We Are The Giant Microbes

At last! At long last! Steve can find Matt some quality ebola for his stocking in the form of a plush toy at the low low price of $8.95. And If Matt is feeling equally, well, warm and fuzzy, he can buy Steve some plush Gonorrhea. Or, if you really like Karl Winter’s stuff, you could buy him some stuffed Salmonella. No, I’m not kidding. This place actually exists. To see the whole pile of choices they offer, go to their main site, GIANTmicrobes.com, choose your country, and look around.

They say their products are good for educational purposes, but they sorta make them out to be a wacky gift/toy. How much of a geek kid would you have to be to appreciate these? They’ve looked at microbes and someone has sat down and designed stuffed animals that represented what the microbe looked like, only way bigger. Please, please, please someone go look at the Giardia doll and describe it to me, so I can picture what Trix’s Giardia bug would have looked like. Or maybe I don’t want that picture. And I wonder what Mad Cow disease looks like. Is it all spongy on top?

God, I feel like such a geek. I have to admit I’m a little curious about some of these. Happy looking around, and don’t let the bedbugs bite.

Remembrance Day Forgetfulness

I was watching the news last night, and a story came on that doesn’t even need the time of day. But, it’s the local news, where coverage of snow blowing around in open areas is considered important, and it being another scorcher out there gets top priority, so I guess it’s slim pickin’s. Anyway, the story was that some people were pissed off because they forgot yesterday was a holiday because Remembrance Day fell on the weekend. The best was the man who said, “I knew it was a holiday, but thought they might be open.” Are you stupid? Either it’s a holiday, or it’s not. If it’s a government holiday, and you’re pounding on the door of a government building, you’re shit outa luck. Go home, or back to work, or something.

All I can think is this is news? Anyone who has lived longer than 17 years has for sure seen at least two cycles of when Remembrance day falls, and knows that when it’s on Saturday or Sunday, the Monday after is a holiday. It does not warrant some reporter running around tracking down nitwits staring at locked government buildings with a look of shock and dismay plastering their faces. Everybody forgets every now and then that a certain Monday will end up being a holiday. But they walk up to the door, go “ah shit! I forgot they’re closed today!” Then they go about their business. It’s not a goddamn tragedy that needs to be on the news.

U R 2 St00pid 2 Post Here.

We’ve pissed and moaned about stupidity on the internet, especially lete-speak. Well, someone agrees with us, and has decided to design a stupidity filter. It will even flash a message back to the apparent moron, telling him his message was more or less unintelligible and to try again.

But Gabriel Ortiz and his team have their work cut out for them, since sometimes, what may look stupid to a computer is actually someone being funny. Plus, they say that their program is more complex than a spam filter, and we all know that spam filters are far from perfect. I’ve deleted spam from my inbox, and fished legitimate mail out of the junk pile. So, imagine how many mistakes this thing has the potential to make. I think that along with the people making fun of something, people who aren’t native speakers of English could get very, very mad after being told their English sucks when it might only be off by a bit.

They’re working on fixing that, looking for patterns in moronic writing. I think everyone should go and help them grade the pool of dumb comments they have gathered so they can make this thing better. Sweet! Someone’s cleaning up the internet! Hopefully the day never comes when I get told that something I wrote was unintelligible. If we had it, I wonder how many times it would have shat on some of Nicks’ gems. Ah, maybe stupidity on the net can still be entertaining.

Mommy And Daddy Are Making A Better Version Of You

This whole thing makes me sick. There’s now a new bill being introduced in the UK to do with IVF. A lot of its ideas are good, like allowing gay couples to register as the kid’s parents on birth certificates, or not denying lesbians from having kids. hell, if they can do it and they can find a donor, go nuts! But one thing they think is a good idea makes my entire body scream “nooooooooooo!”

They want to make it ok for parents of sick children to use In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) to create what they call saviour siblings, or kids from whom cells, or perhaps entire organs, can be harvested to give to the sick kid. Hmm. Do you see any problems with this? I hope to hell you do.

