Don’t Mess With These People

Tajuan Bullock should consider himself a very lucky man. He doesn’t, but he should. Why? He robbed a house, and when the owners caught him at it, they made him clean up his mess at gunpoint. They didn’t shoot him. they just made him clean it up…and wait for the cops, of course. When the police arrived, the burglar actually had the nerve to complain about how he was treated. Not surprisingly, he didn’t get any sympathy.

All I can say is it’s a good thing he wasn’t in Texas robbing Dennis Baker, or he’d be dead right now.

This Deal Stinks

This is a message to everyone on Facebook. If you have the sudden urge to throw poop at your friends’ facebook walls, you might want to think about whether it’s worth it.

Here’s how the poop throw works. It’s apparently part of this thing called Food Fight. In Food Fight, you pay virtual dollars to fling food at people’s Facebook walls. How do you get those virtual dollars? You provide them with personal information. Now, guess what they do with that personal information. If you guessed give it out to advertising companies so they can very carefully target ads at *you*, and do who knows what else, you win a prize.

I can hear you now. “Where’s the poop?” you say. You need a hell of a lot more virtual dollars to be able to throw a big ol’ chunk o dung at Buddy Joe. So, that means giving up more personal information, and perhaps information about Joe who receives the splat bomb.

Here’s where I start to get scared. People are doing it! People are willingly handing over mass amounts of private information just so they can fling fake feces. Honestly, folks, does sacrificing personal data for a virtual shit-fling seem like a fair trade? I certainly don’t think so.

Fools, all of them. But the advertisers just think it’s wonderful. While Seth Goldstein, the one who created this monster, says the thought of what his own creation is capable of makes him cringe, he still lets it continue and says it’s by the people for the people. I don’t think it makes him cringe too much. It’s amazing what money can do.

I hope no one who took part in this launching of Lincoln logs wonders why their personal information ends up who knows where and they get spam messages with their private details in them. They brought this on themselves just so they could be juvenile for one fleeting moment. Smart move. Real smart.

What A Load Of Horse Shit!

Here’s one to twist your brain a little. Patty Cooper needs a service animal. She’s broken her back twice, um, ouch, and is now in a wheelchair. But the animal she has chosen is a horse!

Ok, I can handle that, sort of. It’s a miniature horse, and I’ve heard of guide horses for the blind, even though that seems a little weird to me. If you read more about it, it does make sense. I just wouldn’t want a horse, like some people wouldn’t want a dog. But she wants to keep this beast in her apartment! This would be perhaps fine if…

  1. she didn’t have to have part of her living-room made into a stall.
  2. It didn’t require hay that she wanted the landlords to provide,

    3. and

  3. it didn’t pee on the floor and require the landlords to put in pee-proof flooring!

Ok, there comes a point where accommodating a service animal is too much. What does she say she’s going to do in this whole deal? It sounds like she’s expecting the landlords to do everything. I mean, she’s not even getting the hay!

If she wants a horse, one that is going to urinate and defecate all over the inside of an apartment, maybe she shouldn’t be in an apartment. If she knew how to properly train her horse, she wouldn’t have this issue. the folks at the Guide Horse foundation figured it out. They also said that the horse should have a barn or fensed yard. Maybe she needs to figure out how she can have a place that’s more suitable for….a horse!

I know some people are probably thinking that somebody had to pave the way for service dogs to be accepted in buildings that don’t allow pets, and I agree. But this isn’t paving the way, it’s ripping up the foundation. dogs don’t pee on the floor and need hay and a stall. They crash out on a blanket and do their duty outside. This is, well, a whole different animal!

Will You Marry Me? For Yes, Press 1. For No, Press 2.

Here’s one for the other side of the coin. Now there’s a ring box with built-in LCD screen. So, if you’re an especially lazy prick, you can pre-record your wedding proposal, and let the fucking box do it for you.

Hopefully, for the sake of the girl, there’s a nice sparkling rock in there so she has to at least give it some thought. Aha! I’ve got it! If you have a girl who goes and gets her own ring and makes you pay for it, propose to her with one of these as revenge!

Give Me A Ring Some Time

Steve sent me an article about four months ago that I keep meaning to write about, but for some reason, the idea of ripping it apart seemed like too daunting a task. So I’m going to try today.

It’s articles like this that make me ashamed to be a girl. I guess because it was June and lots of people get married in June, the Guelph Mercury decided to run a story about choosing a wedding ring, and the trends that are going on now.

Apparently, girls aren’t happy with the idea of the one they love proposing and getting them a simple wedding ring. No no no. They want a big, sparkling rock so they can play a nice game of “My Ring’s Bigger than your ring” with their friends. . It’s quotes like

People love a big sparkly ring, especially coming from the person they love most in the world.

that make me sad. How about it’s pretty special that the person who you love most in the world wants to get you a ring at all. To sit there and demand glitter for something that’s supposed to symbolize love and commitment is pretty shallow. It’s special because it’s from him.

Here’s another priceless gem, ha ha.

It’s really in everyone’s best interest to make sure the bride gets a ring
she loves. She wears it for many, many, many years. It’s not like the dress that you wear for one day.

And what about him? Presumably, he has to wear his for just as long. Doesn’t he matter in this whole equation? I get the sense the poor sap doesn’t.

The whole thing’s become way too much of a fashion extravaganza. The guy is expected to “have done his homework” and figured out what ring she wants by following her little hints or looking at her friends’ rings. If the poor soul stumbles onto brides.com, look out! He’s going to get asked by all the other brides what her other jewellery looks like, what her “lifestyle” is, ug!

