David S. Atkinson's Blog, page 262

If You’re Going To Play Dead Then You Can’t Get Up

I would think this concept would be pretty clear, but if you’re going to play dead then you can’t just get up and walk around. It might be hot, you might want some water, but it wrecks the whole thing if you just get up and start walking around. Do it right or don’t do it at all.

Apparently, a group of vendors in China decided to stage a protest, claiming that urban management workers — known as “chengguan” — (who had earlier given the vendors trouble for blocking traffic) had beaten a sidewalk vendor named Han to death. Unfortunately, as Han was playing dead under a sheet on a gurney, the heat wave got to him. He gave up and got up to get some water.

According to the article, Han has been detained for disturbing social order, as one might expect for getting up while faking one’s death.

Frankly, though the chengguan may be a real problem (I don’t know) and the vendors may really have needed to do something (again, I don’t know), I’m thinking they shouldn’t have gone through with this unless Han was really committed. I don’t know how hot it was, but if he just needed a drink of water and got up as a result, then I’m thinking he wasn’t as committed as he needed to be. The vendors probably should have figured that out before they got started.

I’m just saying, if you’re going to play dead, you need to really be into it. You can’t just get up for drinks of water. If you’re going to do that, you just shouldn’t bother in the first place.

 

My German Restaurant Choice Is Validated By Bears

I was only mildly amused when I heard that a Colorado Springs German restaurants was having problems with a bear raiding leftover German food from their dumpster. However, I became a bit more interested when I realized the restaurant was Edelweiss. After all, that is my usual German restaurant:

Bears like the same German food that I do.

My wife and I go to this place all the time, or at least as often as we can given that Colorado Springs is a bit of a drive from our place. We frequently go hiking in that area so we both have an excuse to be near there and to have the calories we’ll need to be able to spare to eat there (we can never decide and always end up getting one of the restaurant’s immense sampler platters).

For some reason, I find it amusing that bears approve of my choice in German restaurants. I’m kind of surprised, since the restaurant is in the middle of town, but I suppose bears are willing to travel for good German food. I hope they don’t have to end up doing anything about the bear, because that would be sad, but in any event I’m not too worried. I’d risk bears for the kind of food Edelweiss serves.

Consider Supporting Red Dust: a mixed-blood Dust Bowl childhood

If you haven’t already heard about this, give a thought to supporting Red Dust: a mixed-blood Dust Bowl childhood. This is a documentary project on the mixed ancestry experience during the dust bowl being organized by Allison Hedge Coke and it is in the funding stage right now. They need to raise about $20,000 for the project, so any help you can provide will help them get that much closer to being able to put this documentary together.

There is more information, along with a video you can check out, on the fundraiser page for the project. To give some background, though, much of the historical perspective we have on the dustbowl comes from an Anglo as opposed to a Native or mixed ancestry experience of that time. Though one set of experiences isn’t necessarily more valuable than another, our historical understanding is incomplete if we don’t have the ability to evaluate different perspectives.

Allison Hedge Coke’s father experienced this world of the dust bowl first hand, but doesn’t feel that the existing works capture fully what it was for him to be alive at that time and place in the world. Funding for the project would provide equipment, travel expenses, and such for Allison Hedge Coke to take her father back to the various places he lived during the dust bowl (Boise City, Oklahoma; Baca County, Colorado; Peralta, New Mexico; Peacock, Texas, and Ft. Sill) where he picked cotton, was inducted into WWII, and so on in order to explore with him and document his memories.

This promises to be a fascinating documentary work, one that will fill in gaps in the currently available documentary work. However, not to be morbid, but this man is 91 years old. There is only so much time left to attempt to preserve what this man experienced, or it will be lost to us.

As such, consider supporting the project if you can. There is no reason to give up what is so easily within our ability to preserve.

Will The Person Who Forgot Their Shark Please Return To Claim It?

Will the person who forgot their shark at the Sea Dog Brew Pub on Nantucket please return to claim it? A cleaning crew arrived to find the 5-foot-long shark blocking the door and no one is quite sure why the shark was left there. Regardless, whoever left it clearly needs to pick it up.

