Hakuna Matata, Asshole

I doubt that I'm alone in indulging in the occasional bit of freeway Schadenfreude*.

*On the off chance - it means 'The delight you take in witnessing something bad happen to someone else.  The fact that the German people felt the need to coin a term for this specific emotion probably says a lot about them, culturally.**

** I kid, Germany. You know I love you

Case in point, the other day I was merging onto one freeway from a different freeway when I witnessed a driver ahead of me stage an act of open defiance against the Zipper Merge*

*A curiously heated point of contention in American Freeway etiquette. The basic premise is that when merging onto a freeway there is usually a special lane of traffic on the side from which you're entering** which goes for half a mile or so before it tapers off and ceases existing, at which point you're expected to have become part of existing traffic. The question that really gets people worked up is - at what point during that half mile should you get your act together and actually merge into the existing traffic lane. One school of thought is that you should immediately merge into the permanent lane as soon as physically possible, as waiting until the last minute means that you're rude and inconsiderate. 

That school of thought is, of course, completely 100% wrong.

The correct school of thought is that you're intended to go all the way up the half mile of side road and then take turns with the existing traffic, alternating from either lane - exactly the way a zipper closes. You can tell that this is the correct school of thought, because THE FREEWAY DEPARTMENT FREAKING FLAT OUT SAID SO.  REPEATEDLY.  The point being that they made the entire half mile stretch of road because they actually wanted you to use the entire half mile stretch. If they wanted you to only use 50 feet they would only have made that much.

Regardless of that clear and obvious truth however, almost without fail you'll encounter some asshat who feels like it's his personal mission in life to deliberately block other cars from merging into traffic, zipper-style, and the principle that they know best.

**It's called an acceleration lane.  This might be considered a clue as to why stopping in the middle of it is just bone-headedly wrong.

So the other day I witnessed a pickup truck go out of his way to run someone off the road rather than let them merge into existing traffic, only to have the exact same thing happen to him when he had to merge into the next lane of traffic a mile or so later.

I immediately thought to myself, 'Hakuna Matata, Asshole', because at some point the details of the Lion King became vague enough in my head that Hakuna Matata sort of means 'Circle of Life' to me, regardless of the fact that it's a totally unrelated song and means nothing of the sort*

*You totally just hummed, 'It means No Worries', didn't you.

Fast forward to the following day, when I observed in the parking ramp a smaller car parked completely centered between two parking spots.*

*More on this vehicle another time, because the story doesn't end there

Upon my return to the parking ramp, I was somewhat pleased to see that the ramp management had left a stern note on their windshield castigating them for parking over the lines and threatening to have them towed if it happened again.  No sooner had I begun to bask in my righteous pleasure at seeing them justly struck down than I got to Lucille (My truck) and discovered that I had received the exact same note. On inspection it turned out that I was, indeed, about half a foot over the line on the passenger side (Lucille's a big girl).

Stupid Circle of Life.

Please Stop Hacking

There's an unfortunate tendency on the internet lately.*

*To be fair, there's an argument to be made that the internet is made up entirely of unfortunate tendencies, but this one stands out at the moment.

I refer of course to the unfortunate groundswell of vaguely interesting ideas being described as 'Life Hacks'

At this point any even moderately interesting new use of... let's say a dust pan for examples' sake... is getting tossed out in some endless parade of clickbait articles titled something along the lines of 'Genius Life Hacks That Will CHANGE YOUR WORLD!'

At first this was moderately amusing turn of phrase, but at this point one thing needs to be made abundantly clear to the earnest young bloggers out there...

YOU ARE NOT 'HACKING'. YOU HAVE NOT MAGICALLY UNRAVELED THE BASE CODE OF THE UNIVERSE IN ORDER TO RE-WRITE IT  YOUR WHIM. YOU STUMBLED ON A WAY TO HELP LADIES PEE STANDING UP.  
YOU ARE NOT MAGIC NOW.

 
That needed to be said.

See, Adam Baldwin, This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

For the past week or so my Internet search bar has sat on the top of my screen looking like this-

Now, at first glance this might seem like sort of an odd question, since it's probably reasonable to assume that either you're already aware of why you don't like Adam Baldwin, or you don't don't like Adam Baldwin and don't particularly care about why others do don't.

