Entries from September 2009 ↓

With apologies to George Lucas, who I hope never sends me a cease and desist order.

Do your expeditions always result in casualties?

Are you sick of the countless wasted hours spent in an ancient ruins throwing bags of rocks and remote droids down every hall to set off falling celiings, spike pits, shock floors, and who knows what else?

Do you still get injured due to traps that only react to certain conditions that only organics seem to set off?

Well waste time and lives no more! Hire Admiral Ackbar’s Adventure Assistants! Yes Admiral Ackbar’s Adventure Assistants work cheap and they work well. They always scout ten feet ahead of you in any situation and come for far less than Calrissian’s Crawlers! Calrissian’s Crawlers are often ex-mercenaries who want the treasure you seek for themselves! When you hire from Ackbar, you get a sharp-eyed Mon Calamari who scouts ten feet ahead at all times. When your young Mon Calamari senses the slightest hint of danger, he’ll yell “It’s a trap!” at the top of his lungs and bolt down the nearest safe path to the exit, providing you with a clear way out that won’t result in grievous bodily harm!

And that’s because Admiral Ackbar’s Adventure Assistants come with a quality guarantee! Admiral Ackbar only hires college archaeology students as interns desperately seeking credit who want nothing more than to just go home, just like the Admiral himself at the Battle of Endor. Admiral Ackbar’s Adventure Assistants consider safety to be job one, two, and any other number a Givin can come up with! Forget Calrissian’s Crawlers, that is unless you want a face full of acid and no artifacts to sell off to pay for the expensive reconstructive surgery!

Remember, if it’s not Admiral Ackbar’s Adventure Assistants, it’s a trap!

I don’t get too political here for the most part (though it’s not hard to guess I lean way left, by any means). I can usually just laugh at death panels and the other lies going around.

Today, thanks to a sign I just saw at the “tea party march” down DC way, I have to make a political post. And it’s going to have some seriously offensive content. Fortunately, some of these people are just stupid, like the one holding a sign covered in stars that said

“I am not a Terroist [sic], Socialist or Extreemist [sic]. I am a PATRIOT.”

Really, they did put in a lot of effort. A circle of stars, nice color work, just uh…well, not so much with the spelling. And right now I’m looking at someone walking with a “Fair Tax” flag (now that I could write plenty about later). He’s holding it backwards. And there’s signs saying “Who is John Galt?” from the objectivists who forget someone has to scrub the toilets, to quote Frank Fontaine. The standard implication Obama is a Nazi, via a sign saying “Got Swastika?” Most of the time, we can just be amused by these signs. And an interview with a woman who said “We have some people in talk radio that are tellin’ us the truth!”

This time, one sign really concerned me.

“Obama,

We have waken[sic] up to your evil plans to destroy our country. Take your racist, un-American *ACORN* group and arrogent[sic] wife back to your own country and strip their rights away.”

Now granted, there were plenty of insane signs as always, but something about this one just really gets my attention, probably the racist undercurrent combined with general Beckian (Comma Glennian) batshittery.

“We have waken[sic] up to your evil plans to destroy our country.”

Now honestly, I’ve never been a fan of say, GW. But I don’t remember people in such large, visible numbers declaring he had evil plans to destroy the country. Was he fucking up? Sure. Were members of his administration war profiteers? You bet. But did he have an “evil plan to destroy the country”? No, he really didn’t. He just was shitty at the job.

Now how in the world have people come to the conclusion Obama’s got active, malevolent intent? What would be the point, even, of actively destroying the US if he even had that ability?

I hear a lot of “take the country back.” From what? Who? I heard a claim of Obama’s secret government, and cries of socialism (and frankly, as someone who’s just fine with some socialism, we’re nowhere close to it anyway, seeing as the government doesn’t control any means of production).

Let’s just visit the next piece of the quote.

“Take your racist, un-American *ACORN* group and arrogent[sic] wife back to your own country and strip their rights away.”

Oh.

I guess that fits with the self-contradictory “Muslim Marxist” claim. Not that Marxism and religion match, or that Obama is Muslim. Or that ACORN is un-American, even. I’d dare say any group which gets more voters to the polls is pretty damn American on either side. But, since ACORN has a tendency to push minorities to the polls, they helped change the balance of power. And as for his arrogant wife and own country…well, if the scary black man really is from Kenya (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary), we can send him away! It’ll be okay, and take his wife too, she’s another negro. Obviously that means she’s not American, because if she was, she wouldn’t be getting uppity, because let’s face it, that’s the word they’re wanting to use.

Oh, and the whole of ACORN. We don’t need those darkies in the US either. I used to wonder why the hatred for an organization that encourages voting. I don’t now.

Just what rights have been stripped away, anyway? Over the last eight years old white conservative men have given us DHS, the PATRIOT act, warrant-less wire tapping, torture, and a suspension of habeus corpus. That was all under the watch of George W. Bush. Some of those programs have ended already, thus restoring our rights since President Obama’s election.

