Rou

Ah, post Christmas bliss. You've got your pile of loot. New toys waiting to be opened and enjoyed.

Can someone explain something for me? What the hell is with packaging these days? I'm sure there is an anti-theft basis for it, but I shouldn't need a plasma torch to cut my way into my items?

I mean, you've got DVDs that are shrink wrapped, then have annoying sticker seal on 3 sides, and then have those two stupid tabs locking them further. I JUST WANT TO WATCH MY MOVIE!!!!

Heaven forbid you got a gadget of some sort. Those plastic containers... I seriously don't know how to properly open them. They place the item between two pieces of plastic, then heat seal the entire deal. The only thing I can do seems to be to machete chop my way through with a knife or scissors. Do your best to avoid cutting anything important like instructions or warranty info. Hope it fucking works too, because most stores won't accept shredded container returns.

I mean, there has to be an upper limit to what thieves will go through before they just grab the entire package and do a grab and run out the door. I feel fairly certain we're well past that point now. I know that because I've seen it done numerous times with packaging far less formidable.

My mp3 container should not be Fort Knox. My DVDs shouldn't require magnetic locks. And my xbox controller shouldn't be hermetically sealed.

OK, I dislike SUVs in general. Well, that's not entirely true. I think they're useful when uses to actually do off-roading. When used by soccer moms to be stylish minivans, no so much.

However, they make up over a third of the vehicles on the road, so I get to deal with it. No problem.

So, what's got me pissed about them today? The drive through. The local fast food joint has 2 speed bumps in the parking lot. Not even big ones. Little ones. About an inch and half high and 2 feet across. I drive my little POS car across them at 10mph and barely feel them.

For some deep and mysterious reason, this woman in front of me, in her behemoth Ford Explorer, come to a complete fucking stop and then inches over these things like she was climbing the berlin fucking wall. I'm talking 30 seconds to pull herself over each fucking one. Fucking hell woman. You've got a vehicle with 8 inches of ground clearance. Even though the Explorer really isn't designed for off road activity, it's still got a decent suspension and can fucking deal with a tiny fucking bump.

You know, you don't have to use your SUV to drive through the west. Or climb mountain trails. But you should be able to handle the fucking PARKING LOT at the mother fucking fast food joint. If that's too much for you, maybe you need to look into car pooling or something.

Stupid dumbass incompetent fucking bad drivers.

A Muslim Congressman swore his oath on the Koran. They said it was the downfall of American society.

I laughed.

No one could take them seriously, right?

Oh how I wish I lived in a country that no one would take them seriously. Now, the pundits are saying we need to step up our immigration policies soon before other Muslim congressman get elected. That somehow, we need to filter out immigrants based on religious belief. Or put in some sort of "moral value" (read as: belief in Jesus!) requirement for serving in Congress. If we don’t do something now, it’s the beginning of the end. I swear to fucking god that’s their exact words. ‘The Beginning of the End.’ Go fuck yourself.

Seriously people, how fucking stupid are you? Seriously. I’m fucking tired of this moronic hypocritical bullshit. Its jingoist propaganda at it’s worst.

Hell, I could accept it if they just didn’t like this guy. Disagree with him. Disagree with his beliefs. Fine. Whatever, it’s no skin off my nose if you like the fucker or not. Couple of years, run a better candidate against him and get him voted out. It shouldn’t be that hard. Fuck. I can’t imagine why a segment of the population would elect someone that actually represented their faith instead of a mindless political whore who saw them like some wretched dog who pissed on his shoes.

Beginning of the end? Please. Have a drink, relax a little bit and shut the fuck up because you don’t have a mother fucking clue.

I can deal with people that have problems with immigrants sitting around munching on the welfare dollar or otherwise pilfering the system. Sure, Bitch about them. Not going to hear a complaint from me. Illegals? No problem from me. Kick the fuckers out by the boatload. But that not what these shit bags are doing here. They’re honestly standing up and saying that our country needs to tell Muslims to get out because we don’t take kindly to their type 'round here.

Fucking hillbilly uneducated bigoted racist horse shit. Those goat felchers need to die in a fire. Acting like somehow your religion is any better than theirs. Maybe you should fucking worry about you own religious faults before you cast stones into someone else’s issues.

Do you neo-con right wing fuckers want to know why the left talks down to you? This is fucking it. You have to talk slow to dumb children to help them comprehend.

I hate being interrupted when I watch TV. No by people, but by commercials. I don't have a TiVO or DVR, but I should get one. Mostly, I flip channels during breaks. Or I watch HBO or something that is commercial free.

