Retards (was: Evolving Language)

On 8/31/2010 8:59 PM, JZ wrote: 

PS - I don't get how people get so bent out of shape about words like "retard", changing the words doesn't change the meaning...

http://www.r-word.org/  -- That whole site is fucking retarded.

Seriously, when you call someone a psycho, the Psychopath Anti-Defamation League doesn't get all pissy.

The National Council on Disability isn't beating down the doors of the creators and maintainers of the GIMP.

The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association doesn't yell at you when you mention how fucking gay Kenny G is.

The NRA doesn't come down on male porn stars for their constant references to "shooting" their loads.

NAMBLA didn't make a press release about how evil South Park was for their Uncle Fucker song.

And it's not the retards who are making a fuss about it (because retards couldn't create a website beyond a FaceSpace profile), it's their parents.  My open letter to those people:

Dear Fucktard Parents:

Look, I'm sorry you wouldn't stop drinking during pregnancy, waited until your 50s to have a kid, or have fucked up chromosomes, but you need to stop being so retarded.  Yes, you have a very rough life of raising a mongoloid ahead of you; yes, your god most certainly hates you; and yes, I'm a cruel bastard who has probably just cursed my children to bare retardo fruit; but I'm still not gonna stop pointing out how fucking retarded something is, when it is indeed retarded.

Sincerely,
Dave Maez, (Retarded) Asshole

Evolving Language

So I was getting my schadenfreude on by watching clips of people hurting themselves, and I came upon this mediocre video of a kid failing at a bike jump:
http://www.break.com/index/bmx-kid-faceplants-hard-on-board.html

Now, the injury was nothing amazing, but what was amazing is when the youthz in the video suddenly switch from American English into Bad French, thus introducing me to the Chiaque dialect of backwoods Canada.  Super cool.

This reminds me of the awesome barrio Spanglish the kids in Houston excelled at.  My senior year homeroom class was with a couple of  Martinez's that loved to switch at random between Redneck English, Spanglish, and Mexican Spanish.  It was how I prepared my mind for the day by trying to guess the rest of their conversation through context.

I can't wait for a future when we're all the same shade of brown, and we all speak in a language derived from pidgin English mixed with techno-jargon.  Destroy 2000 years of culture.

Which reminds me of a really fucking bad movie, Idiocracy, that I wasn't able to watch all the way through because it was written by someone who was obviously a pussy who was bullied in high school, and all I could think was, "Get over it, already!"   But regardless of the inane plot of stupidity ruling the world (wait, that's happening now!) the concept of everyone speaking the same dialect of broken English consisting of slang words from youth subcultures was excellent.

--
Dave Maez
Chicano like Ritchie Valenz - I don't speak a lick of Spanish, but I know all the words to "La Bamba."

Scott Pilgrim vs the World

Summary: Go and see it right away. If you have to wait for the next showing, all the better, because you can play games in the lobby.

Details: I don't know why I waited to see the film. The tipping point was hearing an interview with Edgar Wright--actually the introduction to the interview, where I found out that SPVTW was made by the same guy that made Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. If I'd known that, I'd have seen it on opening day.

Not since The Matrix have I consciously thought about the next time I would see a film. I saw it yesterday, I was one of five people in a 2:20 showing on a Saturday, and three of the other people were my kids. I actually couldn't care less what studio executives think about the money it's not making--I just think it's a phenomenal film, which is mind candy to anyone who's ever played video games. Beck wrote a lot of the music, also the film is about rock, and romance, and ... just see it. In the theater.

The introductory trailers were OK. By the time they started rolling, I was numb from the advertisements--which were from losers. How ironic: Movie theaters are going under IMHO, like newspapers and physical music recordings. The ads were for Jeep (Chrysler's red-headed stepchild), Sprint (hind tit in the mobile phone game), and Madden NFL 11 (a game way past its prime).

Still, once the movie started, it was all good. Awesome from the start. Never a dull moment. Several times I thought, I didn't get all that, I'm going to have to see this again. ... cool. Yes, movie theater prices are outrageous. I still say this one's worth it.

I think next time I'm just going to sit through 2 or 3 showings.

Music Midtown 2002 Smackdown

I'd been meaning to write up the events of Friday, May 3rd 2002 for a while now, and finally got in the mood to do it.

Midtown Atlanta has an annual outdoor music festival every spring called Music Midtown.  My mom and I decided to buy the full weekend tickets so we could attend all three days.  My mom's a hip-hop fan, I'm a rock/metal fan, and we're both classic rock fans, so the festival would work well for both of our musical tastes.

Friday was the start of the festival, so after work we drove down to the Alpharetta MARTA station and caught a train to midtown.  We arrived and wandered around for a while, not really interested in much since it was the first day, and nothing good really started until 10pm.