To understand how I got to the point where I had to ask the question, it's important to understand a fairly fundamental point-

I tend to be completely oblivious about a lot of things going on in the world that other people seem to care a lot about*

*Seriously... I only just this last week discovered Archer.

So, the first Thing I Wasn't Aware Of-

MovieBob

I expect there are a lot of us out there who were unaware of the existence of MovieBob until fairly recently*

*I also expect that there is a much larger group of people who still are completely unaware of MovieBob's existence for that matter

For those who are still unfamiliar, the short version is - MovieBob is the guy that did that online review of the movie Pixels that everyone was passing around on Facebook a few weeks ago.

The longer version - MovieBob (real name Bob Chipman) is one of the many people making their living these days reviewing movies (and other things) online. Until recently he worked producing fairly amusing video reviews for a specific online 'culture' site which I will not name here.*

*Mostly because I don't yet know how rude I'm going to be about them and don't want to get sued, but also partially because they appear to have treated Bob pretty unfairly.

The review of the movie Pixels (If you haven't listened to it) is a delightful profane rant about the recent Adam Sandler movie that uses a zesty mix of invective and reference to biological fluids in a way that I simply have never heard before. It's well worth seven minutes of your time if you aren't bothered by that sort of thing.

Having listened to this, I started tracking down other of his reviews to listen to, because I liked his style and enjoy listening to that sort of 'cultural critique' thing. In one of his other pieces he made the observation that he felt like Joss Whedon was the right person to direct The Avengers because at the end of the day The Avengers was going to be about the group/found family dynamic and that is clearly the sort of thing that Joss Whedon does Very Very well. The way Bob phrased this was that Joss Whedon was so good at this sort of thing that at one point he had even made 'Sentient piece of Human Garbage Adam Baldwin likeable for like a minute'*

*Not an exact quote, but pretty darn close.

The Second Thing I wasn't aware of-

Apparently We Don't Like Adam Baldwin...?

Prior to hearing this, my knowledge of Adam Baldwin was -

1. He played Jayne on Firefly, which was awesome
2. He was some guy on the last season of Angel, which was pretty good but not as good as Gina Torres had been on that show the previous year.
3. The second act of Full Metal Jacket has always felt a little formless to me (although I think that might be kind of the point).  Oh, and..
4.  He once lost a fight with a manatee

So hearing him referred to as a sentient piece of human garbage by a man who's opinion I was coming to respect in a, 'Hey, you've said a lot of stuff online that I broadly agree with' kind of way gave me a moment of pause. And so I did what any sensible person would do in the circumstances and googled it.

The Third Thing I wasn't aware of-

Gamergate

To be fair, I was vaguely aware that this was a thing.  My sum total of my knowledge about it was pretty much summed up by, 'A bunch of anonymous guys on the Internet found an excuse to justify* threatening women with violent rape while distributing said women's personal information.' It's all done in the name of 'ethics', apparently.

*Justify to themselves, obviously.

It turns out that any research about why we don't like Adam Baldwin is irrevocably linked with Gamergate, which has unfortunately led me to having to learn more about the whole thing. For example, I eventually googled 'SJW', as I had no idea what it meant and people kept insisting on using it in sentences.  (It turns out it means 'Social Justice Warrior(s)', and appears to be a catchall phrase for 'Shut up, I don't want to think about that.') The reason that the whole thing is so intertwined with Adam Baldwin is...

The Fourth Thing I wasn't aware of - 

Adam Baldwin Coined the Phrase 'Gamergate' (allegedly)

No, I'm not going to put the hashtag on it.  This whole thing is dangerously searchable enough as it is, and while there's very little that Gamergate enthusiasts could do to my credit score that I haven't done myself already there's no reason to push it.

Not only did he (allegedly) coin the term, but he seems to spend a lot of time and effort using it as a hashtag on twitter. Which sort of brings us to -

One Thing that We All Already Knew 

 

Joss Whedon is a Better Person Than You.

Or me. Or anyone else not named Joss Whedon.*

*There's a case to be made for Jane Espenson...