And the girls don’t want to be surprised. hell, they want to pick it out! But if they want to pick it out, do they want to pay for it? Nope. That’s the man’s job. Some even go so far as to buy it, wrap it, hand it to him…and then give him the receipt! Um, pardon? I was fine if the girl wanted to switch roles and surprise him with a ring, but to get your own ring and then tell him what he can pay is, well, just a little over the top for me.

We seem to be missing the point of this whole exercise. Hell, if girls went way back to see the point of this whole exercise, they might not want the sparkling rock after all. But the sanitized, modern point of this whole exercise is to think of the ring as a symbol of how much the love means. It’s not about all this superficial shit. Also, people forget that just because someone can go out and find a pretty ring doesn’t mean they’re a good person. A prick can ask all the right questions and be oozing with cash, and still be a prick. I hope all the girls on their quests for the big, sparkling rock remember that.

Big Brother Is Watching You Eat Lunch

Note to head teachers at schools in England: If China thinks that fingerprinting kids so they can get their lunches is unnecessary, maybe you should too.

What’s with the need to use fingerprints to give kids their meals? They say it will help process the kids and not stigmatize them, but they never explain how that’s supposed to work. Personally, I’m creeped out.

Nice Going, Ontario!

I figured the voter turnout for last week’s election would be low, but
52.7%?!?!?
That’s pathetic!

All of you who didn’t vote can consider yourselves lucky that those of us who did gave you a government much better than the one you deserve. Hopefully the day never comes when we don’t or can’t. Maybe then you’d feel stupid for not using your rights, ya jackasses.

Why Would They Run That?

So the other morning I’m sitting around reading
The Merc,
and I notice a mistake. No big deal, newspapers make them all the time. But being the decent citizen that I am, I decide it would be a good idea to email them and let them know just in case nobody else has caught it yet. I dash off a quick message telling them what I found and what’s wrong with it, also throwing in a bit about how much I enjoy reading the paper each day. I send it off, figuring that’s the end of it until they print the oops message in a day or so.

Jump ahead to Monday morning. I get an email back from the editor asking me if I could send along my telephone number so that they can varify that I wrote what I wrote so it could be used as a letter to the editor. I’ve written letters to the editor before and this was not supposed to be one of them, but ok, whatever the news man wants, I’ll play along. I send off my number, and sure enough, a few minutes later I get a call. Carin talks to them for me because my voice is shot, but they’re fine with taking her word that I said what I said. Wow, they actually called I say to myself. I can’t believe this. They can’t seriously be considering printing that, can they?

The day is now Tuesday, and I manage to gather enough energy to pay attention to things and decide to take a look at the news. and there, in the editorials section, I see this:

Six political candidates were running in Guelph

Dear Editor – In your Oct. 12 editorial, “Assign negativity to the trash heap,” you start out by saying, “Sandwiched among the multiplicity of campaign signs with sky-high letters proclaiming the names of the various candidates, motorists and pedestrians could have been forgiven for thinking there was a sixth candidate running in Guelph in the just-ended provincial election.”

Unless I’ve got something horribly wrong, there were six candidates running in the Guelph area. We had Liberal, Progressive Conservative, NDP, Green, Communist and Family Coalition candidates running in our area.

Just thought I’d point that out.

Steve Wettlaufer

Guelph

Yes, they actually put it in. I put correction in the subject line, I didn’t send along the information needed to make it a letter, hell, I didn’t even start off with Dear Editor. I did everything I could think of to help them save face quietly, and they were having none of it. And to make it even stranger, the only parts of what I wrote that they changed in any way were the ones about them doing a good job. Ok, maybe changed isn’t the right word, let’s go with purged. Yeah, that’s more like it, because that’s exactly what happened. Anything complimentary was completely removed, never to be seen or heard by anyone, ever.

I’m sure some of you are reading this and wondering why it is in any way odd or interesting? Well, you’d have to know the Mercury to understand. They always print corrections, but rarely if ever do those corrections come in the form of hey idiot letters. They usually slip quietly into the local news section to be seen once and never again spoken of unless they need to correct the correction, something that has actually happened before. But for some reason unbeknownst to me, this one was different. Granted getting the number of election candidates wrong is a pretty stupid mistake, but why, unless they’re really trying to make somebody feel bad or like an idiot, does it need any more play than any other stupid mistake they’ve ever made? Are they hard up for letters? Is the guy responsible for the letters leaving and in a kind of I don’t give a fuck anymore phase? Is there a new employee shaming policy that says errors reaching a certain stupidity threshold must be corrected by sharp-eyed locals who’s names will no longer be withheld? And if so, is it only a matter of time until they stop withholding the names of the person responsible for writing the given editorial and the editor who let it slip through? I hope somebody knows, because my flu-ridden brain can’t stop wondering about it.

Violated All Over Again

If you get raped in Philadelphia, and your case goes before Teresa Carr Deni, you’d better pray she likes you. Otherwise, she may not take your case seriously at all. If you’re a prostitute, regardless of whether the circumstances indicate that what happened was clearly gang rape at gunpoint, she’ll just call it armed robbery because you didn’t get paid.

The worst part of this was her attitude. The judge had no problem saying “Why waste taxpayers’ money for what some people consider an occupational hazard? There are enough sympathetic victims without wasting time on prostitutes who ask for trouble, right?”

It’s not about goddamn sympathy. It’s about what happened. If these four men did this to her, they will do it to others. Do we want to be all nice and give them a break just because we didn’t like the victim?

Yeah, I agree that prostitution is a dangerous job, but rape is rape.

I wish I had more to say, but I’m too mad.