Merry Capitalismas
Archive for December, 2006
phya.pk
Posted in Dollar Dollar Bill Y'all on December 24, 2006 by themaroonYesterday I was flipping through my spam folder, trying to make sure everything in it was actually junk. I get a decent amount of emails from people who came across one of my websites and I try to answer them all, but I suspect a lot of them are flagged and trashed and never seen. I’ve tried to occasionally dig through and find them for the last few years, but it’s such a laborious task that I think I’m going to just give up.
Anyway, one email had a subject line that looked like it might be an actual message from a reader. The name, Sprinter P. Farmhouse, just sounded too realistic to be from a spammer. So I opened it up and it turned out to be a stock tip! How nice of one of my readers to mail me helpful financial advice.
It was about some company named Physicians Adult Daycare. According to Mr. Farmhouse it’s currently trading over the counter at under $2 but in a year will be at $10! I’d say that’s a pretty damned good return on investment.
At first I was a little skeptical. I’m sure Sprinter had my best interests at heart. I mean, why else would he email me a stock tip? But I wasn’t sure if he knew what he was talking about. Picking shares is like driving or playing poker, everyone thinks they’re great at it, few people really are.
So imagine my surprise today when I found that another reader, Moribund Q. Coffeemug emailed me about the exact same stock!!!! His target 1 year price for the stock was only $9.50, but still, that’s pretty damn good. So then I put my thinking cap on.
Let’s look at the evidence. First, they run daycares for senior citizens, and God is making more and more old people every day. That has to be good. And second, two different people wrote me about the same stock and both had similar outlooks. Coincidence? I think not.
Needless to say I called my broker immediately and told him to bet the farm. Anyone else want in? Maybe we can get enough people together to get a seat on the board.
Rabid Consumerism Saves Lives
Posted in Me Thinking So You Don't Have To on December 23, 2006 by themaroonIn the last post I mentioned the death of James Kim. That one saddened all of us tech junkies because the guy was genuinely good at his job. He and some of the other people at Cnet have been an invaluable resource over the years in picking out digital cameras, mp3 players and such. It’s been sad watching trusted reviewers slowly join the cult of the iPod in recent years and James was known as one of the last notable holdouts.
I have to say that I find it ironic that a gadget guru died in a situation where a GPS system could easily have saved his life. Had he had one, rather than a simple paper map, he would probably never have taken that wrong turn and gotten stranded. And even if he did he would have been able to find his way to help.
Even more ironic is the fact that on his personal page on Cnet there’s a list of gadgets he wanted. Number 9 on the list was Sony NV-U70 GPS.
This is why I have long been afraid of irony. I’ve always had the feeling that my death will be something like that. That’s why I never say anything like “gee, airplanes sure are safe” before I fly, or “by the time I’m 50 they’ll have cured cancer”. If Steve Irwin can be killed by an escapee from an aquatic petting zoo I figure irony’s iron jaws could clench shut on me at any point.
And that’s also why I’ll continue to buy every gadget I can think of. When I die I want people to say “damn, that was one unpreventable death.” If anyone can say “he might have lived if only he’d have had a digital camera” I’ve failed as a consumer.
Tax Abuse
Posted in Stuff That Pisses Me Off on December 21, 2006 by themaroonMaybe I’m just a mean person, but does anyone else get pissed when they read stuff like this? Some people go climbing up a mountain in the winter and get stuck and now everybody else’s tax dollars are spent trying to save them. How many tens of thousands of dollars is this particular search costing the people who were smart enough to not put themselves in life threatening situations?
I’m all for search and rescue teams in cases where somebody is accidentally stuck somewhere. The recent James Kim incident comes to mind. He and his family were just driving and got lost. That could happen to anybody. When stuff like that occurs please, by all means, use public money to put some fuel in the chopper and go looking.
But mountain climbing? No way. If you try to climb a mountain for no good reason (and really there hasn’t been any good reason to climb a mountain in this country in over a century) you deserve what you get. Why does part of my income have to go to rescuing morons like that? These people don’t value their lives enough to avoid doing something so dangerous, why should the rest of us value them enough to try to bail them out.