There's an easily findable interview with Our Joss in which he addresses the Adam Baldwin question. Essentially, the question he was asked was - 'Is working with Adam Baldwin weird since the whole gamergate thing?' to which he said (and I'm paraphrasing here) 'You know, Adam is a hardworking, decent guy that always came to work ready to work hard and do his best. That's the Adam I like to think about, not the Adam who sometimes shouts down me or Felicia Day on Twitter'

That there is pretty much the definition of a classy answer, and it goes some way toward again confirming why Joss is so beloved not just by his fans but also by just about everyone who's ever worked with him.*

*Although am I the only one who gets the feeling that there's some sort of weird vibe between him and Sarah Michelle Gellar?

This, in a big circular way, eventually led me to the answer to the question I was ostensibly researching in the first place.

One Thing We ALL Should Know Instinctively

It Is Not - EVER - OK to Attack Felicia Day

Not even verbally.

Not even on Twitter.

Not cool, Adam Baldwin.

The Grapefruit is Coming For Your Family

So for the last few weeks I've been taking a ridiculous number of pills.*

*Some backstory - NOT enjoyable ones. Turns out I had a bacterial infection in my stomach which needed antibiotics to kill it. Unfortunately, most antibiotics also kill me. Which means they have to give me low level alternative antibiotics in large quantities. So I've ended up having to take 18 pills a day for the last few weeks. Fun side effects - constant nausea, light-headedness, and the tendency to get winded standing up or crossing a room.  It's been awesome.

In that there have been many days when the most I'm physically capable of is laying on the couch watching TV and not enjoying a lovely cocktail*, I've pretty much spent the majority of September irritatingly sober, pukey, and watching television**

* It turns out that alcohol magnifies the whole 'nausea' thing by about 5000%. Not a mistake you make more than once.

** Plus side - I finally got around to checking out Bob's Burgers and Archer***. 

*** Seriously, how had I missed Archer?

Now, it turns out that if you're watching a lot of TV and are sober (which I do not recommend) you become irritatingly aware of the commercials. And of course, in that meds were the cause of my current state, I became even more aware of the commercials for dodgy medications.

You know the ones - Handsome and/or lovely young commercial actor standing on a windswept beach and unable to poop/sustain an erection. You know, like you do. Finally the name of some new miracle cure for whatever the problem is is referenced at which point the handsome/lovely actor in question begins running through a field of flowers (presumably on their way to pop a squat or hold a trapper keeper awkwardly in front of their bulging trousers. This then leads to some soft lit nature shots while a voiceover lists the many horrible things that the medication will ALSO do to you*

*Why is anal leakage always on this list?  Is there any man-made pharmaceutical that does NOT immediately cause anal leakage? 

This then segues to some polite-but-firm legally mandated warnings about what not to do while taking the medication*

*And yet for some reason 'Don't wear white pants' never seems to be on this list.

The other night I was watching one of these, and the 'Don't do what Donny Don't Do Does' list began as usual - While using this product, don't drive, don't operate heavy machinery, don't vote in any national elections, etc., etc..  Then in the middle of this list they threw in, 'Don't eat grapefruit.'

Now, is it just me, or is that a curiously specific instruction?  Not citrus, specifically grapefruit.

I choose to believe that someone writing copy for that ad had been hanging out with a buddy who sold grapefruit the night before who had completely pissed him off somehow. (Perhaps he ate the last potato skin, who can say with fruit-sellers). Still stewing over the argument, he throws the grapefruit thing into the 'Don't' list with a profound sense of 'THAT'll show him.'

In my mind, that's how the world of advertising works.

Dig-Duggar

For those too young to remember, back in the 1980s there was a videogame called...

Wait, hold that thought.  Let's clarify.

Back in the 1980s, videogames were something that you had to actually leave your house to play.

I know.  Take a minute with that. It's a bit of a culture shock.  Breathe through it.  Better?  OK.

So.  In the day, videogames all lived in a store space in the local mall called an 'Arcade'. These videogames were large stand up contraptions roughly the size and shape of a telephone booth...

Dammit...

OK, roughly the size and shape of one of those streetside things you can buy newspapers out o...

Oh for crap sake.

Um... Photo booths?  Do we still have photo booths? No? What about voting booths...?  We still do that, right...?

