Shit that Pissed me off this Week – 7/13
Two weeks of shit but CONvergence took up most of it so it is still a pretty light week.
Rob Schneider is a Complete Idiot
Knowing that Rob Schneider is an anti-Vaxxer is not a big deal. I mean, lots of people with no medical knowledge believe that vaccines cause cancer even though they don’t.
Thing is, why the fuck is he being allowed to talk about anything in public. Someone want to tell me the last time the guy was funny?
Anyone who says Duece Bigalow can leave right now.
The dude doesn’t even look funny.
All sorts of clueless people say clueless shit all the time. Famous people say it into microphones. That doesn’t bug me as much as this:
Why is Rob Schneider still getting microphones stuck in his face????
Shit That Pissed me Off This Week – 6/29
Iranian Americans Told They are Not Allowed to Buy an iPad because Racism
I’ve been an Apple customer for a long time. There are more Apple products in my house than there are bathrooms. It’s pretty sad.
This story is a publicity nightmare and I’m pissed they didn’t have the intelligence to publicly state “you know what – we messed up.”
While Apple has a policy against exporting their products to Iran (because what Iran needs to bring down the US is clearly lots and lots of iPads), that doesn’t mean that anyone who speaks Farsi should be denied service.
A vital piece of the dreaded Iranian “iPad enrichment” program
Hell, I think it is a pretty major invasion of privacy just to ask what language was being spoken. If I was speaking a foreign language in an Apple store and an employee asked me what language it was, I’d tell them it was none of their business. Especially now.
Come on Apple! Wake up and admit your policy is screwed and tell people you won’t be denying service to anyone based on what language they speak. To achieve your goal of world domination by 2018, it is a necessary step.
You can’t dominate the world if you don’t dominate Iran. I think Napoleon said that.
Shit that Pissed me off This Week – 6/22
Michigan House Passes a Bill that Says it is OK for Counselors to Discriminate Against Gay People
Here’s the facts: A graduate student in counseling was dismissed from her graduate program when she refused to help a suicidal gay student because (you guessed it) she’s a Christian. She sued (of course) and lost (of course).
Well the Michigan House can’t help her but they can definitely help the next homophobic therapist tell a suicidal patient to find someone else by passing an “antidiscrimination” law that will allow people to discriminate!
Why didn’t they say “hey, if your religious beliefs prevent you from counseling certain people, maybe you shouldn’t become a therapist?”
Suck it up and tell the gay kid he has something to live for. Because he does. According to you, all he has to look forward to when he dies is hell so do the compassionate thing and help him enjoy the 100 years he’s going to be living outside of the lake of fire.
It’s what Jesus would do.
Shit that Pissed me off This Week – 6/15
Megachurch Pastor Beats up his Daughter and his Flock Praises him for it
Let me begin by saying that I don’t know if his daugter’s allegations are true. But let’s just assume for a moment that he did, in fact, “put his hands around her throat and…then slammed her to the ground, punched her and beat her with his shoe. ”
How many parents think that is appropriate behavior towards one’s child? Teenagers can be a pain in the ass, I get it.
But choking, throwing to the ground and beating with a shoe?
Here’s what one of his supporters who seems to accept his daughters’ allegations had to say:
101 likes for kids getting their ass beat!!!!! God bless America!
Holy shit people! He was beating the shit out of her before she called the cops! That isn’t discipline. That is abuse.
Shit that Pissed me off this Week – 6/8
Doctor Allegedly Refused Treatment to an HIV Positive Patient
The accusation is that a doctor refused to get an HIV patient his medications because the patient was gay and (I’m paraphrasing) “he deserved it.”
In a culture where preachers are teaching their children to sing songs about how homos are going to hell, this shouldn’t come as any sort of surprise. People are being told that it is OK to treat homosexuals differently on one topic (marriage) and, therefore, they reach the conclusion that they can treat those people differently in all situations.
The people who think that way are horrible people. They would probably still be horrible people if they hadn’t been trained to behave this way toward homosexuals. I think that perhaps we need to re-direct that acrimony towards something more productive. Like hating Wal-Mart. Or Ke$ha.