The nasty underbelly has shown itself, and it’s racism, plain and simple. From claims the president isn’t born in the US (A claim that people had the decency to leave alone when it came to John McCain, despite having been born to US parents in Panama because they understood a US parent makes him a natural born citizen), to that he’s a Muslim (fine if he is, we don’t have a religious test to hold office, but he’s not), to overtly racist propaganda.

This one came from Doctor David McKalip. A Tea Party activist, Beckian extraordinaire, and member of American Medical Association’s house of delegates. I’m sticking this one under a thumbnail because holy shit, it’s vitriolic, racist, and pretty damn shocking.

This is where we are as a nation. A group that’s had power for 30 years, effectively, has finally been totally put out of power and has shown its true colors. Ad hominem attack, overt racism, panic and lies.

When Barack got elected, I thought “wow, we really HAVE made it somewhere. Racism is still there, but I think it really might not be the problem it used to be.”

I was wrong.

Am I saying everyone against health care reform is racist? Absolutely not. Am I saying everyone who was against the stimulus package, or other policies from the administration is racist? Certainly not.

But it’s become very, very clear a large amount of the people fighting are, even in congress, where you can’t get most of the Republicans to say “Barack Obama is constitutionally eligible to be president” even. At best, they’re playing to an extremist base. At worst, they are that base, and this shit has to end. Now.

I know I find a commercial series to hate daily, usually locals, but what is this crap Dentyne is pulling with the “friend request?”

It’s such an obvious grab at “the youth culture” as seen by a sixty year old “youth expert.”

I can’t help but even feel a bit patronized by the commercial. It features your standard awkward commercial male, a little geeky, fairly shy, who just goes around asking everyone “Friend request?” and passing them a piece of gum. Then narrating “accepted!” Because that’s how reality works. You see a random person, give them gum, and hey, friends! And at the end they’re all at a party together, even the people who didn’t take the gum! And like a smurf, every phrase the man speaks is replaced with “Friend request.” Bad breath? “Friend request please!” A date? “Friend request tonight?” Caught in bed with someone’s wife? “Friend request?” Sure, two are made up, but let’s see how long before they make it 100%.

Okay, maybe that IS how it works with some people, but we’ll get into my dislike of the concept of MySpace friends (random people you add to your list who you never have and never will meet or even email) later. For now, I’m sticking it to Dentyne’s terrible ad series. Because it doesn’t just end on TV, now there’s prevalent banner ads with hipster-approved drawings. With, of course, the “friend request?” caption.

For some reason ad companies seem to think co-opting some piece of popular culture, particularly when they don’t understand it, will get customers. The masses will say “they understand us!” and flock to the product. Because…you know, I can’t follow the logic here, even having worked in advertising.  If there’s one thing the kids hate, it’s their culture being abused by the squares, the old people, the grups!

I’d like to blame focus groups, because I know they’re hand-picked these days as the most easily malleable and receptive subjects, but did nobody see this ad, place their forehead and cheek firmly to the palm, and declare “uuuuugggghhhh”? Followed by someone near him saying “I know, right? Yeeeecchhh.” But instead, Dentyne continues to put money into an awful campaign. And they can go friend request themselves with this banality. It’s like…

Aw smurf. I get it, this appeals to Grey’s Anatomy fans doesn’t it? Anyone who still says “McDreamy” and “McSteamy” (by still I mean EVER said it without cringing) probably thinks this is just amazingly clever.

Is that show a hit still? I think it might be time to kill myself.

But there clearly is one. I see them advertised constantly, people use them as a status symbol, and boy do I ever get a lot of spam for them.

They demand big time floorspace in retail outlets, and even favorite online retailers of mine occasionally just decide to sell a bunch of watches.

So…what’s the big deal? Do we all just have somewhere to be that urgently? I do understand the need to keep track of time, though there are clocks EVERYWHERE now. On TV, hooked up to the TV, on a cell phone, all over the public space. I don’t think people even wear watches to tell time now, I think they wear them to as fashion statements. Yes, it’s great that a Rolex winds itself by your motion, but would anyone care if another brand did the same and wasn’t called Rolex? Would you buy a Fauxlex if it was exactly as high quality, even the same materials, but a lesser price?

Most people wouldn’t. They’ll pay $2,000 for a watch that doesn’t particularly outperform others, it just looks relatively nice. Yes, relatively. Let’s face it, watches still look like watches, no matter how special they are. Or they’ll pay $500 for a replica that doesn’t work at all, but boy does it look just like the real thing.

Now don’t get me wrong. I appreciate craftsmanship. I appreciate all that goes into a watch. I just don’t think any watch should cost over $500 or you’re just trying to prove you’ve got the biggest balls. I can understand a stand-up clock of some sort being that much, even, a grandfather clock or a really artistic piece. But the most artistic watches are just $250 anyway.

You want to see a cool watch? Check these out. Unique, functional, and definitely eye-catching. But nothing is over $250. They’re still mostly jewelry, like any watch over $15, but at least they’re unique and a relative reasonable price.

But that’s exactly why you’ll never see them. They’re unique, they’re underpriced. Damn it, we like our status symbols to be easily recognized by brand, overpriced, and not that impressive the more you think about it.

You know, now that I say that, I’m a little surprised I don’t get “$tarbuck5 R3pl1c@ <up” spam.