Entries Tagged 'Bullshit' ↓

MSNBC runs live all day, based off the eastern feed.

The Ed Show, Hardball, Countdown, Maddow, same time for everybody. This is how most news channels work, really, with repeats later on in the night. And that seems to work fine.

But the Olympics get a tape delay.

On a live network.

The Olympics that are happening right now in Vancouver will not be seen by west coast residents until 3 hours after the events are over on the network that runs everything else live.

What the fuck? Is this a secret plan to keep The Ed Show off of the west coast? Does LA not deserve Dylan Ratigan? The only effect of this delay is that shows which wouldn’t be pre-empted suddenly are, but only for half the country. If they kept to one feed, they’d be able to break in for news and events as needed, and they’d certainly not have to worry about repeating coverage to make up for the separation.

But to hell with that. Tape delay it. Show it live on the east coast, delayed on the west, they decided, for a reason absolutely nobody can figure out.

I’m starting to think NBC just wants to go bankrupt and get it over with, I really am. They’ve got a decent Thursday block, Chuck, Heroes, and Saturday Night Live. The rest of the time is a big festival of “No thanks.” Unless you’re the one person excited for The Marriage Ref or Who Do You Think You Are, then I guess NBC’s doing well.

Maybe NBC is just trying the Bush theory of promotion. You know, Michael Brown fucks up FEMA, gets a Medal of Freedom. Harriet Miers fires US attorneys out of political motivation and calls Bush “the most brilliant man she has ever met”, she gets sent up for a Supreme Court nomination. Jay Leno bombs on primetime but says how great NBC’s programming and sponsors are, gets sent to the Tonight Show.

Forever, really. Every year Valentine’s Day comes and goes, and every year I see ad blitzes for romantic comedies, overpriced teddy bears, and pajama deliveries.

Nobody actually likes the day. People in relationships hate the pressure it adds. Single people hate the reminders of being anywhere from an extra wheel to a second class citizen. Valentine’s is when you remember you are very much alone, that you were passed over for a promotion because you weren’t married and the other guy had a wife to pay for (true story for me and several friends), and that one chick decided instead of spending the day with you as planned she’d go spend the weekend with a guy she met the night before. Or that the woman you went on that fantastic date with will talk about how she doesn’t want a relationship with anyone.

It’s a crappy day for everyone who isn’t selling flowers. Although to be fair, more and more companies get in on the act. Even Sony is offering Valentine’s promotions on the Playstation Network, and NHL 10 has gotten Valentine’s related in-game ads. Really, I find the in-game ads most puzzling, the demographic least likely to celebrate Valentine’s gets the most intrusive ads.

But nobody ACTUALLY celebrates Valentine’s. People just get depressed on it over never living up to expectations. Even Christmas manages to come out as a better day for most people, even Thanksgiving which has two fights built in. There’s no real romance to the day, it’s “Hey, look what I’ve got and you don’t” at most. It’s a damn near objectivist holiday. A purer form of consumerism than Christmas has become, and how better to celebrate the martyrdoms of two Saints named Valentine? Buy some crap you nor your partner will like. A cheap paper sentiment, chalk flavored candy with illiterate scrawling, some bad chocolate, and according to the commercials, sit in adjacent tubs while your resurrected erection goes to waste after popping a pill.

I say to hell with it, it’s time to recognize this day as the blight of a social obligation it is, wherein you’re forced to spend exorbitant amounts of money on shit, or be reminded that nobody will ever love you.That if you buy less than the next guy (and let’s be fair, it’s usually men who have to buy all this), you don’t love your partner as much. But you can ask a Walgreens gift advisor for help fixing that! Buy more mylar balloons! Buy more bags of fattening candy that’s somehow worse than candy corn, but is purchased anyway because of the heart shapes! Enjoy the continued ad blitz wherein every break is composed of Vermont Teddy Bear, Cialis, Pajamagram, Cialis, Vermont Teddy Bear.

It’s my belief that we must immediately begin calling Valentine’s VD. Clearly it IS a disease, leading to poverty, depression, and self-injury, so the moniker is appropriate. Beyond that, given time, it should acquire RAS (redundant acronym syndrome) syndrome, as with PIN number and ATM machine.. Soon everyone will call it VD Day, and perhaps, given the unpleasant connotation forget about it entirely. Nobody’s going to buy a Vermont Teddy Bear or Pajamagram (which, by the way, are part of the same company) for VD Day.

A bill amendment in the senate was voted on to remove funding from Haliburton, Blackwater, and other companies contracting overseas if they require mandatory binding arbitration for absolutely  anything that goes wrong. No chance of litigation, trial, anything, just arbitration. Arbitration is already known to go very much in favor of the company, seeing as they pay the bills. It’s bad enough on civil suits, but this is applying it to criminal issues.

Like rape.

In fact that is, specifically, what brought this vote up.

