MattMaroon.com

Out of sheer masochism I decided to watch the State of the Union Address this year. I just wanted to see if Bush had finally realized that he’s the worst President in modern history and has bungled pretty much everything he’s touched as badly as humanly possible. I’m not sure if he has or has not though because I didn’t absorb a word he said. I couldn’t concentrate on anything but Nancy Pelosi.

Either there was a very narrow breeze aimed directly at her eyes and nobody else’s, or maybe Karl Rove in the balcony with a UV laser pointer, or she blinks way, way too much for a human being. I counted for a little while and she blinked 5 times every three seconds. That’s absurd. That’s 100 blinks per minute. Nobody’s bpm ratio should even be two digits, hers is three. It’s called Visine Madame Speaker, give it a try.

I have to say, I don’t like her being second in line to the Presidency. I don’t trust anyone who can’t even restrain their eyelids to control our military. It’s especially scary too, because you know any sniper who is trying to take out Bush is going to make damn sure they get Cheney while they’re at it. I don’t think anyone will ever seriously attempt an assassination, but just in case we better make sure those two are always at least five states apart. Cheney may not have a soul, but at least he has tear ducts.

The only thing scarier than the thought of Nancy Pelosi becoming President is the person next in line: Ted Stevens. Because that guy is definitely on a few mind altering substances.

Think about it. You’ve been around people who were high before. Couldn’t you picture them saying “Man, I just had this thought. The internet is… like… a series of tubes man. It’s not like something you… like… dump stuff on. It’s not like a truck, ya know? I wonder if Taco Bell’s still open.”

Actually though, in all fairness to potheads, none of them ever said anything like “Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why?”

That’s something hard core there. I’m thinking crystal meth would explain that one. So therefore we know that Ted Stevens is a smoker, a tweaker, and a fucking moron. And he’s third in line, behind Pelosi. So our succession line is officially Satan, freaky dry eyes woman, and a drug addled moron. Makes a President who is just plain stupid seem like a pretty good deal doesn’t it?

I had the misfortune of watching a bit of the O’Reilly factor the other day. Stephen Colbert was on it and I just had to see that one. After six minutes of that garbage my brain was sputtering like my ten-year-old Mazda 323 that time back in high school when the transmission died, so I decided “fuck this, I’ll just TiVo it and skip to the meat later.” For anyone with an IQ above that of a watermelon more than 10 minutes of that show could be coma-inducing.

For those who haven’t seen it, the O’Reilly Factor is a show where an ultra-conservative pundit voices his retarded opinions so that mouth-breathers all around the country have something to nod their heads to. I realize I just described pretty much every show on Fox news, but the difference is that O’Reilly actually knows his viewers are morons and treats them accordingly. That’s why he has a text feed to the right of his head that has almost everything he says roll across it verbatim, just in case they missed it the first time, and it’s also why he is the most popular personality on cable news. He is the right-wing, “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot” that Colbert impersonates so perfectly, and uneducated idiots across the nation can’t get enough of him.

Probably the only thing dumber than O’Reilly is the way the media, or “liberal press” as Bill would call it, actually pays attention to this schmuck. That’s most of the reason I can’t read any political blogs, they spend way too much time critiquing moronic talking heads who nobody smarter than a cantaloupe is watching anyway. Who cares?

A great example of how poorly-informed he is would be his recent comments about how the Stockholm Syndrome is a myth and that Shawn Hornbeck must have liked his captivity. Liberal bloggers are outraged at how wrong of Bill it is to say that. I’m personally just outraged that anyone dumb enough to think that can be on television.

Stockholm Syndrome is well-studied, well-documented and widely accepted among psychologists. Yet Bill O’Reilly, a lifetime television commentator, believes himself to be in a position to have a contrary opinion. Anyone willing to publicly disagree with the overwhelming majority of experts on a topic they couldn’t possibly know anything about is, in my opinion, unfit for television or society in general on account of stupidity. That’s roughly as dumb as saying “biologists say that male lions often kill baby cubs from other male lions in the pride upon becoming alpha male, but I don’t believe that because it’s cruel.”

If you don’t have a background in psychology there is only one reasonable opinion you can have on the topic, which is that, while it might seem far-fetched, a lot of people who have devoted their life to the study of such topics seem assured that it does exist and therefore you are in no real position to disagree. A lot of shit that seems far-fetched turns out to be true, and unless you have solid evidence to the contrary the last thing you should be doing is saying horrendous things about an abductee and victim of a sexual predator because, in your completely uneducated opinion, the entire psychological community is wrong. That’s hateful, ignorant, anti-intellectual, and just plain stupid, which is pretty much the perfect way to describe Bill O’Reilly and everyone who watches him.

Either way the Colbert interview was hilarious. I have a feeling some of the Factor’s staff is going to be fired for laughing so loudly as Stephen mocked Bill. Here it is, courtesy of the tubes:

My favorite is how O’Reilly did a “study” that showed that Daily Show viewers are stoned slackers. I would love nothing better than to get a wager going around this. If only there were some way to get Bill to agree to a friendly bet. We’d go out, find a bunch of random Factor viewers, and a bunch of random Daily Show or Colbert Report viewers (Bill’s choice) and have them face off in a standardized test. Honestly I’d probably take random Spongebob Squarepants viewers over anyone who can sit through the factor for more than 10 minutes. What say you Bill?

I want one.

Yesterday we were taking my 3 year old nephew to Wal-Mart and when he got in my car he said “this car stinks”. I told him he stinks, and he said “Noooooooooooo. Your car stinks. It’s cheap.”

That’s one I’ve not heard (it’s a fully loaded ’07 Lexus Rx350 for those playing along at home) so I asked him why he thought it was cheap. He looked up at the sun roof and said “it doesn’t even have a roof.”