OK.  They were about the size and shape of a voting booth*

*People of Florida, you're just going to have to google it.

Anyway, an arcade was a darkish room full of neon signs and these large stand up videogame machines that you had to put quarters into to play.  They were about six hundred times larger than a video game station you might see today, only played one game each, and almost never involved scoring points for raping prostitutes. Also there was Skeeball.  Which was awesome.

One game that we particularly awesome was called Dig-Dug. In it you were a pudgy little guy relentlessly digging himself further and further down while trying to avoid attention from the other people around you.  If one came to close you had a special tube you stuck in them and pumped until they exploded.

Which brings me of course to Josh Duggar

To establish my cred on this issue up front, I was WAY ahead of the curve on the whole 'Hating the Duggars' thing.  I've despised them from back when their show was called Two Kids and We're Planning on Having a Couple Baseball Teams' Worth More Because We're Too Stupid to Understand Birth Control. They represent everything wrong in modern culture with their smug hypocritical stupidity, simple expecting to be handed everything they could ever want simply by shouting louder and louder how Jesus only loves people like them because apparently the fundamentalist bunch just eats that shit up. They contribute absolutely nothing to the world except bigotry, hypocrisy and a steady workforce for Matt Staver's secret camp for manufacturing knock off wallets for export

Whew.  As I said.  I despise the Duggars and everything they stand for.

So, Josh Duggar then.  Assuming that you live in a yurt, let me bring you up to speed.  After spending many, many years on TV telling us all how Jesus hand carved their family out of the purest ivory and they are always perfect, it came to light that they had to add the caveat 'Except that time we totally let our oldest son repeatedly molest four of his younger sisters without ever facing any consequences'

According to their press release, they found out about it, told Jesus about it, and Jesus looked back at them and said, 'Aw, you guys.  I could never stay mad at you. We're totally good.  You tell him I said go ahead and molest away.'

Now this story has more or less faded by this point, except for one unfortunate thing. The Ashley Madison website (That's the one that exists solely to provide people a forum to cheat on their spouses) got hacked, and it turned out that our boy Josh had a couple of accounts with them. Now, there's no actual evidence that he hooked up with anybody, but he did prepay for the 'Guaranteed Affair within three months package'* and did not request a refund

*A real thing btw

 So, that's Women and Children crossed off of Josh's 'Things I'd like to have sex with' list. At this point I'm enthusiastically looking forward to the almost inevitable announcement that he's been caught having anonymous gay sex in a public restroom. Not because I enjoy watching bad things happen to the Duggars (although I certainly do!) but because he's this close to pulling off the hat trick and it would be a shame if he didn't make it.

It's the same reason we rooted for American Pharoah at Belmont.

In Retrospect, I Kind of Blame the People of the Mountain

So many years ago, back in the halcyon age before the Internet (and computers for that matter...) I had a grade school teacher who was a bit of a hippie. 

Regularly at school assemblies he would bring his guitar and we would all sing songs along the line of 'If I Had a Hammer', and 'Leaving on a Jet Plane', with the lyrics written on huge sheets of white paper in the front of the school gymnasium. 

One of Mr. Case (for that was his name)'s standards was 'One Tin Soldier'. For those unfamiliar with the song in question, you can review it here*

*As presented in The Legend of Billy Jack**

**I'm not going to even attempt to explain The Legend of Billy Jack

Now, the song is a pretty straightforward 70s peace anthem swaddled in vaguely Tolkien-esque middle-ages village imagery*

*If you could fit the entire 70s into a giant stock pot and let it boil for a very long time, it would eventually reduce to something not unlike the song 'One Tin Soldier'

So the basic story is this - We have the Mountain people who supposedly have a 'treasure'. We also have the Valley people who live next door and would very much like to swing by and borrow a cup of treasure. The Valley people send a polite note requesting the treasure, the mountain people send a deliberately vague note back, and so the valley people slaughter the mountain people and discover that the treasure is, in actual point of fact, the words 'Peace on Earth', which are for some reason know only to the mountain people hidden under a rock.