I don’t have anything against mountain climbers. I really can’t fathom what would make somebody want to do something so pointless, but hey, whatever floats your boat. And I also feel bad for the families and all. I just don’t want my money spent on other people’s stupid hobbies.
When people waste my money like that it sickens me. Every $20 spent is one extra hour that some average American who was smart enough to not climb a frozen rock has to work rather than spend time with their family or friends. Why? Because some nutjobs really wanted to see what it looks like from a few thousand feet up. Is it me, or is that wrong?
There should be some sort of mountain climbing insurance that will pay for a private team to rescue you if you’re lost, and if you don’t have that, well, best of luck. And if the local sherriff doesn’t feel like explaining to the hysterical families why we the people aren’t going to foot the bill for their relatives’ idiotic hobbies they can pass the phone to me. I’ll be more than happy.
Paging Mr. umm…
Posted in Me Thinking So You Don't Have To on December 17, 2006 by themaroonOne thing I never understand is when a word from another language that uses a different alphabet is translated into English and spelled oddly. It makes no sense. Take for instance the popular Vietnamese last name Nguyen. That’s pronounced the same as “when”. What moron came up with that?
At some point a Nguyen came to this country and he, or more likely the customs agent he spoke to, could have spelled it any way they chose. If you looked at his name in Vietnamese it would look like squiggle, squiggle, dot, dot, house, bonsai tree and since we don’t have house or bonsai tree symbols on our keyboards we had to translate it over to the Latin alphabet that most of us know and love.
So did that first Nguyen choose Wen, or When, or Wenn, or even Squigglesquiggledotdothousebonsaitree? No, he chose Nguyen. And that’s retarded.
Now every time a Vietnamese kid in America gets a new teacher, or goes to the BMV or anywhere else where their name is called from a list, they have to hear “Steve… umm… nuh… nuh… nuh gue yen?” I’m sure they really appreciate that. They all change their first name from whatever it really is to something like Tom or Dan to try to fit in, so I’m sure they love nothing more than having teachers mangle their name aloud while all of the Smiths and Joneses giggle. I think it’s safe to say that if that first Nguyen is still alive, he better watch his ass. There are probably a hundred thousand wannabe Wens who’d like to have a little talk with him.
If I Had A Million Dollars I'd Hire A Hitman To Wipe Out The Barenaked Ladies
Posted in TV, Movies, Music, and Why They All Suck on December 16, 2006 by themaroonOddly enough, the band I’ve seen in concert the greatest number of times is Barenaked Ladies. I say oddly because I hate them with a passion. If I had to make a top ten list of my least favorite bands, they’d be on it. They might even be number one. They’re like a cross between bad musicians and bad comedians, which are undoubtedly two of the things I hate most. They’re approximately what you’d get if The Backstreet Boys had Cedric the Entertainer write their lyrics.
But when I was growing up, back before the nail was officially pounded into rock and roll’s coffin, my little area had a thriving music scene. Some local acts blew up in the 90′s, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was built, and we had two great modern rock stations that threw annual festivals. Tours like Lollapalooza, Horde, and ROAR all stopped at Blossom Music Center. I went to pretty much all of them, and unfortunately so did the Barenaked Ladies. I always had a mental image of all of the other bands in the back standing around and talking.
“Oh man, who told them about this one?”
“Maybe it was the drummer from No Doubt.”
“Hey dude, don’t look at me. Gwen, put your shirt back on.”
Their half hour of stage time notwithstanding, those festivals were a lot of fun. Often the bands would come out after performing and hang out with the audience. I met a lot of them that way. Moby once told me to stay off the weed because my voice was really scratchy and my eyes were red. That was really funny because I had bronchitis and the only drug I had taken was Robitussin. Nonetheless I appreciated his friendly advice, because if marijuana ever makes you look like a guy with bronchitis you probably should lay off of it for a while, so it was good to know he cared.