I'm pretty good at timing my flips back to the original station. I very rarely miss more than a few seconds of the show.

A lot of people are like that I suppose. Or the TiVO is helping them avoid commercials automatically. I say that because recently I've seen more and more little stupid commercials running DURING the show.

The annoying fuckers suddenly pop up in the lower right hand side and take up a quarter of the screen. They overlay whatever you're watching, and occasionally, when you're really lucky, they have SOUND!! that overrides the shows sound. How wonderful.

The past few weeks, I've seen a ton of these. I don't know if I'm just lucky or if there are actually more of them. Fox is running a Eragon blitz to help promote that movies release. Another station is doing Cold Case. Spike is doing Video Game awards and Sci-fi is doing non stop ads for the Lost Room.

Now, you may say that the ads are working because a) I watched them and b) I remembered them. This is true. But there is a flaw here. I will not watch the indicated shows. I refuse. Maybe that's not true of all their viewers, but it certainly is for me.

I just can't stand those stupid little pop ups. Can't avoid them, can't ignore them, can't stand them.

I can't imagine why I've taken to watching shows online instead.

So, it's been a while. But yes, there are still people willing to sue Rock Star because of the GTA: San Andreas mod. In case you've missed it, a hacker released a mod that allowed you to access a simulated sex game that was left in the source code.

Of course, this was all hashed out in the press a year ago or more. But a Philly man has decided to sue because the company won't refund his money. You see, he bought it for his son two years ago. Apparently he just caught up to the news. So, he took the game away from his kid and wants his money back. The company offers a patch that will disable the mini-game.

The kicker? The kid? He's 23 now.

I don't know about you guys, but if my dad tried to take a game away from at age 23 because it had badly animated sex scenes... I'd have a hard time not laughing in his face. Hell, he was 21 when the game was released. Full grown adult. I mean, I know I harp on parental responsibility all the time, but this... this goes to the other end of the extreme.

I'm certain Pops is going to die of a heart attack when he finds out that there is porn on the internet and a decent chance his son looks at it.

Fuck you.

You know, I’m not a very good alumnus. I know that.

Maybe my high school's attempts to indoctrinate me with school pride during the forced pep rallies failed on me for some reason. Maybe I just never understood why I should feel a fanatical devotion to my college.

Regardless of the cause, the end result is the same. I don’t donate money to my schools. I don’t get it. I paid a rather large sum of money to attend university. I’m not quite certain what on earth would make me want to continue that after graduation. I was pretty sure that this is even truer when you compare the rate of tuition increases compared to the inflation rate.

I ignore the letters. They always come two at a time; One for me, and one for my girlfriend. The envelope states, in flowing script, that the University’s “Office of Annual Giving” is looking for another pledge of support. The name cracks me up because it is total fucking bullshit. I get letters from this “Annual” office between four and six times a year. Twice that if you count both envelopes. And that doesn’t count ‘special’ credit card offers, email services, home mortgages, and various other money sucking scams that originate from the alumni lists of my college. All certified and supported in an effort to get more fucking money out of me.

I paid a lot of money to get my degree already thankyouverymuch. Maybe I’m missing the sentimental bone that drives others to continue paying for that wall hanging long after I’ve earned it. Besides, I can think of a billion and three better places I could donate money then my old school.

Dunno. Maybe it’s just me. It could just a total void where my school spirit is supposed to be.

Every time I look at my phone bill, I know it’s true.

Simple pricing is what I want. One price, and the cost of any long distance calls I make. It’s simple. When you advertise something like $29.99/month and $.05 nights and weekends, the bill should be simple math to figure out. But it’s not. The fine print is those ads don’t include taxes and fees. They add up quickly.

Line charges, connectivity charges, and a handful of little taxes quickly tack another $10 to it.

Honestly, it drives me up a wall every time I actually take the time to read the bill. I usually just look at the amount owed and write the check. I know that’s dangerous, but I figure as long as the amount is consistent with previous bill, it’s better for my anger management to avoid the details too much. Or at the very least skim past it to just look at the call charges.

It’s not just the phone bill. My cable bill has a couple of them on there too. Power. Gas. All the same. Little tiny addendum to the bill. Fine print they never mention when they’re selling the service to you. All the sudden you turn around and notice that a bunch of the monthly bill money has vanished into the fine print.

It’s easy to phase it out or ignore it as a couple cents here and there, but if you ever step back and examine the mass of these fees, it’s enough to really drive you batty.

So, lesson for the day, don’t spend too much time examining your records in Money or Quicken. Sometimes it’s better to be blissfully ignorant. Especially when I start looking at how much of my income vanishes down a black hole called social security.