Michael Kindt's Blog, page 135

I bet cops in real life run across a lot fewer pubic hairs than do cops on CSI.

That’s gotta be a plus. 

Karaoke!

*removes pants*

Pat and Vanna are still kickin it.

Wheel of Fortune is on here at the bar, and there they are. Shit, I remember watching them when I was a kid! I havent seen this show since, like, the 90s.

Vanna is still doing letters by hand. In 2015. You would think a robot or a push of a button had replaced her by now, but no. There she is in all her glory, marching back and forth in front of the puzzle.

And there’s still Pat, being kind and disarmingly funny, holding the same mysterious cards in his hand he’s always held.

The sound is down and we’re listening to Willie, but Pat and Vanna live on.

I find this profoundly reassuring.

Assume the worst, most terrible, most dastardly thing about your government,

and you will still fall short.

U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades

U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades:

A Justice Department operation started keeping logs of Americans’ international phone calls in 1992 and became a template for far broader phone surveillance after the Sept. 11 attacks.

I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you!

*dozes off because DUH*

I had plans to ditch myself and get outside, but goddamn toasters got in the way.

Nothing pressing, beautiful day. I thought I would spend it in the bar. I prefer bars in the day. No crowd, no prancing women or leering men. Just us old drunks and the tv. Sun streaming through the small dirty window.

Out of bed, I thought I’d have toast for breakfast. Last night I baked a loaf of bread and, between you and me, I’m a goddamn good baker. The greatest thing since sliced bread is bread you have to slice yourself, so that’s what I did. I deposited the hunk in my cheap plastic Chinese toaster and waited.

Nothing.

Sometime during the night, the toaster had died. So I shook it, slapped it around, and tried again. It worked for brief second, then died for good. Enraged, I smashed it against the floor, crumbs and bits of plastic everywhere.

Isn’t anything made out of metal anymore?

I went to Someone’s In The Kitchen and looked at their Chinese toasters, then went to Shopko across the street at looked at theirs. They were all the same toaster. Plastic, with too many knobs and settings. Each one had a different brand name but they were all the same toaster.

The great lie of the “free” market.

At home, I went to Ebay and ordered a “vintage” toaster for ten bucks. WORKS! the write-up said. It was made out of metal and simply toasted toast. It had one button: ON/OFF.

I thought back to a week ago to when I was trying to twist out the ice from my cheap plastic Chinese ice tray and all the cubes shattered and flew everywhere, becoming snow essentially. I threw it against the floor, too, and ended up ordering metal ice trays off the internet, ice trays with a handle you pull that pops the cubes out intact.

Do we actually believe our civilization is getting more advanced?

While on the internet looking for real toasters, I discovered there was actually a community out there of people who fucking HATE modern toasters. They get together virtually and bitch about the crappy modern toaster and how its sucks total fucking balls. A whole community! Needless to say, I joined up, choosing Metal Mike as my username.

It’s the same username I used a week ago when I joined the virtual community that fucking HATES the the modern plastic piece-of-shit ice tray.

This is a strange, strange world we live in, people. If you need me, I’ll be at the goddamn bar.

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no..."

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.”

-

Neil Postman, comparing and contrasting 1984 and Brave New World

I ask you, which book is more relevant to our time?

Perhaps it was all a brilliant marketing ploy.

The Indiana pizza parlor which was the first to say they wouldn’t cater gay weddings, I mean. They’ve raised nearly a cool million through crowd-funding.

I was outraged, too, by their intolerance, mainly because I thought they weren’t going to serve gay people, but now I see their only stand was to not cater gay weddings. I am less outraged, but their stand still doesn’t make religious sense because at least one third of heterosexual marriages happening in the U.S. today are unscriptural and even sinful (adulterous) according to the words of Jesus himself. Anyone divorced and remarried without the benefit of their previous spouse dying or cheating on them is in a sinful, adulterous marriage. How many heterosexuals fall into that category, a category no different than gay marriage?

It’s not really about bigotry, but hypocrisy in my opinion. I dislike hypocrites more than bigots. At least bigots are honest.

The oppositional, fuck-you, rebel in me, though, is actually quite delighted that Memories Pizza made so much bank from all of this. This is a brave new world we live in, one swiftly approaching that found in Huxley’s book. Maybe it takes a brave new capitalism to live “the American Dream.”

Good riddance to dickwad Kevin Christopher Bollaert, who started...

Good riddance to dickwad Kevin Christopher Bollaert, who started a revenge porn site which posted naked and sexually explicit pictures of women submitted by angry ex-boyfriends or ex-husbands. To have the pictures removed, the women had to pay Bollaert around three-hundred bucks. Along with the pictures, personal information about the women was also posted, such as email, Facebook, and phone number.

What a classy, classy guy, huh?

Bollaert got 18 years in jail, a firm sentence that pretty much yells “don’t try this shit again”.

Money doesn’t talk, it swears.“It’s alright, Ma. I’m only...

Money doesn’t talk, it swears.

“It’s alright, Ma. I’m only bleeding.”

—Bob Dylan