At one of those tours the Barenaked Ladies, after performing one of the atrocities they called a set, came back to the second stage area right next to where we were standing with a couple security goons in tow and started signing autographs. When I was a kid my family used to go the PGA event every year, and during the pro-am my brother and I would fight the throng of kids at the 16th hole to get our guidebook signed by all of the golfers. I always got them all. But sometime around the age of 12 I realized that signatures were worthless and uninteresting, so even had I liked BNL, as all of their fans called them, I probably still wouldn’t have wanted theirs.
But a friend of mine was a big fan (I guess I had lower standards back then) and he wanted to go meet them, so I figured “what the hell else am I going to do?” and walked over with him. The line was full of people like the guy in front of us, who was so stoned and/or stupid that he thought they were Marcy Playground, which he claimed was his favorite band, despite the fact that they were playing their only hit song not even 200 feet from us.
Of course it was a concert, so except for the few people who still had their ticket the only paper anyone had was the kind you rolled various dry leaves in and then smoked. So when we got to the front of the line I saw that everyone was using their jacket instead (for autographs, not joints) since it was the only thing readily available. My friend followed suit, and then the lead singer (or should I say lead signer, har har har) made the not unreasonable assumption that because I was in line I would want my jacket autographed too. He held his Sharpie up and I said “Woah man, no thanks.”
He said “I don’t blame you, that’s a smoking jacket man,” which is pretty much the only thing I’ve ever heard from him that I wouldn’t pay good money to forget. And he was right. It was this bright orange thing I had picked up at a thrift store a week before for $4. This would have been in 1996 or 97 when the only people who wore orange in public were me and the guys in the parking lot at the county fair who point you to your spot. Nowadays if you go into Saks you can find a plethora of orange, including jackets almost identical to my cheap little thrift store find that literally cost 40 times as much, but back then I was a pioneer. I like to think I started the trend.
My response was “Yeah. Yeah, that’s why.” Perhaps it was a little obvious that I just didn’t want him to sign my jacket because he sucked, but I think that was pretty friendly considering the hours of their performing I had endured over the years. I mean, sure, you could walk around, maybe go to the bathroom and visit the drink cart for a bottle of Pepsi that cost $8, but you could never get far enough away to make you stop wishing you were in Gitmo being waterboarded instead. And even if you did you would have lost your good seats and been forced to watch the good bands from the back row.
I probably was a lot nicer of a person then. Six years of the Bush administration making a mockery of everything we as a nation hold dear while spending our next ten years of tax dollars on a war that should never have happened while the religious right crept out of their dark, filthy holes to cheer them on can have that effect on you if you pay too much attention to it. Or ten minutes of watching Fox News, which is the Cliff’s Notes version of the same thing. If I were as bitter and world weary then as I am now I probably would have said something more like “Eeeeeeeeeeasy big fella. I’ll pass on you, but do you know if the guy from Soul Coughing is gonna be here later?” But I didn’t, so I let him down easy.
So now whenever I hear one of the musical abortions they call a song I think of that. It’s the only thing that keeps me sane.
New Diet
Posted in Food/Beverage on December 14, 2006 by themaroonWhat the hell is up with vegetables these days? With all of this E. Coli going around I’m considering becoming strictly carnivorous. Being an omnivore is getting a little too dangerous for me. From now on when I eat a hamburger I’m going to use chicken patties for buns and bacon instead of lettuce. Let’s hope Burger King really means it when they say they’ll make stuff “your way”.
Apparently the last batch of tainted lettuce came from Taco Bell. I’m amazed that someone actually figured out what was going on. That means that somebody ate at Taco Bell, got sick, and thought “hmm, this is unusual, I better go see a doctor”. That guy deserves a Nobel Prize.
