Category: Stupidy (of Others)

Oh America!

Apparently there’s some American woman who wants to move to Australia because…

“…their president is a Christian and actually supports what he says…”

Hmmm, let’s do a comparison…

Julia Gillard
Prime Minister of Australia		 Barack Obama
President of the United States of America
President? No Yes
Christian? No – A stated Atheist Yes – Despite right wingers’ repeated claims that he’s a filthy, evil, communist, socialist, terrorist, Kenyan “Muslin”
He? No Yes
Actually supports what he says? No* No*
Score 0/4 3/4

When it’s put like that, I rather think she’d be happier staying where she is.

(* Find me a politician who does and I’ll give you a shiny new donkey – or if you prefer, elephant)

Boorman You Wacky Man

THIS COULD HAVE HAPPENED!
I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way...

Stumbled over this recently on the Middle-Earth in Film page on Wikipedia…

…In the 1970s John Boorman was contracted by United Artists to direct an adaptation that would have collapsed [The Lord of the Rings] into a single film. […] In the script by Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg, many new elements have been inserted or modified. Among other things, Gimli is put in a hole and beaten so he can retrieve the password to Moria from his ancestral memory [and] Frodo and Galadriel have sexual intercourse…

My initial reaction was What!? But then I discovered that John Boorman was the guy behind Zardoz, and suddenly it all made sense.

What makes the proposed film even more disturbing is that in the 1970s they wouldn’t have been able to use the digital editing that Peter Jackson used to shrink his actors, and may not have been willing to do an entire film with the complicated trick photography Jackson used when he wasn’t using CGI. So Gimli and the Hobbits would most likely have been played by dwarfs. A movie where little people are thrown into holes and beaten in between sex scenes doesn’t sound like heroic fantasy – it’s more akin to something you’d get under the counter in an ‘adult novelty’ store.

Thank the lord Boorman made Excalibur instead, which (if memory serves) features very little dwarf S&M content.

The Second Coming of the Napisan Man

There’s been a fair bit of to-do around the country lately concerning electricity costs. In most states they’ve jumped up, primarily because the power companies have been holding back on infrastructure related price rises until they could blame the new federal carbon tax – after all, why increase everyone’s bill by $75 a year and have no-one to divorce responsibility onto when you can increase them by $85 and say it’s all the fault of Ju-Liar Gillard and her evil compact with the Greens?

In any case, prices have risen and as a consequence the state government here in WA has been a running a series of ads in which an impossibly well groomed young family lecture the audience about all the things they’ve been doing to reduce their power bill. Most of these are common sense – turn appliances off standby, don’t leave the TV running if you’re not actually watching it, grow your marijuana in the backyard instead of under lights in your roof cavity, that sort of thing – but one of them left me absolutely gobsmacked.

The impossibly well groomed mother is loading clothes into the washing machine and turns to the camera saying “Instead of running three loads of washing a day, I wait till the end and just run one big load”…

Ahem.

THREE FREAKING LOADS OF WASHING A DAY!?!?

What human being needs to do three loads of washing a day!? Someone who shares their home with incontinent farm animals? A family who rent their loungeroom out for Haliburton fracking operations? A cult who await the second coming of the Napisan Man? What kind of insanity is this?!

Now, I accept that a family, particularly a family with small children, will generate more dirty clothes than a single guy like myself, but I only need to do two loads of washing a week. A circumstance where I’d need to fire up the washing machine on a daily basis – let alone on a tri-daily basis – is to me like something out of a Chuck Palahniuk novel. Seriously, if you’re creating a full load of dirty clothes on a daily basis, and need them washed on a daily basis, you need to see some kind of endocrinologist (or possibly you need more clothes).

If everyone in western society is running their washing machine at these levels, it’s no wonder we’re running out of fresh water.

Your clothes will be fine in the washing basket for a few days people. Seriously.

Do as History Teaches

It’s that time again, the time when the Australian swim team goes off to the Olympics and – to the general consternation of the nation – totally fails to dominate. Our swimmers pick up some silvers, some bronzes and maybe a few golds, and the press fills up with questions about where it’s all gone so wrong.

The thing that everyone fails to remember is that this is the Olympic Games, not the Commonwealth Games. In the Commonwealth Games we slaughter everyone, because, frankly,  we’re the only people in the Commonwealth who can actually swim. At the Olympics we face the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese and a horde of upstart, wildcard nations that luck out by stumbling over a single brilliant swimmer. Faced with all that competition we actually punch well above our weight, but there’s still hand wringing and gnashing of teeth every time we win a silver (or, the horror! a bronze) rather than a gold.

To those who are upset at our team’s performance in the pool – or elsewhere – I say shut up and listen to some TISM.

Annual General Mouthoff

Strata company AGM last night – absolute clattering bag of madness.

