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insomnia and bad grammar since 2001

Smoke Out

Somewhere in the misty lands of corporate america, a building super is getting tough on smoking. Because that’s your job in a bureaucracy, making everyone else’s job more difficult. I’m not really kidding. Management has to justify their existence.

Smoking – Smoking is permitted in the designated area in the lower deck where the benches and ash trays are provided. Please remain in the smoking area and not in the pathway of oncoming traffic. Smoking is prohibited in the front of the buildings, in front of handicap parking, inside the parking decks, at the bottom of the hill and on top of the parking deck landing. We are receiving complaints that people are walking through smoke to get to their cars. Please do not use the old planters, grassy areas, pine straw and rocked areas to extinguish your cigarettes. Please use the designated smoking area only.

Update: this is not related to the cigarette smokers problem.

Meta-Factchecking

Factcheck.org gettin all meta-psychological on our ass. Now I’ve been a pious fan of research cherry-picking watchdog groups for about as long I’ve been politically aware and internet enabled, and perhaps therein lies part of the problem, one man’s statistically sound study, another man’s crock-full-a…

But Factcheck, who remain all too infrequent and obscure, contemplate the mind-bending proposition that perhaps de-obscuring the truth just leads to further obscuring, by way of a complex pattern of downwardly spiraling retardation, which manifests itself mainly in dumb people. While I agree with the premise, which is that most people who walk upright and get occasional haircuts are intellectually not much further along than the Bonobo, but do we have to draw attention to it? Perhaps they should go the logical step further and simply pronounce that, “all I know is that I know nothing.”

That’s the end game.

Chocolate Chill Out

4am. Been working the overnights lately and seen my bedtime creep from the usual 3am to 6am. Finishing early tonight. Enjoying some ice cream, which got me thinking, they should have a mix of chocolate and Combos, my other favorite late night snack. That’s right the cheese filled pretzels. Ok, I just tried it, and you can’t really taste the cheese with the ice cream. Still, this is a really good idea putting two powerhouse snacks together to create something special. But we need something more. We’ve got to cut through the aisles of banal consumables. Todays marketplace is filled with foods mixed up with other foods, like the peanut butter with jelly already in it. We need to take it to the next level. Ice cream and Combos and…what? How about Xanax? Oh, fuck yeah. Or, the inverse product would be Combos filled with chocolate and Xanax? Fuck yeah. I could totally design award winning snack foods.

Red Tape

Is it worth it to rage against something intangible like bureaucracy? I imagine not. Why is ‘collective man’ so fucking useless? The Kafka within me just won’t submit quietly. Ok, instead of succumbing to fantasies of workplace violence, I’ll just listen to the Circle Jerks…

Pizza Delivery and the Future of War

I’ve brought up my fascination with non-lethal weapons before. And let me tell you, whether it’s military adventurism, fraternity pranks, or good ol’ domestic abuse, non-lethal weapons can play a big part in your life. With no casualties everyone’s a winner, in a non-lethal utopia by way of a sticky foam rave kind of way, where pain is only an illusion, and therefore, not real, right? In no time we’ll all be mad with laughter, at the mere thought of “war.”

My problem with future weapons technologists however, is that they just aren’t thinking outside the box enough. Nuclear missiles? Come on. That’s so 1980s. We need to have fun with this. We need a Willy Wonka of future weapons. Previously I mentioned my idea for the Ibiza Techno-BubbleBox, capable of turning any street corner disturbance into a full-on Ibiza style bubble rave. To build upon this I’m currently developing several alternatives such as the the spaghetti web, slushy riot crowd-control spray, milk non-duds, meatball catapult , and a very simple replacement ammunition for all machine fired projectiles, part of the forthcoming Nerf-War package. There’s one more technology in the early stages of development known as “pizza delivery.” It’s very complicated but the idea is that wherever there are dangerous crowds, enemy lines, etc., precise geographic coordinates are logged through fancy GPS technology, and then the “interwebs” contact food-service giant Halliburton and orders a large number and variety of pizzas to said target location. When the pizzas arrive the crowd loses it’s will to fight and begins to dissipate amidst the confusion of pepperoni and who ordered which pizza. It’s the perfect confusion.