I definitely would not have been able to put two and two together there. When I eat at Taco Bell, which happens about as frequently as a full solar eclipse, I expect illness. I’ve been reading a little bit about the effects of E. coli and they sound about the same as the ones I get from Nachos Belgrande. In fact, I think they should have to clearly label the symptoms that their foods typically induce on the menu. Soft Taco Supreme: 99 cents and two days of explosive diarrhea. And instead of Mild, Medium, and Fire sauces they should have Tums, Pepto Bismol, and Penicillin.
The whole Taco Bell incident didn’t really scare me too much. I probably have a better chance of a being killed by telephone pole that fell on me after it was struck by an asteroid than of eating at one of those shitholes. But the previous one was a little close to home. I have bought that brand of bagged spinach dozens of times, and people in my area got sick from it. E. coli is unlikely to kill me, because as far as I know my immune system is a well-oiled machine, but it sounds so unpleasant enough that I might be tempted to do the job for it. I don’t handle stomach illnesses well and that sounds like one of the worst.
So from now on I have a new rule. If it wasn’t shot or boiled alive at some point, I ain’t eatin’ it. I might have to spend a lot of money on Lipitor, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
The Nerfization of America
Posted in Me Thinking So You Don't Have To on December 11, 2006 by themaroonI was reading my friend Richard’s post about the end of “the days of anything goes”. When Las Vegas goes non-smoking you know it’s more than just a trend, it’s an unstoppable juggernaut. You can now see a tiger, gamble away your mortgage, and pay a woman to shove a whole deck of cards into her anus while 4 people watch, all within a 300 ft radius, but you can’t do it while smoking.
I really see it less as the end of the days of anything goes and more as the end of the days of personal accountability. Are you a smoker who can’t quit or a barfly who doesn’t like second hand smoke but doesn’t have the necessary will power to change venues? Fuck it, just outlaw smoking everywhere. Are you a restaurant patron who wants to eat healthy but couldn’t pass up a desert if your life depended on it? Hey, let’s ban that shit too. Remember, you can’t make a bad choice if you can’t make any choices at all.
Do you know what I blame all of this on? Elevator doors. I’ve been telling people this for years and everyone looks at me like I’m nuts. But I think that the modern elevator door was the opening salvo in the war on individual responsibility.
Once upon a time elevator doors maimed people somewhat frequently. Back in the early days they didn’t have all of the convenient sensors they do now. If you tried to get in while the door was closing and your timing was bad, you got what you deserved. If the elevator operator (whose most important function was to prevent such injuries) wasn’t paying attention you could end up with broken arms and legs, or maybe even dead. And that was the way it should be. There aren’t many tasks in life easier than boarding an elevator. Call me an elitist if you will, but I think that if you can’t consistently get on an elevator without incident society is better off without you.
Of course as elevators began to approach ubiquity it became apparent that it was not going to be cost effective to pay an operator to man them at all times, so engineers added a number of features to allow the common man to operate one himself. That’s when the doors began to change. No longer did they simply crush you with all of your might if you were dumb enough to be caught between them. They just opened back up. And that, my friend, was when personal accountability died.
It was the beginning of our Nerf culture. Those who couldn’t manage the simple task of either getting on before the doors began to close or waiting for the next lift were suddenly saved by technology. What used to be (rightly) fatal quickly became commonplace, and it whetted our taste for relying on things other than our own common sense and intelligence to save us.
America then spent the better part of the last century putting a symbolic foam padding around everything to protect us from ourselves. Are the borderline-retarded routinely burning themselves by driving with a thin foam cup of coffee between their legs? That’s okay too, we’ll just sue McDonalds until they turn down the temperature. Sure, some people who are intelligent enough to handle a beverage without injury like their coffee hot, but fuck them. You have a right to not burn yourself, just like you have a right to the foods without transfats that you can’t decide to eat on your own. You could pass a law simply requiring those foods to be clearly labeled, but then you’d still have to choose not to eat them, and you know you wouldn’t. They’re tasty.
