Category Archives: Rants

Another reason why Christians are seen as the bad guys.

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Between groups like the Westboro Baptist Church asshats, the nutcases behind World Net Daily, and the Catholic Church in general, the image of Christians in the minds of a lot of people can end up pretty tarnished.

But you don’t have to be a part of an organized group to help contribute to the your religion’s image problem. You can be like Dean Saxton and just go around holding up a sign that says ’You Deserve Rape’:

Source: Ryan Revock/Arizona Daily Wildcat

Source: Ryan Revock/Arizona Daily Wildcat

Dean Saxton — also known as Brother Dean Samuel — regularly preaches on the UA Mall in front of Heritage Hill and the Administration building. On Tuesday, his sermon drew the attention of onlookers, several of whom either personally confronted him or complained to the Dean of Students Office.

Saxton, a junior studying classics and religious studies, said his sermon was meant to convey that “if you dress like a whore, act like a whore, you’re probably going to get raped.”

“I think that girls that dress and act like it,” Saxton said, “they should realize that they do have partial responsibility, because I believe that they’re pretty much asking for it.”

Ah, the classic asshat tactic of blaming the victim. Those poor men. So tempted by the slutty sluts who dress in a manner Brother Dean finds inappropriate that they just can’t help themselves. If women would just dress the way Saxton thinks they should then rape would probably disappear completely! You gotta admire a man who is so confident in his beliefs that he’ll shout them from the rooftops no matter how much it offends the folks he’s trying to win over.

Jesus loves you, Brother Dean, but everyone else thinks you’re an asshole.

Too Much Faith Will Make You Crazy: Try, Try, Try Again Edition.

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Nothing fails quite like prayer. If you’re facing a crisis of some sort and want to do the absolute least thing you can do to help, prayer is your best choice.

It’s a particularly useless thing to do when your kids are are sick and need medical attention:

Herbert and Catherine Schaible belong to a fundamentalist Christian church that believes in faith healing. They lost their 8-month-old son, Brandon, last week after he suffered from diarrhea and breathing problems for at least a week, and stopped eating.

Now I’ve written about dumbshit parents who opted to try and use prayer to heal deathly ill children many times over the years, but this case is different.

This isn’t the first time they’ve tried this:

Four years ago, another son died from bacterial pneumonia.

[...] A jury convicted the Schaibles of involuntary manslaughter in the January 2009 death of their 2-year-old son, Kent. The boy’s symptoms had included coughing, congestion, crankiness and a loss of appetite. His parents said he was eating and drinking until the last day, and they had thought he was getting better.

The Schaibles were sentenced to 10 years’ probation.

You’d think that after they killed their first son by appealing to a God, that either doesn’t care or doesn’t exist, they’d have learned their lesson and made sure to not make that mistake again.

At a hearing Monday, a judge told the couple they had violated the terms of their probation, noting the Schaibles had told investigators that they prayed to God to make Brandon well instead of seeking medical attention.

“You did that once, and the consequences were tragic,” Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Benjamin Lerner said, according to the Philadelphia Daily News.

I’d find the attempted defense of these two idiots by their lawyer hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that they’ve killed two kids so far:

“There are way more questions than answers at this point. We haven’t seen the autopsy report. We don’t know the cause of death of this child,” Jayaraman told The Associated Press. “What we do know is Mr. and Mrs. Schaible are distraught, they are grieving, they are tremendously sad about the loss of their most recent baby.”

“Nobody argues that these aren’t very loving, nurturing parents,” she said Tuesday. “Whether their religion had anything to do with the death of their baby, we don’t know.”

The hell we don’t. They made it pretty clear that they wasted days praying instead of seeking medical attention. Their church has a sermon on its website called  ”Healing — From God or Medicine?” which states that it is a “definite sin to trust in medical help and pills”. That sounds like their religion being involved to me.

These morons violated the terms of their probation and are probably headed to jail with an entirely new manslaughter charge tacked on to boot. Their seven other children are currently in foster care which is probably for the best considering the judge thinks these two are “a danger to their children — not to the community, but to their own children.”  I couldn’t agree more.

Google is killing Reader and I’m hating all the possible replacements.

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googlereadertombstoneGoogle announced recently that they’re going to close down their RSS aggregator called Reader due to declining usage and their desire to concentrate development resources in other areas. I’ve used Google Reader for years now, pretty much since it was launched in 2005. It’s how I keep up with the couple hundred different blogs and websites without having to visit each and every one of them in turn. Needless to say this announcement was very distressing, but all good things come to an end and it’s not like they’re the only RSS aggregator out there so I started looking into alternatives.