Usually only about 12 of us turn up. Since this isn’t (despite what BSG has taught us) a quorum, the meeting is adjourned for a week, at which juncture six of us turn up, have a brief discussion about the issues, and get home within an hour. Last night – thanks to a series of rabble-rousing letters that have been circulating around the complex whining that our strata fees are too high and the strata company are a bunch of despots on par with Darth Vader and Pol Pot combined – about 100 people turned up, all of whom wanted their own chance to yell poorly thought out abuse and idiotic questions at anyone who got up to speak.

The meeting was scheduled for 5:30. It actually started at 6:00 because it took that long for everyone to sign in (people insisted on monopolising the sign in sheet while whinging at the Strata representative) and didn’t finish till 9:10.

Idiocy reigned. There was a lot of yelling about cockroaches, herb gardens, guttering and how a bunch of palm trees have been devastating one woman’s existence for the last five years. Every budgeting decision was held up for prodding, poking, ridicule and demands to get a series of quotes, and every decision made at last year’s AGM was attacked by people who couldn’t be buggered turning up at the time but were now outraged that they weren’t consulted.

The main insanity revolved around the budget. People seemed completely unable to grasp the concept that the budget isn’t a list of what will be spent over the coming year, it’s a list of what can be spent over the next year, should it be necessary to do so. The fact that the total budget exceeded the expected revenue from strata fees by about 5 percent had people in absolute conniptions about how the Strata Company “can’t do maths”. A revised budget was eventually passed that clipped $50,000 from the maintenance budget for absolutely no reason apart from it made some morons feel that they were striking a blow for freedom and financial prudence, leaving me feeling like the transit advisor in Sim City 2000 and hoping that a retaining wall falls on their front doors and can’t be fixed until the following financial year.

Me, at Strata Meeting
Me - 8:30pm Tuesday

Perhaps the most jaw dropping moment of the entire fiasco was when we were informed that problems with the complex need to be submitted to the Strata Manager in writing, rather than via a phone call. A woman – who had just been elected to the Resident’s Council no less – responded by complaining that she “[didn’t] have time to write a f***ing email”. If she doesn’t have time to write “a f***ing email”, where the hell is she going to find the time to serve on the Council? But then I’m probably just making the mistake of thinking logically…

Finally the dates for some levies were pointlessly shifted around and the meeting concluded with a bunch of imbeciles patting themselves on the back about how they’d stood up to the evil Strata Company and got to have their cake while simultaneously gorging on it.

The next year should be interesting to say the least…

Holy Calamity, Scream Insanity

Herp Derp Particle

The HerpDerpParticle Twitter feed is one of those things that first makes you laugh, and then makes you weep for the future of humanity. It does nothing but retweet insane twitter posts about the probable discovery of the Higgs Boson, which can mostly be categorised into three types…

1: Liberal atheist European scientists have found the God Particle, thus proving that God exists and hoisting the evil, science-worshiping, communist, agnostic, atheist, anti-American, Darwinist, liberal, gay, Muslim, perverts by their own petard.

2: Liberal atheist European scientists found the God Particle on July 4th, thus proving for all time that God loves America more than any other nation on Earth and condemning all evil, science-worshiping, communist, agnostic, atheist, Darwinist, liberal, gay, Muslim perverts to Hell for electing Barrack Obama.

3: All science is an evil, communist, agnostic, atheist, Darwinist, liberal, Anti-American, gay, Muslim, pervert plot and all the truth you ever need is in the Bible.

It’s this kind of thing that makes me reconsider living on this planet.

Later: But this cheers me right up 🙂

Requesting the Impossible

Client: Our website went down for two hours yesterday! What are you doing to ensure that this never happens again!?!

Hmmm, well, how about nothing?

If you own a website, sooner or later it’s going to go down. It’s the nature of the beast. I mean Amazon went down for a full 11 hours last year, and some of their cloud services were down for three days. If Amazon can’t run their website with 100% reliability, how the hell do you expect us to?

It’s not like we play with server cables for entertainment’s sake. We didn’t sit down yesterday morning and say “Hey, you know what would be funny? Taking down a bunch of websites for two hours!”. Our severs aren’t sitting in a cupboard, prey to custodial staff who disconnect them to plug in their vacuum cleaner, or in a leaky attic where rats and possums can nest in the cases. Our systems are secured with all  the industry standard protection and backup systems to prevent outages. Despite this, outages will sometimes occur. If you can’t understand that, you shouldn’t be operating a website. And if you think that there’s some other company out there who’ll keep your website online 100% of the time guaranteed, please feel free to go looking for them.

(And if you find them, please take a look at how much they charge you compared to us)

But hey, I’ll tell you what. If you pay us 48 billion dollars a year we’ll guarantee to be as reliable as Amazon. This means we promise that your site won’t be offline for more than an additional nine hours this year.

How’s that for a deal?

Close Bitnami banner
Bitnami