No longer is a clean, healthy lifestyle just for those who choose one. Nope, we’re going to save everyone from themselves, whether they like it or not. Whether it benefits humanity or not. Because let’s face it, the best way to solve many of the real problems facing humanity, like global warming, poverty, overpopulation, and water scarcity is to ensure that everyone dumb enough to get stuck in an elevator door (or work in a place that will almost assuredly give them lung cancer, or be unable to read a menu and not eat foods that are clearly labeled as being bad for them) doesn’t end up dead as a result of their own stupidity.
8 Year Old Girl Owns Bill O'Reilly
Posted in Conclusive Proof That People Are Stupid, Opinions You Would Agree With If You Weren\'t An Idiot on December 9, 2006 by themaroonThis video cracks me up:
The best part might be the song at the end.
Bill O’Reilly even responded with:
Hilarious. The score:
Bill O’Reilly: 0
Anonymous 8 year old girl: 1
Isn’t that sad? Let’s hope the little girl turns her attention to Glen Beck, Hannity and Colmes, and all of the other idiotic talking heads on television today.
Wii/Twilight Princess
Posted in Enjoyable Ways to Waste Time on December 9, 2006 by themaroonEveryone is asking me what I think of the Wii. Long story short, best game system ever. It succeeds in doing exactly what Nintendo set out to do, which is make video games accessible to everyone. I’ve had many people playing it who probably haven’t seriously played video games since the NES, if ever, and all were able to compete almost instantly and seemed to enjoy the experience. It was a tremendous hit with the family on Thanksgiving. Almost everyone tried and liked it. People from the ages of 3 to the mid 50’s all were able to play and compete. To put it in perspective, right now the high score in Wii Bowling (215) at my house is held by my 7 year old cousin.
Wii sports is the first game I can remember in a long time to be included with a console. It’s simple but addictive. Tennis and bowling are fun. Golf is pretty frustrating when putting, boxing is fun but nearly unplayable if, like me, you mind the fact that half of the time you try to throw a punch nothing happens. And baseball is pretty boring, just like the real sport. It’s not the best game ever made, by any means. The graphics are laughable and there are a lot of times when you wonder if the Wiimote is broken because the game just doesn’t register your movement, but for an included game that was meant, more than anything, to be an introduction to the Wiimote, it serves its intended purpose.
(Brief side note, anyone who broke their TV playing with it is an idiot. We’ve bowled probably over 200 games total and not once has a Wiimote ever come out of anyone’s hands. And even if it had, that strap is pretty durable. I doubt there are many people who could break it if used properly, and even if they could it would slow the remote down to the point where it is highly unlikely it would break a television. It would likely be thrown in a different direction altogether. My guess is that every picture seen online of a Wiimote buried into the glass of a television is either the result of some moron who didn’t use the strap and, on top of that, was somehow less coordinated than an average 5 year old, or the attempt by someone with a previously broken television to get a complimentary replacement out of it from Nintendo.)
Nintendo did, I think, make a couple bad decisions. For one the Wii does not support hi-definition. Their logic there was that it made the system cheaper to make. They figured that since only 20% of households have HDTV right now anyway, it wouldn’t be missed by too many. I think what they overlooked there was that there is a tremendous overlap between households that have gaming systems and ones that have HDTVs. The vast majority of people with HDTVs have gaming systems, so if 20% of houses have HD and 40% have a gaming system, that means almost 50% of gamers are playing (or will want to be) in HD. I don’t know what the actual numbers are, I just threw that 40% out there, but my point is that HD would be desirable to a lot of their target audience.
I realize they’re also stretching out to new audiences too, but many of them will have HD sets as well. Plummeting prices have HDTV sales skyrocketing and many people expect the number of them sold to double in the next two years. At that point the lack of high-def might be a major liability. Maybe Nintendo is planning on pumping out a new system in three years, which, as long as it will support Wii games, might actually be a great idea, especially since they’re the only company selling consoles at a profit.