We walked past the "BellSouth/Z93" Stage and scheduled to play next was WAR.  We figured, fuck it, we'll sit down on these bleachers and wait for them to play "Lowrider" and be done with it.  However, to both of our surprise, WAR kicked ass.  Great funky music had us bopping and dancing all the way til the end when they finally played "Lowrider."

We were in good spirits after witnessing a surprisingly good show, and didn't even mind the rain that was continuing to fall in spurts.  We saw that Jethro Tull was playing next on the same stage in 30 minutes, and we were like, "Cool, we should get up closer to the stage for this." 

After securing our spots close to the stage we waited for about 20 minutes as the crowd gathered tighter around us.

There was a lady with her husband standing to my side smoking a doobie.  I gave her a smile and a nod, and she promptly looked away and kept on toking.  Bitch.  In my day we shared the wealth.  Oh well, I never feel good partaking in front of my mom, no matter how cool she is.

Then a group of about 10 Abercrombie wearing Frat guys and their girlfriends started snaking their way through the crowd and stopped right in front of us. 

My mother was a little incensed because we had stood waiting for 20 minutes to get a good view of the stage, only to have it blocked by a large group of six foot tall dudes at the last minute.  She told them to keep moving, and word came back from the front of their snake that they were trying, and both the Frat guys and their girls looked apologetic and embarrassed.

I thought, "Cool, at least these people are nice.  I wonder why they're not at the stage where Incubus is playing like they should be?" 

My mom, however, didn't seem to notice that they were politely trying to move through the crowd and taking a little bit longer to get out of our way because of this.  So she began to rage.

Now, my mom is super cool, and she's normally quite pleasant and happy.  Since I'm her son, and an asshole, I have managed to get her into a rage before, and it's not pretty.

But I had never seen her this angry in my life, nor have I since; and I still don't know what caused her to snap.

She suddenly just started screaming at the guys.  Obscenities and vitriol poured out of her mouth to a degree that would have impressed R. Lee Ermey.  The girls backed up, afraid, and the frat guys gathered and approached her slowly with their hands up in apologetic gestures in an attempt to calm her down.  I was just staring at her shocked for the duration of this.

Then she did something that finally caused me to react.  She reached over and crushed one of the guys' $8 MGD tallboys.  It erupted like a geyser all over him and I'm sure his fingers were probably in pain after being caught in her vice-like death grip.  I immediately flung my arms around my mother to restrain her.  I was begging her, "Please calm down, mom.  It's OK!" as I tried to pull her back away from the frat guys.

By this point, she was foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.  My mom had obtained rage strength and lunged forward again, and reached out from under my arms, and crushed another beer can, dousing some more frat guys in another geyser of watered down American lager.

The frat guys were like, "What the Fuck!?!" and growing angry themselves.  This is when I was sure I was about to die.

Women never seem to comprehend that while they can pick a fight with men and social norms prevent those men from retaliating, they are completely free to retaliate against any male who is with her.  In this case, me.  My mom's anger was leading to my inevitable public beat down by a gang of beer soaked frat guys.

The entire crowd was staring at us in shock and disbelief, when my mother made her final attack.  Through clenched teeth she shouted, "GET. THE FUCK. OUT OF HERE." and reached up under my grip again, grabbed one the shorter guy's white baseball cap, and threw it down into the mud.

As I was bracing myself for the punch that I was sure had to be coming at me, the shorter one bent down, picked up his hat, looked at my mom and said, "What's wrong with you, lady?!   Fine.  We're just going to go.  You're the meanest lady in the world, and you're going to Hell!"

As they were about to make their retreat, my mom (like a character in a bad action movie) growled back, "I'LL SEE YOU THERE!"

Which caused them to hasten their retreat, since they wanted absolutely nothing to do with that psychotic woman.

The crowd reacted with mixed enthusiasm as I let go of my mom (for all the good that had done me), and stared at her in embarrassment and exasperation.  Some clapped for her (the only people she heard), some laughed at the ludicrous situation, others were frightened and embarrassed like me.

I received a tap on the shoulder from the lady that had been bogarting a joint, and she offered me a hit out of pity.

I asked my mom what she was thinking, and she simply replied that they shouldn't have tried to cut in front.  Then she started getting giggly from the shock of adrenaline. 

I sighed and waited for the Tull to begin playing while keeping my head down and trying to avoid the looks we were continuing to get.   After a few minutes Tull started, and a few seconds later both my mom and I remembered that Jethro Tull is fucking lame.   She had just chased off some poor college kids who wanted nothing more than to sit through this silly flute music, and all we wanted to do was listen to anything besides that crap.

Since the irony wasn't lost on either of us, we had to stifle our laughs, and wait three whole songs before making a big production about our pretend desire to buy drinks, and left as quickly as possible.