For products already on the market see slip n’ slide, jumpy things, and of course the old standby: opera. Nothing immobilizes like bad music.

Since war doesn’t want to go away, shouldn’t we just make it fun and more safe?

Spendy War Bangers



Cost of the War in Iraq
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Now, even if you don’t believe the government should be involved in public education or health care, this is still money that could be spent elsewhere. In other words, it’s your money, beeyatch! Wake up! See “What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy.” Imagine if this money had been spent on national defense? We could have one of those utopian missile defense programs or even individual apocalypse-proof bubble suits. I’m more in favor of the latter, as it allows for travel.

The Innocence Project

The implementation of capital punishment is flawed, both morally and logically. Everyone understands the emotions of revenge, no matter how self-serving and ultimately futile they are. We’re human after all. The problem is that the legal system kills and jails innocent people at staggering numbers. So revenge comes at the price of further innocent death. Ironic vicious circle, anyone?

As many have argued, why would you put the government, who can’t even fix holes in roads, in charge of deciding who lives or dies? The result of course, is that our legal system has put many innocent people to death, and locked many thousands more away. This is the moral contradiction CP supporters just can’t get around. Supporting capital punishment, is supporting a system that has jailed and put to death thousands of innocent people. That’s where the Innocence Project comes in, working with DNA evidence to exonerate the thousands of wrongly convicted. As you can imagine, death row gets priority.

There’s a good and quite emotional documentary on The Innocence Project, called After Innocence. Highly recommended on awareness raising factor alone. It’ll haunt you. It should haunt you…depending on your state, your tax money kills innocent people.

Ass-Deep in Blackwater

I really want to make a good joke about Deepwater or Blackwater, but it’s just eluding me. Let’s see…Deepwater…What do you get with loads of “free” taxpayer money, no oversight, and several colossal bureaucracies? Nah, just depresses me.

But you heard about Deepwater, right? Part of the program was to lengthen already existing Coast Guard boats to the tune of 10 million per boat. Yes, I said lengthen. Apparently, you can lengthen boats, just like you would, oh, trick out an El Camino. Of course, it didn’t work, and the government is blaming the contractor, and taking the project over, but something tells me only the government could get itself in such a stupid situation in the first place.

Now if we can only take some of this genius technology and widen the planet, we’ll have some more room for all the babies in China.

Nanny Go Home

Here at manunderstress global media watchdog sports center, we object to all forms of cultural Nanny Statism, most especially trendy authoritarian legislation designed to keep us from getting fat, having too much fun, or just being as stupid as we want to be. We think nannies are better kept out of government.

In Georgia, our very own Governator, one of them deep-fried Southern “Conservative” types, wants less government, if less means more, and more means Jesus.

Two years later, some Georgians say the governor has done an about-face. Perdue recently signaled his opposition to a bill that would allow voters to decide whether to allow Sunday beer and wine sales in stores. He remarked that the Sunday prohibition teaches Georgians “time management” by forcing them to purchase alcohol earlier in the week.

Ah, I see…so it’s actually a government sponsored “time management” program. Clever, Big Government Sonny, clever indeed.

Statewide, 68 percent of Georgians polled in January wanted the chance to vote on the question. In middle Georgia, support dropped to 45 percent.

Hmm, 68%? So democracy is where then?

Letter to Nikita Khrushchev from Fidel Castro

Watched a documentary on the Cuban missle crisis the other night, and then looked up the letters mentioned in it between Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev. Here’s Castro in a loony and masochistic plea to practically end the world, if the US were to invade Cuba:

Letter to Nikita Khrushchev from Fidel Castro regarding defending Cuban air space

I would like to briefly express my own personal opinion.

If the second variant takes place and the imperialists invade Cuba with the aim of occupying it, the dangers of their aggressive policy are so great that after such an invasion the Soviet Union must never allow circumstances in which the imperialists could carry out a nuclear first strike against it.

I tell you this because I believe that the imperialists’ aggressiveness makes them extremely dangerous, and that if they manage to carry out an invasion of Cuba–a brutal act in violation of universal and moral law–then that would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.

It made me wonder how odd the world must have been back then communicating during emergencies via telegraph.

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