In the past few weeks it became clear that what Google considers a “small” group of users is still huge compared to anyone else as just about every other RSS aggregator I tried was swamped with people checking it out after the announcement. The three most recommended ones I tried were Feedly, Newsblur, and The Old Reader.

Newsblur was almost completely useless at the start because its servers were so overwhelmed by all the folks jumping ship. Things have settled down since then and I’ve had a chance to try it out a bit and it certainly seems to have the most features, but it’s also limited to 64 feeds with 10 stories max unless you subscribe to their service. It’s only $24 a year and it might be worth it, but I’ve not used it enough to make that determination yet. It’s one I’ll definitely be playing with more, but my initial impression is that it’s trying too hard to be everything to everyone and the fact that it requires a subscription to really be useful is a negative. It also doesn’t appear to be able to share items with anyone who isn’t a Newsblur user. I’ve gotten used to sharing items on my Google+ page and Newsblur doesn’t support that.

Feedly also was near useless in the immediate aftermath, but it has since become more stable. It wants to present your feeds in a magazine format that’s quite different from Reader’s layout. Ultimately it suffers from what I call “Apple Computer Syndrome” in that it’s very pretty but it wants you to do things its way instead of the way you’d want to do them.

I have a particular way that I go through my RSS feeds in Reader and getting Feedly to allow me to do the same thing has been a real pain in the ass. Some things can be set as default through the preferences option (full articles as opposed to excerpts with a pic next to it), but other things have to be configured on a per-feed basis (showing only unread vs all articles). Considering that I have 200+ feeds having to tell each and every one of them that I want to see both read and unread articles is damned annoying. How you sort feeds in Feedly is also a mystery to me. I want mine sorted alphabetically, but by default it sorts them by who has the newest content. I seem to have somehow gotten it to sort alphabetically, but I have no idea how I did that.

It’s also slow compared to Reader and it becomes even slower if you have a crappy network (like I do at work). Lastly it seems to have a habit of skipping over some articles in a feed. I’ll get to the end of new articles, but it’ll still show 5 or 6 as still unread and if I click on the feed again it’ll suddenly show new items between the items I’ve already seen as if it had them in its pockets and just forgot to show them the first time around. But it is very pretty and it will let me share items to my Google+ page as well as Twitter and Facebook and a couple of others I don’t recognize so it has that going for it.

The Old Reader is an attempt to clone Google Reader from back when it was more of a self-contained system. When you shared items back then it wasn’t posted to your Google+ steam because Google+ didn’t exist back then. Instead it was only shared with other GReader users that had marked you as a friend or subscribed to your shares. TOR also suffered from the sudden influx of new users, but it didn’t seem to impact the functioning of the application so much as it did it’s ability to import your Google Reader subscription lists. You can export your subscriptions as an OPML file that you can use to import them into another RSS aggregator. I did with this TOR and it was nearly two weeks before it got around to actually processing it because so many other people were trying to do the same thing.

That said, TOR is the closest so far to Reader in terms of how it does things and it’s relatively speedy once it gets your subscriptions imported. The ability to rearrange subfolders has a couple of annoying quirks, but you can work around them. It’s definitely a work in progress and its performance will vary as a result, but the biggest negative against it is the same one Newsblur has. That it will only share with other users of TOR.

So, for the moment, I’m still trying to use GReader until they yank the plug or I find an aggregator that does everything I want. Alas, Google appears to have broken GReader’s ability to share items with Google+. When I try to do so these days it’ll pop up the box and I’ll get halfway through typing in a comment only to have the box suddenly disappear and all my key-presses interpreted as keyboard shortcuts screwing up where I am and losing the share in the process. It’s damned annoying. So I keep hopping back and forth between Feedly and GReader and finding I’m not happy with either one.

Granted, in the grand scheme of things RSS aggregators are pretty low on the list of most import things ever and it’s definitely a First World Problem I’m bitching about, but that won’t stop me from pouting over it.

Your kid’s elementary assembly is not the place to do a striptease.

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In the right time and place getting up and doing a striptease for an audience can be a very liberating and exhilarating experience. In the middle of an elementary school assembly, however, probably isn’t the best choice.

But that didn’t stop 24-year-old Aydrea Meaders of Albany from giving it her best shot:

Police: Woman undressed in front of elementary school assembly – NEWS10 ABC

“It had been going as a terrific event. The cafeteria was full. We probably had about 200 students in there from throughout the school,” said Ron Lesko of the Albany School District.

The school district says Meaders joined in on the assembly – at first just dancing with the students.