Three years ago, because that’’s how long getting past the arbitration clause has taken, Jamie Leigh Jones was, allegedly, I still have to say allegedly legally but it’s kinda “fucking duh”, gang-raped by her co-workers at KBR/Haliburton, in Baghdad. Her contract declared this to be “personal injury arising in the workplace.” That includes the part where she was stuffed into a shipping crate afterwards.

Now that alone is pretty outrageous, and the fact they tried to say it was contractually bound to arbitration moreso. Not like Haliburton is considered a company of good guys, right? But it goes on from there.

Senator Al Franken (I love saying that) put in a bill to withdraw funding from companies with those clauses. The vote passed 70-28-2. Two abstentions, 70 yay, 28 nay.

28 people voted that what happened should never go to trial, effectively. That companies with mandatory arbitration clauses deserve government contracts, regardless of the truly serious crimes happening.

They voted that hey, if you’re raped, that’s too bad, and a company representative will decide what happens to you and the assailants. If anything. They can just fire the victim for false claims against the company without seeing any evidence either way, and they’re completely free of accountability. Isn’t that wonderful?

So, 28 senators, all men, all Republican, have voted that rape is just fine with them, because the free market said so. Notorious assholes John Ensign, Mitch McConnel, Jon Kyl, and David Vitter all are included on the list of nays.

How crazy is that? Michele Bachmann supported the amendment in the house. So out of touch, this is a real quote of hers. “I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We’re the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours. We have people that are working two jobs.” Yet she realizes that mandatory arbitration is a bad idea.

But not these guys:

In the interest of fairness, ten Republican senators voted against rape:

All the rest of you, however, deserve a lifetime of being skullfucked by a kakapo.

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.

What’s the point?

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, I mean hi-definition channels running standard-definition shows. This isn’t something like running SD shows from 1995, mind you, I mean recent shows which air, otherwise, in hi-def.

For example, TBS HD is airing My Name Is Earl. But they’re airing the 4:3 version at a stretched aspect ratio. The show is filmed in high definition, and aired in hi-def on NBC. Cartoon Network HD labels The Clone Wars as “Available in Hi-Definition”, and yet runs the show at a stretched 4:3 aspect. Same with The Venture Brothers, the third season at least, which is drawn in an HD ratio and is even on blu-ray.

It seems that Turner does this on all their channels that aren’t CNN, for some reason. TNT airs originals in HD, at least, but plenty of other shows are stretched and are fully headache inducing.

EVERYTHING on Cartoon network gets the treatment of stretched ratios. Okay, that may be wrong, there could be some of the CN:Real abomination not being stretched (exception for Destroy Build Destroy, which has the best title…ever). But right now, Ultimate Avengers 2 is on. Again, a movie mastered in 16:9, run in 4:3 stretch. To make it worse, CNHD doesn’t just stretch, they zoom. CNHD actually crops the top and bottom of any 4:3 show to an extent, in addition to stretching. This may apply to TBS HD, I haven’t checked because my brain is already swelling.

Okay, I checked. It does. They’re airing Men In Black right now, 4:3, stretched/cropped. What the fuck, y’all?

Why? Why not just preserve the ratio properly? People who want a stretched image are extremely rare, and most televisions have the option to stretch the image anyway. Why make your channel unwatchable by the majority of HDTV owners?

I don’t see why aspect ratios are so complicated, but local stations do apparently. In Phoenix, mind you, not Nowhere, Arkansas. Routinely, footage which is 16:9 is shown at 4:3 and vice versa. I’ve seen times when footage was formatted for 16:9, but was run through the program to process 4:3 for 16:9 ratios, compressing the image horizontally until it looked like a strip of paper. Or a 5×8 photograph, run the other way so that it fills the screen, ending in a 8×13 picture of one amazingly fat person. Alternately, a healthy looking Olsen twin or slightly less mega-chinned Heidi Montag.

Television and competence clearly don’t mix.

Sure, there’s all the flagging options, but really, when a post is just insulting there’s no good option, all you have is “Spam/Overpost.”

Craigslist needs a button labeled “Fuck you!” Might not be bad in the personals section, admittedly, when you have your incredibly unappealing individuals demanding perfection, but mostly it’s needed for the jobs section, particularly the creative ones. Let me provide an example post of why it’s needed.

“We are a small local firm seeking a couple research assistants to help with the editing and revising of textbooks, which will be published shortly. The subject matter is varied, but the current project deals with emerging threats and homeland security.

This is an unpaid position, but a credit will be awarded to those who contribute and this is a definite resume builder. The schedule is very flexible and the only requirements are excellent writing skills and a laptop.

Interested? Let’s talk.”

“Do our work for free! We’ll put your name in small print in return, where it’ll never be seen and we’ll take all the credit for your research.”

“Fuck you!”

See how that works? It’s cathartic, and I think if someone get hammered with the “Fuck you!” button, they’ll quickly come to understand there’s something about their offer that doesn’t jive with the market.