My cold dead hands
I’ve been thinking a lot about Americans and our guns lately. I’ve wanted to do a blog post about it but I’ve been reticent because gun rights are only slightly less divisive than abortion rights and – well – the people who disagree with me have guns.
That was a joke.
Shit that Pissed me Off this Week – 6/1
Missed last week because I was on vacation so here’s a couple weeks’ worth of annoyances.
Disney Changes it’s FastPass System – Sort of
I’m not going to try to explain the whole thing but the basic issue is that Disney has a system wherein you can get a pass that will allow you to go to the front of the line for various popular rides. The catch is that you can’t go on the ride until a particular time. So if you want to go on Space Mountain, you get a fast pass for – say – 10:00 and come back later rather than waiting in a 40 minute line.
Now the fast passes have always given you an hour window. If your pass starts at 10:00, it ends at 11:00. Except it never did. They have been honored all day for as long as the system has been around (over ten years now).
Until now. Now if you have a fast pass that says 10:00 to 11:00, you’d better get there between 10:00 and 11:00. No exceptions.
So great – if I’ve got a lunch reservation at one and the fast pass time available is 1:00 to 2:00, I’m out of luck. This wouldn’t bug me so much if the rules had always been that way. No matter what it says on the pass, though, they have never enforced it. Until now.
It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing. Such a little thing.
Why did they do it? I don’t know for sure but I would guess they did it to cut down on the wait in the standby line. I would imagine most people using a fast pass wait well past the posted time on their pass and that serves to back up the standby line more and more as the day progresses. Most people with a 9:45 fast pass don’t show up until much later. I know I didn’t . Also, by having the fast pass expire, not everyone who gets one will end up using it. Overall, it means fewer people going through the fast pass line every hour which means the standby line is probably at least fifteen minutes faster.
That’s great for them. But what about me?
Shit that Pissed me Off this Week – 5/18
I’m on vacation this week and next week so the column is shorter than usual. That, I imagine, is probably a good thing.
Most Psychotic Anti-Gay Person Ever
This lady’s crazy rant has been circulating the internet quite a lot in the last week.
This doesn’t piss me off. It makes me laugh but if I’m being honest with myself, it also makes me sad. This woman isn’t just anti-gay, she is completely around the bend crazy. She needs some sort of medication in the worst way. Just listen to the crazy shit she is saying. Normal people don’t talk like this. When you can make Michele Bachmann look sane, you have a very serious problem.
Update: Yep – she’s mentally ill. Her family says she is on medication (up the dosage) and that makes the attention on her all the more sad. The whole thing points up the kind of hatred that is focused on gay people. She’s mentally ill and you can’t control that but would her vitriol be focused on gays if there weren’t so many sane people doing it already.
The Stadium Debate – Not theirs, mine
In what puts me at odds with a lot of my friends, I can’t be completely annoyed by the fact the state finally approved a new stadium for the Vikings. I’m annoyed, mind you, just not completely annoyed. As with most issues like this, I live in the grey area between “fuck yeah!” and “what the fuck?”
Shit that Pissed me Off This Week – 5/11
The Heartland Institute Goes for Broke on a New Series of Billboards
The Heartland Institute is a Climate Change Denial think tank and they just put up a series of billboards to support their point of view. Let’s see if you can tell why the campaign pisses me off:
OMG!!! He’s crazy! I don’t want to be crazy too!!!
They also have billboards planned featuring Charles Manson and Osama Bin Laden.
You know, because only crazy people believe that Climate Change is real and caused by human behavior. It is a spurious and insulting argument that has nothing to do with facts or science.
You think 97% of the world’s climate scientists are wrong? Prove it!!! Don’t waste time saying that they must be wrong because some crackpot out there believes them. It’s like saying that I shouldn’t be against the death penalty because most prisoners on death row are also against the death penalty.
Update: after extensive public outcry, they have decided to take down the billboards. They haven’t apologized for them, of course, but they took ’em down…
Grail Diary 