We all know how this probably happened. You go out for a night of drinking. When you wake up in the morning, you realize you left something somewhere during the night. Sometimes it’s your keys. Sometimes it’s your wallet. Sometimes it’s just a jacket. However, sometimes it’s a 5-foot-long shark.

“Oh hell, Marcus. My head is killing me. Wait…where’s the shark?”

“Dunno, Phillip. You must have left it somewhere last night.”

Heck, the person who left it is probably embarrassed. Now he or she has to try to remember where all he or she was that particular night and call each asking “by any chance, has someone turned in a shark?” I’m sure we’ve all had mornings like that, and it’s no picnic to add on top of the likely hangover that he or she is probably suffering from.

Still, whoever it is needs to claim the shark. Embarrassed or not, it isn’t fair to make other people clean up after your drunk mistakes. Please, people…claim your sharks.

Suggestions For Identifying Satire

It is becoming problematic to identify satire these days. We all laugh when someone mistakes satirical news articles for real ones, except when we didn’t notice it was satirical ourselves. I think part of this is that there are so many satire sites out there these days that we don’t immediately pick up on satirical sites that we aren’t already familiar with. Worse, the actual news is sometimes so absurd these days that even the satirical articles sometimes seem completely possible.

Just think about how many satirical sites there are out there. I don’t think anyone is familiar with them all. I know The Onion, The Daily Currant, The Lapine, and The Borowitz Report. I’m sure there are others. We won’t even talk about how many teacher friends tell me that their students got mad when they didn’t realize that the assigned reading, Swift’s A Modest Proposal, was satire.

Whether understandable or not, there is a chance that this can happen to anybody. It happened to me at least once, I admit it. However, there are some things we can do when we find an article that seems really, really wild in order to not look like idiots when someone calls us on it for assuming it was real:

- If the website has an ‘about’ section, read it real quick. Sites like The Lapine mention that they are satire in their ‘about’ page.

- Look at their other articles. One of the other articles may make it clear that the site is satire. For example, you can be pretty sure Scalia didn’t try to burn down the Supreme Court building. Context can help when a particular article is so close to absurd reality as to seem possible itself.

- Check to see if there are other news articles about the subject. If something really wild did happen, the site you found won’t be the only news source reporting on it. Reporters can sometimes get an exclusive, but other news sources will make some kind of report if it’s actual news.

- Do a quick search for the name of the site and ‘satire.’ Someone else may clue you in that the site you have found is a satire site.

Do I remember to do these things myself all the time? No, sometimes I still make mistakes. However, when I remember them, I usually realize what’s really going on. Then I don’t look quite as dumb. Given the state of the world, satire is sometimes hard to identify these days.

Please Stop Burying Your Guns In The Ground. It’s Preventing Children From Fishing.

I just ran across an article about a 9-year-old boy in Arizona who was digging for worms and instead came across a .38-caliber revolver and a bullet buried in a plastic bag. Given this, I’m going to have to ask everyone to please stop burying their guns in random spots. You are preventing children from fishing.

Granted, the article doesn’t specifically mention that the boy was digging for worms to go fishing. However, I don’t want to even imagine why else he would have wanted worms other than he planned to use the worms to go fishing.

Regardless, since he found the gun instead of worms and apparently immediately told the police, I’m betting he didn’t get to go fishing. For one thing, he probably stopped digging when he found the gun. For another, I’m betting all the police and such kept the boy around the area until way after it was too late for the boy to still go fishing.

Is this what you really want? To stop young children from fishing? That isn’t right. Don’t stop children from fishing.

People, please…be more careful with your damn guns.

More Fight Club Rules

For some reason, a number of my friends have been referencing the Fight Club rules recently. Maybe it has something to do with the graphic novel sequel that is in the works, but maybe it doesn’t. In any event, whenever this has popped up, me and a number of others have felt the need to clue people in on other, unknown Fight Club rules.

Let’s take a look at a few, shall we?

- Fight Club Rule 347: No cell phones during dinner.

- Fight Club Rule 20040: Be sure to say sorry if you knee the other fighter in the groin. That’s not cool, dude.

- Fight Club Rule 999: Nobody really wants to know what you think of their haircut.

- Fight Club Rule 23.H34: The rule about no shirts does not apply to the fight club cafeteria.