“Wasn’t an expected part of the routine but she wasn’t doing anything inappropriate,” said Lesko.

But that’s when things quickly went in the wrong direction

“Suddenly she stepped to the front of the group threw off her coat and stripped from the waist up,” said Lesko.

Staff rushed the stage to protect the kids from seeing naked boobies which would undoubtedly scar them for life and Ms. Meaders was arrested and charged with seven counts of Endangering the Welfare of a Child and one count of Public Lewdness.

The article doesn’t say what her motivation was or if she was drunk or high at the time. It could just be that she works up one helluva sweat dancing and finds that dancing topless is the best way to moderate her body temperature. Even so, the potential corrupting influence of naked tits is too much of a risk to allow to go unpunished.

Jack in the Box heiress blows $1 billion gambling over 9 years.

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gamblingcatI can admit that the main reason I’m not fabulously wealthy is because in many ways I’m a bit of a screw up. Occasionally this realization makes me a little sad, but the next time it does I can comfort myself with the knowledge that I’m not this much of a screw up:

San Diego ex-mayor used charity funds to cover gambling debts – latimes.com.

SAN DIEGO — She married a fabulously wealthy man decades her elder, and became the first female mayor of San Diego. But when Maureen O’Connor left public life, she spent countless hours seated in front of video-poker machines.

Over a nine-year period, she wagered an estimated $1 billion, including millions from a charity set up by her late husband, who founded Jack in the Box.

That was the portrait that emerged in court Thursday as the frail former mayor tearfully acknowledged she skimmed more than $2 million from a charity founded by her late husband, Robert O. Peterson.

When my father-in-law took me gambling for the first time last year we went with a budget of $300 and I had a hard time with the knowledge that we were risking $300*. I can’t begin to fathom coming anywhere close to wagering a billion dollars.

She obviously has a gambling addiction problem, but it’s still hard to conceive how should get let herself get to the point of blowing her fortune and then stealing from her late husband’s charity without ever once thinking that maybe she might have a problem she needs help with.

I don’t mean to criticize or condemn this lady over this. I’m only writing about it because it so boggles my mind to even think about that writing it down is the only way I can deal with it. There are so many other things I’d be doing if I had that kind of money at my disposal and I probably still wouldn’t come close to ever spending it all.

* We left the casino with $50 more than what we walked in with. Which was enough to convince me I shouldn’t press my luck by ever going again.

Oxford American Dictionary decides 25 years late to make “GIF” the word of the year.

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So this happened. The folks who produce the Oxford American Dictionary have declared their word of the year to be “GIF”, which is actually an acronym for “Graphics Interchange Format” and was introduced all the way back in 1987.

Personally, I’m confused by the choice and the reasons listed in the news article do nothing to clear said confusion up:

 ‘GIF’ named word of the year by Oxford American Dictionary | The Sideshow – Yahoo! News.

“GIF celebrated a lexical milestone in 2012, gaining traction as a verb, not just a noun,” said Katherine Martin, head of the U.S. dictionaries program at Oxford.

“The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace.”

It’s gained traction as a verb? What the hell? How the hell do you use it as a verb? I’ve been on this Interweb thing since right around 1987, long before the mainstream caught onto it, and I have never, ever, ever heard anyone use GIF as a verb.

Guess I better check in with the people who put out the dictionary to see if they have any examples of this usage. Turns out they have a blog on which they announced this choice:

GIFverb to create a GIF file of (an image or video sequence, especially relating to an event): he GIFed the highlights of the debate

Seriously? Not only would I laugh my ass off at anyone trying to use that as a sentence, but why the fuck would anyone “GIF” the highlights of a debate in an age of ubiquitous streaming video?

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of video clips that make excellent GIF animations. There’s hours of amusement to be found at sites like Señor Gif which provide you with crucial snippets like the following:

This one has revolutionized how I get around the office at work.

But if someone were to come up to me and ask if I’d seen that video they had “GIFed”, I’d have no choice but to slap some sense into them.

That said, their blog entry goes on to say:

The GIF, a compressed file format for images that can be used to create simple, looping animations, turned 25 this year, but like so many other relics of the 80s, it has never been trendier. GIF celebrated a lexical milestone in 2012, gaining traction as a verb, not just a noun. The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace.

That highlighted part captured my attention so I continued reading to see if they provided any examples of this supposedly new use for GIF files. Here’s one they came up with in a section called “Highlights of the year in GIFing:”

January 2012: The New York Public Library launches the stereogranimator, a tool enabling users to make GIFs of vintage stereographs in the library’s collection to create an illusion of the 3D experience of viewing through a stereoscope.