In the story, both kids seem to be doing fine and they’re a happy family. But what happens if the parents who decide to create a “spare parts baby” as they’re calling them aren’t such good parents? Then what happens to baby no. 2? Do they give the kid up for adoption? Or worse, maybe they keep him around in hopes of getting more parts, but he’s never treated as well, or is perhaps abused. yes, one sibling can be abused when the other ones are treated well. If you don’t believe me, go read A Child Called It.

Or, horror of horrors, what happens if kid no. 2 gets sick too, and needs stem cells. Are ya gonna pop out another kid?

What really really burns me up is this whole bullshit is unnecessary if we could just figure out how to save umbilical cord blood. The cells are right there, and we throw the stuff away. Why not use that? Creating another kid for parts is just wrong, and it has nothing to do with playing god. It’s got to do with treating every human being like a human.

Sometimes we have to accept that a kid’s got something wrong with him, and the solution isn’t to brew up another kid for parts. If another family member can help out, that’s great. But if not, then the family has to find ways to deal with it. I don’t know how I’d feel if my mom decided to have another kid just so they could have the nerve cells to somehow regenerate my optic nerves. That would just be too weird.

Don’t Download This Song

This, for lack of any better terminology, is fucking absurd. Why should it be the responsibility of college and university students to prop up the failing business models of multi-billion dollar corporations? And why should doing the sensible thing and not doing so be punishable by the revocation of all federal financial aid to all students of non-compliant schools, including those who don’t own computers? Not only does it go against the principle of innocent until proven guilty, but it also forces undue financial stress on people who are supposed to be the great minds and workers of the future.

New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also “alternatives” to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students.

The U.S. House of Representatives bill, which was introduced late Friday by top Democratic politicians, could give the movie and music industries a new revenue stream by pressuring schools into signing up for monthly subscription services such as Ruckus and Napster. Ruckus is advertising-supported, and Napster charges a monthly fee per student.

The full article is
here,
and I hope that after reading it all sane Americans will write or call whoever they can to ensure that this type of stupidity is not only blocked this time, but never crops up again.

Google’s In My Head!

I’m trying to write this without sounding like a paranoid nutbar. I will probably fail. Oh well. I’ve probably sounded like many different varieties of nutbar before, so what’s another kind?

I want you to think. think of when you first remember hearing about the Google search engine. Can you remember? Can you remember someone telling you about google, or talking about googling someone, or maybe you saw it as someone’s startpage? The reason I ask is that I can’t.

One day, it was like the word was planted in my brain. I don’t know where it came from. It was back in 2000 or early 2001. I’m not sure. Steve was hanging out with me in my little residence room. I was sick of all the other search engines like Mamma, Dogpile, Altavista, Yahoo, etc. So, I said to Steve, “I’ve heard of this thing called google. I think it’s supposed to be good! I don’t even know how to spell it! I’m not even sure if it’s google, or what, but the word Google comes to me.” Steve asked me where I’d heard of it, and I honestly couldn’t answer him. So, we typed Google’s address into the address bar, and miracle of miracles, there was a search box! And we loved it! But how did I hear about it? I really don’t know! I didn’t know then, and still don’t. It was like the word just appeared out of the clear blue sky.

I find this especially freaky, since Google is everywhere now. It’s *the* search engine, and because of that, googling has become a verb. How many search engines get that status? I’ve never heard of anyone yahooing or altavistaing someone or something. Maybe I’ve never heard of altavistaing because that is impossible to say. But anyway, no other search engine was ever turned into a verb.

Add to this that Google runs blogger, without which there would be no VC in its current form. It owns Feedburner, which runs our feed. And, of course, it runs our ads! On top of that, it has Google Mail, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Earth, a bunch of other stuff, and a whole wack of dough. How did Google get so big? Is it just because of the sheer awesomeness that is Google, or…is it something more cynister? Have the folks at Google figured out how to mess with our heads and make us think stuff without us even knowing about it?