The Wii does support 480p (like a progressive scan DVD player) but for some reason you can only get that resolution by using the component video cables. That didn’t make sense to me at first, since 480p can be delivered over lower-bandwidth connections, until I found out that you have to order the component cables direct from Nintendo and that they cost $30. This is a part that could not possibly cost more than $3 to manufacture. Now I’m just pissed off. I don’t mind them choosing to not include features to save money and drive down the price of the system, but gouging us that badly for them is unconscionable.
Still though, there’s a noticeable difference in the graphics when playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, so you have to buy the component connector if you’re a gamer. So after my anus healed from that I popped Zelda in (to the Wii that is) and started playing. Long story short once again, best game ever. Seriously.
When it comes to Ocarina of Time, the first Zelda game on the N64, there are three types of people, ones who consider it their favorite game ever, ones who haven’t played it, and ones who are retarded. It is considered by almost all game critics and a large number of fans as the best game of all time, and it was, undoubtedly. Twilight Princess is to the Ocarina of Time as the current war in Iraq is to Desert Storm. It’s bigger, it’s badder, and it’s ten times longer.
It really is the perfect game. The graphics are like OoT but less polygonal and more life-like. The camera-work is the same and really it should be, it was perfect. Play any other 3D game and you find yourself getting frustrated wrestling with the camera angles andb trying to see where you’re going. It’s sometimes impossible and quite often unbearable. This is the fourth console Zelda in a row for which that occurs almost never. They’ve nearly mastered it. There are a couple corners of the universe where you might wish you had a bit more control, but they are so few and far between as to be virtually negligible.
The world in Twilight Princess is somehow even more interactive than in the past few Zeldas. For instance today I had to cross from one ledge to another that was very far away. In between was a chandelier that was a little too far from the ledge to jump to. I had to figure out, on my own, to hit the chandelier with a weapon of mine to make it swing so that I could jump on it when it got near me and off when it got near the other ledge.
There are so many puzzles like that. Everything is totally interactive. Boxes can be moved to make climbing easier. Fire can be used to melt ice. Water can be poured onto fire to put it out. Because everything is so well thought out and so complete puzzles might often have more than one solution. That’s what has always kept it light years ahead of all of the other RPGs and they’ve definitely widened the gap with this release. When you play any other 3D game you often think to yourself “this looks nice, but what if I could move this box over here, or break this barrel†or whatever. In Zelda you can. It’s far closer to total immersion than any game has ever come.
It’s also much larger than any previous Zelda. Allegedly it can take 45 minutes to cross from one side of the world to the other. Luckily you can find much faster ways to do that, so there isn’t a lot of tediousness, but I can definitely believe that it’s that large. And there is always a ton of stuff to do. Right now I’ve got about 40 hours into the game and I estimate I’m half way done. I’m going through it and doing everything I can (there are always a ton of side-games to play, mini-quests to complete, and items to find in any Zelda game) all without the help of any of the walkthroughs available on the internet. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could beat the game in 50 hours without doing the extracurricular stuff and by cheating a bit using gamefaqs.com, but really, why would you want to?
The Wiimote also makes playing the game so much more fun than with a standard controller. Need to shoot your bow and arrow? Just point at the object you want to hit and push the trigger. When fishing you use the Wiimote like a rod and the nunchuck like a reel. If you’re as hard core about Zelda as I am, buy the Wii just for the pleasure of using those controls. You’ll like it much more than you would on the GameCube.
So right now I have to wholeheartedly recommend the Wii for everyone and Zelda for the real gamers. The mechanics are not overly complex, but the puzzles can actually get to be very challenging, and they would be even harder if you aren’t familiar with the world of Hyrule. If you’re like me, however, and have been breaking flower pots looking for Rupees since you were a kid (I’m so familiar with the games that I can actually predict with at least 90% accuracy what is in each treasure chest before I open it) you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven. It’s the same series you’ve come to know and love, but with a few new weapons, puzzles that seem far harder than the ones in Wind Waker and maybe even a little harder than Ocarina, and even more things you can move, pickup, throw, or otherwise manipulate to achieve tasks. It’s the perfect game on the perfect system, and I already can’t wait for the sequel.