Now, as a kid I readily accepted that this was a story about bad valley people who killed their neighbors, but looking back on it now I can't help but think that the Mountain people have to take at least some of the blame for the whole situation. I mean, I don't want to blame the victim here, but let's take a look at how easily the whole situation could have been cleared up by having the following simple conversation-

VALLEY PEOPLE

 Hey, we've heard you have a bunch of treasure. 

The 411 is that it's tons of gold. We'd like you to give it to us.

 FYI, we're totes willing to kill for it.

MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

I'm sorry, what?  We couldn't hear you over our enormous beards

VALLEY PEOPLE

Your tons of golden treasure.  Please give it to us. 

MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

Oh... I totally see where the miscommunication here is.  

We don't actually have literal treasure like gold or silver or anything like that.  

When we say treasure we're talking about a 

metaphoric representation of peaceful coexistence.  

VALLEY PEOPLE

You what now?

MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

 We wrote the words 'Peace on Earth' under a rock. See?  Look, you can totally see it.

VALLEY PEOPLE

Why would you even do that?

MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

It's ... like.. a metaphor.

VALLEY PEOPLE

Why did you put it under a rock?

MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

Because shut up, that's why.

VILLAGE PEOPLE

Why are we even a part of this conversation?

VALLEY PEOPLE

Oh CHRIST, not them again.  Screw this, we're going home.

See?  Totally cleared the situation up and nobody had to get slaughtered even a little bit.

Honestly, it's like the Mountain People wanted to get wiped out.

#SadHulk

A bit of backstory -

For the last couple of months I've had an ongoing issue of some kind going on in my guts.  I'm still not sure what's going on exactly, but my current theory is that an alien is going to erupt from my sternum at any moment.

As part of the ongoing quest to figure out what exactly is going on I've been going through a series of medical tests. First the simple stuff - bloodwork, etc. That showed nothing wrong. Then the 'poo samples' saga (which has already had far too much discussion here)  This also came back and showed nothing wrong. Then we progressed to the ultrasound to check organ function - this was notable for including the following exchange-

ME:

I suppose this is where most people make the obvious joke 

about finding out if it's a boy or a girl.

VERY NICE ULTRASOUND TECH LADY: 

(In a voice of unspeakable weariness) 

... yes.

Once the ultrasound came back showing nothing wrong we moved on to something called a radioactive injection test*.

*Because apparently the name 'Fiendish Death Ray Test was already taken, but they still wanted to sound really sinister.

As tests go it was fairly non-threatening (despite the ominous name). The basic upshot of it is that they put an IV in your arm and fill your veins with radioactive goo. Then they mount you on an enormous metal sandwich board  and scan your organs for traces of radiation. The practical upshot of this is that you can watch on the conveniently placed monitor as your liver, gall bladder and small intestine all light up in dayglow colors as radioactive goo gets processed through them.

Now the answer to the two obvious questions -

Yes, the test came back showing nothing wrong, 

and

No, I do not appear to have been turned into the Incredible Hulk

I confess to being disappointed on both counts.

While I had to wait to hear back from the clinic for the first answer, I ascertained the second on my own through the simple expediency of recruiting a colleague at work to attempt to make me mad and see if it caused me to transform into a giant green* rage monster**

*possibly grey 

** Arguably not the world's most controlled experiment...

One slight procedural hitch - I don't really get angry very often, which caused a little difficulty. So in practice the experiment ran more like -

HELPFUL COLLEAGUE:

Did you hear?  You're not going to be allowed to have a teacup pig at work in the new offices

ME:

Oooooh.  <Sad Noise>

HELPFUL COLLEAGUE:

No, you're not supposed to get sad.  You're supposed to get angry!

ME:

But that's really sad news!

HC:

If you don't get angry how are you going to turn into the Hulk?

ME:

Well... maybe some Hulks aren't triggered by rage.  Maybe some Hulks are triggered by other emotions.  Maybe I'm Sad Hulk.

HC:

Sad Hulk would be Awesome! Sad Hulk would say things like "Sad Hulk wrote you poem. You probably won't like."

ME:

"Sad Hulk Eat whole tub of ice cream.  No one ever love anyway..."

HC:

"Sad Hulk lay down until DIE."





Please begin submitting your own quotes from Sad Hulk with the hashtag #SadHulk.  My debilitating stomach pain will totally be worth it if this ends up on the Nerdist.