Na…*shakes head.* What am I talking about? I really do sound like anutbar. But the fact remains. I don’t know how I heard of Google, and I remember all kinds of obscure things. Why is that one missing?

Rogers Rage Update

Well, I got a response from the support Gerbils at Rogers, and wow, it was only semi-formulaic and completely useful!

Amid the standard issue “thank you for using our online customer service” and “We appreciate your feedback” crap, there was a decent response! They are escalating my concerns to the web-team, and they’re going to fill in my info into this contest. Let’s hope “escalating your concerns” isn’t gerbil-speak for placating the customer and then heaving this whole email exchange into the trash. But, I got their attention, and actually got something resembling service! Let’s hope this goes somewhere.

Knowing Where I’m At Isn’t Where It’s At

I’ve seen these commercials advertising this new GPS service offered by certain wireless providers where you and your friends will always know where each other is. All the people on the commercials sound like stoners or zombies. They just keep pushing buttons on their phones going, “I know where you’re at.”

“Oh yeah? Well I know where you’re at.”

Ok, how many of us have a conversation that’s like that?

This service sounds like a recipe for disaster. I’ve heard that you choose who knows where you are and when, but what if someone you add to your ok list turns out to be not ok? What if you block them and they go ballistic because they can’t know you’re exact whereabouts all the time? I can see people who turn into abusers really loving this service.

Or, what if your significant other who is on the same provider is you isn’t down with you knowing where they are all the time, so they don’t sign up? Are you going to get suspicious because they’re hiding something?

Whatever happened to calling your buddy and saying, “Hey dude, whatcha up to?” Can’t we stick to that? Do we need to voluntarily set ourselves up to be tracked like wildlife? Ug! We’re just too plugged in these days.

The Medical Care Was Worse Than The Snakebite!

Let’s think about this. A woman gets bitten in a religious snake-handling ritual. That’s perhaps ironic and worth a sarcastic chuckle, but if you’re a hospital staff member and she shows up for treatment, shouldn’t all chuckling stop and treatment start?

If the staff at the Marymount Medical Centre in London, Kentucky, truly did what the family of Linda Long says they did, i.e. giving her a fan when she asked for oxygen, making derogatory comments about her religion, asking way too many questions about way too many things, not putting in a breathing tube, which caused her to die, then the family should sue their asses off. Come on, people, let’s show some professionalism! Whatever happened to “do no harm?”

Surprise!

Wow. This sounds like a joke. It just can’t be true. But if it is, that’s a sixteenth birthday that poor boy won’t forget.

His mom, for some unknown reason, decided to have a man in a gorilla suit show up to his drama class for his sixteenth birthday. But when she bookd it, she became what the company is calling the victim of a booking error, and so…a stripper came instead.

Oh my. Oh my my my. The stripper not only came, but she had no problem carrying out her, um, er, duties. She looked like a policewoman, only with a short skirt. She asked for the birthday boy to stand up, saying he’d been a naughty boy, not doing his homework. Next, she put on some Britney Spears, put a leash on the boy, and led him around the room on all fours, hitting him sixteen times. Finally, she stripped to bra and panties, put some cream on herself and asked the boy to rub it in. AT this point, the stunned teacher came out of her trance and put an end to the antics, and the boy ran from the room.

The best part of this whole thing was the boy’s mother caught the teacher a few minutes before the, um, miscommunication was about to play out, just said something was about to happen, and asked the teacher to film it with a camera which she provided. So, during this whole escapade, the poor teacher was probably wondering if that was what the mom had intended.

What I can’t figure out is why the stripper wouldn’t go, “hmmm. I think there was some mistake.” when she ended up at a high school drama class. I kno strippers aren’t known for their ethics, but there’s a line somewhere, I’m sure.

Anyway, the school is looking into things, the whole class is in shock and is asked to remain tight-lipped about the whole thing, and the boy is pretty humiliated…and I can’t stop giggling!