That particular service may be new, but people have been converting stereographs into animated GIFs for years. Some of the earliest postings I’ve seen date back to the late 90′s.

August 2012: The GIF vaults to prominence as a tool in covering Olympic events, marshaled into use both for serious analysis and humorous effect. Blogging for the New York Times, Jenna Wortham called GIFs “the perfect medium for the Olympics.”

Again, this isn’t particularly new. You can find plenty of animated GIFs from previous Olympics created both by ordinary people and a few news agencies.

Then there’s this:

February 7, 2012: First post on the GIFtastic tumblr whatshouldwecallme 

Um. OK? Not sure why we should give a shit that it was used as the first post on some random tumblr no one’s ever heard of. But what do I know? I can’t even manage to figure out how to use the word as a verb.

Granted, in the great scheme of things, what the folks at the Oxford American Dictionary deem to be the word of the year isn’t particularly important. It just feels like a wasted opportunity given how many other significant not-25-year-old-acronyms are out there that would’ve been a better choice. Then again, when you consider that their second choice was YOLO, hoping for something better than “GIF as a verb” is probably being overly optimistic.

Man dies after competing in a roach eating contest to win a snake.

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I understand the appeal of pet ownership and I also understand that the more exotic a pet the more it can cost to acquire. Snakes aren’t my thing, but some folks like keeping them and some of them can cost a pretty penny. So it’s not entirely surprising to me that some folks would engage in silly competitions for the chance to win an expensive snake. What I can’t understand is why anyone would consider snakes, or any other expensive pet, worth eating cockroaches over.

But apparently I’m in the minority in that opinion as a contest held at Ben Siegel Reptiles in West Palm Beach required contestants to do just that and several people signed up to participate.

Alas, for contestant Edward Archbold it would be the last meal he’d ever consume:

Edward Archbold, 32, collapsed after winning the repulsive contest at Ben Siegel Reptile Store. Archbold, who was competing for a free python, was stricken outside the Deerfield Beach business, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.

Investigators reported that Archbold “wasn’t feeling well and began to regurgitate” shortly after the contest’s conclusion. “He had consumed dozens of roaches and worms,” a sheriff’s spokesman noted.

Archbold was pronounced dead after being transported to an area hospital. An autopsy was conducted, and the Broward County medical examiner is awaiting test results to determined Archbold’s cause of death.

On the positive side, he won the contest.

If I had to guess I suspect he may have had an allergic reaction. Eating bugs isn’t particularly dangerous in itself if they’re cleaned and cooked, but live insects can carry a number of potentially problematic diseases (read: e. coli and salmonella, among others) not to mention possibly pesticides.

Knowing all of that, I still wouldn’t eat cockroaches — live or otherwise — unless I was starving and had nothing else at hand. Certainly not for an expensive pet. Very few bugs, uh, bug me, but roaches are at the top of that short list. I couldn’t tell you why. I’ve never had to live in a roach infested home and my encounters with them over the years have been few and very far between, but they give me the heebie jeebies.

Sometimes a little advanced planning can save you a lot of trouble.

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The following news item is pretty typical of what you’ll see in any local paper these days. Someone gets into a high-speed chase with the cops because they’ve done something stupid:

Mandy Ramsey, 35, of Fort McCoy, was speeding south on County Road 318 in a Ford F-250 pickup truck when a patrol car chased after her to pull her over, according to a Marion County Sheriff’s Office report.

After seeing the patrol car in pursuit, the woman turned onto Northeast 220 Street and then continued down Northeast 10th Avenue, running a stop sign and eventually hitting an oak tree.

The only question is: What is the stupid thing they’ve done that left them feeling they had no recourse other than to flee from the police? Had a dead body in the bed of the truck? Open bottles of booze in the seat next to them? Carrying huge amounts of crack cocaine or crystal meth?

In this case it was nothing so mundane…

The deputy lost Ramsey during the chase in the area, but soon found the car parked behind a mobile home with its passenger side mirror broken with an oak tree leaf in it, according to reports.

Deputies made contact with the vehicle’s owner, Ramsey’s boyfriend, who said he hadn’t driven the car in over two hours. Ramsey then admitted to deputies that she didn’t stop because she was driving topless and wanted to surprise her boyfriend.

You have to admit, that’s one helluva surprise. Honey, I got into a police chase and wrecked your truck all so you could see my tits! Surprise!

The thing I find most amusing about this is that just a little bit of forethought could have prevented the problem. Start with not speeding on the drive over to his house so the cops won’t decide to pull you over. Too much of a lead foot? Then perhaps you should consider take a shirt with you on the off-chance the cops do catch you speeding.

