mean, crushed? I don’t think anyone was really crushed.

Yup, that whole situation would be bizarre. But the story gets longer and longer as person after person deflects blame. “The halls were supervised…” “They are not narrow…” “This really was a freak accident!” Um, was anyone saying it was anything more than that? They even took the time to interview a senior pupil about it, and mentioned the building of a new school. What in the blue blooddy hell does the building of a new school have to do with this? Is it going to be freak accident-proofed? Are the halls going to be super wide so people bending down to pick things up won’t be trampled?

I can only come to two possible conclusions. Either they’re terrified that they’re going to be sued over this and are trying to get it on the record that no one did anything wrong, or Falkirk is really low on newsworthy events.

I Guess It Beats Repeatedly Asking "Do You Love Me?"

Oh lord. Now we have a mobile service in Korea grading a caller’s sincerity level. They’ll even send the person paying for the service an analysis of the conversation, broken down into affection, surprise, concentration and honesty.

Part of me wants to see how well this works, and part of me wonders how many Korean relationships are about to go straight down the shitter.

Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz, Oh, What Intense Pain It Is

Hey there Chrystal Kolinski! Explain something to me. Please explain this, because I cannot wrap my head around it. If you met a random man in an adult video store, and you became friends with him, and he kept asking you to drink some random fluid and capture you on film doing it, wouldn’t you ask more questions? Questions like “What’s in this shot?” or “Can I see the videos of the other people who drank it?” spring to mind for me. If you thought of it as a “hitch” and you eventually did it to “shut him up,” didn’t you know it was wrong? Do you not obey your gut instinct? Well you should have, because now you have no gut. Yes, that was mean. Mean, but accurate.

Ya wanna know what she drank? It was caustic fluid. Ya know, sodium hydroxide! Still mystified? How about drain cleaner! That clear things up for ya?

I don’t know why I read this story and feel this bubbling, boiling anger that this even happened. Hmmm….interesting that I chose the words bubbling and boiling, because her digestive tract probably did a lot of that that fateful morning.

The Secret To Our Success

Well, I think Mushers’ Secret is already a success! We went on our first walk with it, and it worked like a dream! Trixie was steady, confident, fast but safe, and she went through salt and barely yeeeped! I think it was a yip in anticipation of pain, because after I wiped her paw, she walked through the same patch and not a peep out of her. I think this stuff is what I’ve been looking for. Go Mushers’ secret!

I Offset, Therefore I’m not

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the concept of carbon offsetting. In case you’re not familiar with what that is, it’s basically a system that allows businesses and individuals to contribute financially to environmental projects such as forestation and renewable energy initiatives to compensate for things they’ve done that are considered detrimental to the planet. Essentially you do a bad thing, then help out with a good thing and the bad thing is cancelled out, hence the term offsetting. People seem to be all over this idea, treating it like the greatest thing since sliced bread. By the way, what was sliced bread the greatest thing since? Unsliced bread? Sliced meat? Fire? An answer would be nice.

But back to the matter at hand, I don’t understand how this offset credit deal is supposed to work. Where else in life does this logic apply? If you kill a guy but save somebody else’s life on the way to your murder trial, are you free to go? No, you’re not. If you rape somebody but also volunteer at a centre for abused women, does the rape not count? Yes, it does. So how is it then that spewing hundreds of tonnes of chemicals into the air on a daily basis can be undone by forking over a few bucks to a guy with a truck full of seedlings and windmills? That’s right, it can’t.

I wish people would do a little bit of critical thinking before buying into such a fundamentally flawed idea, but I suppose that would be a lot more difficult than throwing money at a problem to create the illusion of doing something while not having to put effort into making real and lasting changes.