Most people tell me the thing is a chick magnet (and I have had some ladies start talking to me at gas stations since buying it, but that might just be my rugged good looks) but the toddlers apparently aren’t impressed. Maybe if it looked like Thomas the tank.

Apparently this week a couple of Saddam’s henchmen were hung. One of them was so fat that he got decapitated in the process. What I find most humorous about this is that you know it’s going to inspire yo momma jokes throughout their country for the next few years. They say that culturally the rest of the world is 15 years behind us, which means they are just about due for those witty insults. I can see it now:

“Hey Mohammed. Yo momma’s so fat that when they hung that bitch for crimes against humanity her head popped off.”

“Ohhhhh snap.”

“Them’s jihad words right there.”

I used to believe in the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Until yesterday and today, when it showed itself to be retarded.

I mentioned the jump in AAPL shares in response to the iPhone. That went up again today, for a total increase of about 13% in 2 days.

Now, if the market was truly efficient, how could this happen? Pretty much everyone expected Apple to debut the iPhone yesterday. I suppose all of the previous rumors and shenanigans made it less than 100% certain, but I can’t imagine it was nearly uncertain enough to warrant that sort of reaction. If the market was truly efficient how could it react so strongly to something it already knew was a virtual certainty?

Maybe the phone turned out better than a lot of people were expecting, but I don’t really see how that could be. It costs $500 with a two year contract and is tied to one carrier. How many units can this thing sell? I’d be more inclined to buy Apple stock if they did basically what everyone was expecting and took a mediocre phone, painted it white, and made it play iTunes.

And also, does anyone know how much profit per unit Apple stands to make off of each? I can’t see how they could. I doubt Apple even knows for sure yet. So even if Apple sells 10 million of these phones in 2008 (and that means roughly 1/5th of all Cingular subscribers have to buy an iPhone. I’ve read that people change phones on average ever 2.5 years, which means that roughly half of all Cingular subscribers who buy a new phone have to plunk down at least $500) nobody has a clue how much their making on it.

And also there’s the well-known fact that Cisco owns the trademark on the name iPhone here. The two companies were allegedly in talks as of yesterday, but as of today the news is that they fell through and Cisco has officially filed suit. What does that do to the profit margins?

Casting even more uncertainty on the EMH is the fact that RIM’s stock dropped about 8% too. 8%? Could any intelligent person consider the iPhone a serious threat to the Blackberry? Not any intelligent person who knows anything about gadgets, that’s for sure.

These two products aren’t competing for the same customers. Even the few carefully chosen Apple cheerleaders who got a little hands-on time with the phone yesterday described typing on it as being not as good as a dedicated keyboard. Of course it isn’t, it couldn’t possibly be. And when the kind of people Steve Jobs trusts enough to handle the most eagerly anticipated release in his corporation’s history say it “isn’t as good” that really means its going to be annoying as hell to anyone but an Apple fanboy.

I’m not really sure who is going to buy this phone. Their marketing is good enough that lots of douches with more money than brains will pick one up, but 10 million of them in a year? For a $500 phone without 3G but with an obnoxious contract on a sucky cell phone carrier? I just hope Bodog puts up an over/under on that one. The iPhone is going to be the biggest disappointment since the PS3.

I used to think that I lived in a redneck state, and then I read this. Say what you want about Ohio, we don’t have any wild pigs, let alone ones that weigh 1,100 lbs.

Also, the pig was caught “in a suburban Atlanta neighborhood”. So not only do they have hogs the size of elephants down there in Georgia, they live on the outskirts of major cities. I’m picturing what we here in Akron, a city far smaller than Atlanta, consider suburbs and trying to imagine where the hell a pig that size could hide, let alone meet other giant pigs and raise a giant pig family. Apparently just as we Ohioans have squirrels in our back yards Georgians have wild hogs, and the logistics are truly mind boggling.

What does a half-ton suburban hog eat? I guess it would be alright on trash day, as it could probably chew its way through a garbage can, or at least knock one over, but what about the other 6 days of the week? Do Atlanta residents often wake up to find their lawn mower half eaten?

Do these things do a pretty good job of staying off of the roads? Or is it common to see a 700lb road kill swine? And do people have pigfeeders? Maybe instead of bird houses Atlanta residents have troughs in their backyard.

And if the mere existence of 1,100 lb pigs doesn’t thoroughly qualify Georgia as the redneck capital of the world, there’s the fact that after the “hunter” (and I hesitate to call anyone who killed a suburban animal a hunter, even if it was bigger than a Geo Metro) killed the pig he hung it from his tree. Now that’s redneck.

“Gee paw, I just shot me a hog the size of a walrus. Whadda you reckon I oughtta do with it?”

“Ain’t nuttin for it but to hang that son bitch up from a tree I s’pose.”

Apparently I am the only one who thinks song parodies are just not funny. Ever. Random dudes make these things every day, and every day morons all across America laugh at them. Stop.

They are all the same, and they are all not funny. Period. Not one of them ever has been, and not one of them ever will be. If you don’t agree with that then please, I beg you, for the good of humanity, don’t procreate.

I can just see millions of slack-jawed Bush-voters watching YouTube saying “Haha, this is so funny. This guy took ‘Bringing Sexy Back ‘and made it ‘Bringing Paxil Back’! And then the whole song is about Paxil! An ode to an anti-depressant sung to a hit pop tune. That’s so hilarious!”

No, it isn’t. Trust me on this. And even if that sort of thing were funny to begin with, which it wasn’t, Weird Al ran it into the ground in the ’80s. It’s over, even though it never really began. Let it die.