- Fight Club Rule 00000: No loud noises after 10:00 PM.

- Fight Club Rule 823: No twittering about fight club. You can say it’s not talking all you want, but it is.

- Fight Club Rule 37337: Nobody likes a crybaby.

- Fight Club Rule 98210: If you have to talk about fight club, at least don’t say anything mean about anybody without a good reason.

- Fight Club Rule 11210: No skorts.

- Fight Club Rule 334: Just because you have two personalities does not mean that you get a turn for each.

That’s just a few. There are many, many more. Kind of changes your mental picture when you know a few more of the rules, doesn’t it? They cut the rule list down quite a bit for the movie because they thought it made things look kind of silly.

Castle Grayskull Oddities

Like many people who were young boys in the early 80s (as well as some young girls, and even possibly some odd men and women who weren’t young at the time), I used to have He-Man’s Castle Grayskull. As a child, there were many things I didn’t question about the toy that perhaps I should have. Looking back on it right now, there is at least one thing that strikes me as weird.

Let’s take a look:

What’s odd about this? Well, look at that trap door in the throne room. When the throne is moved, the trap door opens.

First of all, Castle Grayskull is supposed to be the home of the good guys. Do the good guys usually resort to tricks like trap doors? As I remember, He-Man usually faced enemies bravely without tricks. I don’t remember him ever resorting to something like a trap door, particularly in his own house. So…why is it there?

Second, why does the trap door apparently let out in the antechamber of the castle instead of in a dungeon or something. Ha ha, evildoer, you’ve fallen for my trick and through the trap door! Now you gotta…climb back up the same ladder you did a moment ago. Yeah, sorry about that…for some reason we never built stairs and have to use that ladder.

Last, why would they have made the trap door to be triggered by movement of the throne? Isn’t that an odd way to trigger a trap door? Oh, you have me trapped in my own home, evildoer. Before I respond to your threat, let me just shift my throne so it no longer faces you real quick…

Granted, this was a toy and was made a while ago. I’m sure it isn’t supposed to stand up under scrutiny and I’m not supposed to subject it to such. Regardless, this seems kind of odd to me now. I can’t help but wonder about it, however much it’s pointless for me to do so.

The Turks Too Lax In Clearing Bird Of Spying

Apparently, villagers in a rural Turkish village found a kestrel that had a leg band labelled “24311 Tel Avivunia Israel.” The bird was brought to authorities who nicknamed the bird “Israeli Spy” and released the bird after x-raying to determine that the bird wasn’t carrying any spy devices. Clearly, the Turks were way too lax in investigating this spying bird.

Here’s a photo of a kestrel just so you know what kind of bird we’re talking about:

Think about it, would a bird necessarily have to have spy devices in order to spy for Israel? Hasn’t the bird got eyes? Can’t it hear? I didn’t see any mention that the Turks had bothered to interrogate the bird at all. Didn’t they even ask it what it had seen or heard, much less what it was prepared to report back to Israel?

The fact that they didn’t apparently even try to interrogate the kestrel suggests to me that the Turks aren’t really serious about their security. For heaven’s sake, man…at least as the bird a question or two.

We’re Missing A Golden Opportunity With This Mouse Memory Implantation Thing

I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how scientists have discovered how to implant fake memories in mice. That is both fascinating and worrisome for a number of reasons, but the thing that concerns me is that we are apparently missing a golden opportunity to screw with the heads of mice.

We should implant memories of The Secret of NIMH into the mice’s heads.

I mean, we’ve got the video already. It shouldn’t be that hard, right? Granted, the way the scientists are implanting memories appears to be more simplistic at this point than uploading actual video, but that has to be on the way. Just think of the possibilities.

After all, these mice would all have memories of being super intelligent and sinister creatures independent of man. What a puzzler it would be for them as to how they got back into cages and why they no longer have electricity of their own. It’d bug the crap out of them. They’d never run through a maze again looking for cheese, too busy trying to figure out what the hell had happened. It’d be great.

Granted, some people might not think it ethical to mess with the minds of mice in this way. However, in this case I think we have to put the entertainment needs of the many over the ethical qualms of the few.