Hell, for that matter, how long does it take someone to yank off their shirt in the car after they’ve arrived safe and sound at the house? Leave the bra at home and toss on some oversized T-shirt you can slip out of in 2 seconds flat and you’re all set. This isn’t rocket science folks.

I can appreciate surprise tits as much as the next guy, but I can appreciate not having to bail someone out of jail after they wrecked my vehicle a heck of a lot more.

If you get a phone call saying President Obama will pay your utility bills just hang up.

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Seems there’s a new scam making the rounds where someone calls you up and says that President Obama has just signed a law that created a grant to help folks pay their utility bills and all you need to do to qualify for it is to provide the caller with your social security number and your bank’s routing number.

And there are idiots out there who not only fell for this scam, but got their friends to sign up for it as well:

Channel 2s Tony Thomas spoke to a Griffin woman who fell for the scam. Loneiyce Washington even introduced her friends to what she thought was a legitimate offer. They ended up getting scammed, too.

Washington said she thought Obama passed a law that provided credits to help her and others pay their utility bills, she told Thomas.

Investigators said the scammers ask for peoples Social Security numbers and bank routing numbers. The victims are then given a fake routing number to a bank and the money routed will go toward paying their utility bills. Washington thought after the money had been routed, her bills had been paid. But that wasnt the case and she said she didnt have to give out her private information.

“I didnt think it was a scam because they are not asking for personal information,” Washington said.

Apparently these folks don’t consider their Social Security number to be a form of personal information.

The story doesn’t say, but I’d hope that these were older folks who could be excused for being a little slow on the uptake. If it was anyone under 70, though, then they need a swift slap up the side of their head. Do not hand out your Social Security and bank routing numbers to strangers on the phone pushing too-good-to-be-true offers.

Skype introduces ads during calls, tries to play it off as something you’d want.

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An example of the new Skype ads in action. Click to embiggen.

The folks at Skype announced on their blog yesterday that they were rolling out a new advertisement system for users who are not paying subscribers. A good percentage of Skype’s user base are, let’s face it, freeloaders who are content to use only those features that are offered for free. I’m one of those freeloaders and one of the things you put up with for free stuff is being subjected to ads. Skype has promised that these ads will not affect call quality nor will they make any sound whatsoever.

I don’t have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is their attempt, in a post on their blog, to make it sound like the introduction of these ads is something we freeloaders will appreciate:

Skype – The Big Blog – Skype Advertising Update

While on a 1:1 audio call, users will see content that could spark additional topics of conversation that are relevant to Skype users and highlight unique and local brand experiences. So, you should think of Conversation Ads as a way for Skype to generate fun interactivity between your circle of friends and family and the brands you care about. Ultimately, we believe this will help make Skype a more engaging and useful place to have your conversations each and every day.

Seriously? The only way they will spark conversation between me and whomever I’m Skyping with will be if they’re in any way annoying enough for me to mention how fucking annoying they are. Otherwise, like most ads on the Internet, we’ll probably ignore them altogether. In fact, if we’re not using the video option then chances are the Skype client will be minimized and I’ll be looking at something else entirely. The last thing I do on audio-only calls is stare at the Skype client.

Again, I don’t have a problem with Skype putting ads on the screen per se. I get that they’re a for-profit company and they have to come up with a way to make some bucks off of those of us who don’t subscribe to their service. I just wish they’d be honest about why they’re doing it and not try to sell it as something beneficial to me like I’m an idiot.

Had they said something like this:

Hey folks. Today we’re putting advertising on the screen during 1-to-1 audio only calls to try and offset the cost of providing you with the service for free. We promise to keep the ads as unobtrusive as possible and they will not affect the call quality. We do offer a subscription service that not only offers lots of additional features, but also eliminates the ads for those who don’t wish to see them if you’d like to consider that option. We hope that this will not be a source of inconvenience for you and we welcome your feedback.

I’d be damned impressed with their honesty. Running a service like Skype is expensive and they have to make money somehow if they want to keep offering some of their features for free. These ads aren’t unreasonable even if I think most folks, like myself, will ignore them.

But who knows? Maybe I’m wrong and there will be a lot of people who end up finding them a useful topic to discuss with their friends. Maybe such people really do exist and I’m just being an old curmudgeon. I’d like to think that’s not the case, but I’ve been wrong before. Even so I think Skype would do well to count those as a happy side-benefit of the ads instead of trying to promote that as a feature folks will appreciate. But maybe that’s just me.