Cox commercials are certainly known for being shitty. Low budget, misleading, usually starring the wife of whoever was around (this is completely true, historically Cox Commercials have used the wife of someone). Lately Cox has made an effort to have a budget, license some really really shitty indie songs, and be appealing.

Now they just have stupidity on a higher budget.

I just saw a commercial that said “Dish Network’s commercial may tell you “come on, get happy”, but what they don’t tell you is they’ve raised their prices for the last nine years. But Cox gives you hundreds of channels and no extra charge for high definition!” The latter is a lie, as you’re forced to pay for a more expensive cable box (7 dollars worth, in fact, which is the price of most additional tiers). However, that’s not important.

“We’re describing the price raises of the competitor, but we’re not going to actually talk about prices even though we used “but” to indicate a comparison.”

This might have something to do with the fact Cox has also raised prices for the last nine years, and dish network has those same hundreds of channels.

Once again, fuck marketers and their abuse of all common sense, as in reality the commercial should be “Dish network raises their prices! But so do we! So you’re screwed no matter what!”

The best part of owning a website isn’t those fat stacks of cash (ha, there aren’t any!), it’s the ridiculous email that finds its way to my inbox.

Enjoy. There’s a link in there to his/her youtube page too, which is also rather batshit, but mostly what you’ve read here.

~ Science Like No Other ~

I have all the secrets of infinity in my hands,
i really want to spread it to as many scientists
as possible. so here i go.

here’s a simple scientific test you can experiement
with.

wear black clothes and go to a busy mall
you will notice your mind really hurts, this
is because black colors ( or dark colors )
are pulling other humans imagination and bringing
them to close to you and you read it.

this causes stress especially when you are
surrounded by religious people or something.

but when you WEAR WHITE CLOTHES..
the opposite is true, you reject everyones idealogy
and you get to feel free with your own science.

your own imagination is not disturbed.

you can optimize and re-test this if you want.
you can even wax the body hair you have
and dye your hair to yellow or white.

trust me, this is extreme science like no other
and i have it cracked, this can be used to
stop aging, reverse aging,

we can use this to time travel, be immortal
and make money too

because infinity’s law suggests the more people
you spread this truth to of, the more money
you are likely to make. ( it’s the reward you
get from infinity for giving people the secret )

so tell people to wear white ( be nice, by force
is prohibited by federal law of infinity ).

or just wear white clothes and walk around
shopping malls, you become a role model
and your influence alone will earn you money.

WHITE as you know is a color that pushes
while BLACK is a color that pulls light.

so imagine if you were made up of light
and you were wearing black clothes.

you’d age faster than anyone else.

if you were wearing white, because it pushes
the light back, you could stop yourself
from aging.

try experiementing this with luxury places
because there is a competition going on, on earth.

it’s as if everyones soul has some jealousy
inside them and they do not like it when
someone is about to spread the truth and rise
into power.

so keep yourself safe, experienment around
luxury stores where your safety is not jeapordized.

if you are a highly scientific person, try avoiding
conversation with highly religious people.

my own great parents are religious, so i am not
talking to them not even on the phone.

their voice and the way they think can interfier
with my imagination and distort the science
i am working on.

please feel free to ask me for more information
i am on youtube right now

youtube.com/summertimedancings
post comments on my channel i’ll respond 24/7
to every question you have.

on my youtube page i found david’s video wow
i really want to give this guy all the secrets i have
he can put it into media, become a billionaire
and spark a revolution that can save us all.

i mean all of us, we are all about to become
immortal supreme beings.

all we have to do is wear white clothes
and be obsessed with white stuff.

very simple.

this is no joke, i am about to get this party started

Summer Time Dance

Woo! Hows about dem subtle racist ideas in there? If you’re not a good aryan you’re absorbing everyone else’s thoughts and feelings! Start bleachin’ that skin to go with the body hair!

SilverSonic XL, one of many of the same product that works as a small overear audio amplifier (so, a hearing aid shaped like a bluetooth headset).

The ad asks the question “Do you wish you had sonic hearing?”

That is not a misquote.

Sonic hearing.

son·ic (snk)
adj.
1. Of or relating to audible sound: a sonic wave.
2. Having a speed approaching or being that of sound in air, about 1,220 kilometers (760 miles) per hour at sea level.
3. Slang Extremely exciting and fast-paced: a sonic lifestyle.

Do you wish you had hearing related to audible sounds? Do you wish your hearing had a speed approaching that of 1,220 KMPH? Do you consider hearing a lifestyle?

Unless you’re deaf, this commecial is selling you WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE.

I wish I could make this angrier, but the only way to do that is start typing “DAMNIT DAMNIT FUCK” for several pages. I say typing because copy-pasting doesn’t release the fury I feel right now. So just envision R Lee Ermy neckpunching someone, and you’ll know how I feel.

Oh, and after, it says “The SilverSonic XL is discreet, so nobody will know you have sonic hearing!”

Why are there tons of writers, good ones, who can’t find jobs in advertising, but that idiot did? Also, why isn’t he currently being stabbed with a pen?