--

Dave Maez

Barking tree frog

So I almost smushed this tree frog in a porch umbrella. After I put him down he shat a ginormous poopy so I guess the experience was tough on him.

Do you have any corn?

http://webmademovies.etherworks.ca/popcorndemo/

Sometimes inspiring, sometimes corny, plenty entertaining. Apparently the story isn't just the content of this video, it's the medium:

Developers at the browser maker's Drumbeat project — an initiative that advocates new open web technologies — have created Popcorn, a tool intended to make web video every bit as interactive as the rest of the web.

I like the idea. But, hey, I also liked VH1's Pop-Up Video show. The demo isn't as "in your face" as I'd imagined. The enhancements are mostly elsewhere on the page, except for the subtitles. I've seen augmented reality and several other cluttered visions of what was first called "interactive television," but Popcorn keeps things pretty well spread out. It does seem to lag a little bit -- expected -- as it identifies locations and people, then looks them up on Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, and so on. I like how the list of sites is dynamic, i.e., that list is probably not comprehensive.

I wonder about what seems to keep happening to companies that do one thing really well -- or at least, really lucratively -- and then say, Wow, let's branch out into something else! and then they die this horrible death, usually from starvation, and everyone just looks on, agonizing in blog posts about how great that company was, analyzing where they went wrong, and wondering whether the tools that this dying company developed will still be supported.
Oh, well. Good luck, Mozilla! We hardly knew ye, anyway.
-- 
A duck walks in to a bank, right up to a teller and asks, "Do you have any corn here?" The teller answers "No, we don't have any corn here." The duck turns around and walks out.

The next day, the duck walks back in to the bank, goes to the same teller, and asks, "Do you have any corn here?" The teller answers, "No, we don't have any corn here." Unfazed, the duck turns around and walks back out again. 

The duck repeats this for several days with the same teller. One day, the teller answers, "No, we don't have any corn here, and if you come in here and ask me that one more time, I'm going to nail your beak to the counter!" 

The next day, the duck walks back in to the bank, right up to the teller and asks, "Do you have any nails here?" The teller answers "No, we don't."

"Well, in that case", says the duck, "Do you have any corn?"

Propaganda Techniques of Bigots and Rednecks

So last Thursday, I was on some internet forum reading a thread on the Arizona immigration law.  I had already censored myself once, since I had gotten carried away before remembering that arguing politics on the intertubes is as pointless as arguing politics IRL.

Anyway, as I continued to peruse the thread, I noticed some bigot using the phrase "race card."  What a fantastic term.  Its use enables the bigot to pretend that pointing out racism is somehow a logical fallacy. 

Example:

Bigot: They need to just strip search every Arab who goes to the airport.
Normal Person: Umm, racial profiling is not only illegal but morally wrong and has been proven to be ineffective.
Bigot: Oh, there it is.  Somebody's always gotta pull out the race card.
Normal Person: What?

The same putz then ended his post with a hyberbolic metaphor/simile that wasn't analogous to anything being discussed, in an attempt to make the other argument seem as lacking in common sense as their little fable.

Jeff Foxworthy should actually have a joke for this: "You might be a redneck if all of your arguments end with a ridiculous metaphorical one-liner that has no bearing on the situation at hand."  Hmmm, doesn't seem to have the right ring to it.

Example:

Bigot: We need to waterboard the sunsabitches.
Normal Person: Umm, no, besides being cruel and illegal, torture has been proven to be an ineffective means of obtaining information.
Bigot: Horseshit.  If'n there's a deer tick on yer willie, ya don't hump a bear to get it off.
Normal Person:  What the hell does that even mean?

--

Dave Maez

God Hates Kansas

Judge: State ban on protests at military funerals unconstitutional

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/08/16/missouri.funeral.protests.ruling/?hpt=T2

So the gist is this:  That crazy Westboro "God Hates Fags" Baptist Family Church was picketing military funerals with their hilarious signs, and Kansas passed a law banning protests at military funerals.  A federal judge has rightly overturned the over-broad law, and Conservatives are up in a tizzy since they only care about civil liberties when it applies to them.

Again, this is why state's rights are stupid, because states are (somehow) even dumber than the federal government.  We just shouldn't let morons like Kansas be able to pass laws at all. 

The simple solution would have been to send a cop to these funerals -- where they expected protests -- and arrest the protesters for disturbing the peace.  The crazies can then try to argue free speech and be shot down since holding up a sign that says "Thank God for IEDs" in front of the grieving friends and family of a dude killed by an IED is not protected speech.

But no, these fucktards had to go pass an unconstitutional law where no law was even required, get it shot down, and make a federal judge who is trying to preserve our civil liberties look like a jerk in front of all uneducated Americans.  Thanks a lot, Kansas.

--
Dave Maez
sellout:DM.upYP1ZArCc:0:0:Dave Maez:/us/SC/Greenwood:/bin/ksh