Today’s rant: onions

It is September and normally that would mean that new seasons television shows would begin.  That is not the case because the Writers Guild of America, led by the fearless Fran Drescher, is striking the big television and streaming producers in Hollywood.  Then the Screen Actors Guild went on strike.  This has been going on for 5 months.  Two weeks ago, the United Auto Workers union also went on strike against the big 3 Detroit, MI car manufacturers.  Personally, I’m not affected much.  There are lots of episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on YouTube, and those take over an hour and 30 minutes to go through.  Also, I am not in the market for a new car, especially not when Ford stands for Fix or Repair Daily.

My opinion of labor unions is that they can be both good and bad.  Examples of some of the good they do are improving safe working conditions and get a decent wage for their members.  Some of the bad they do are spending money on expensive shit for the labor organizers and get involved with racketeering and organized crime.  I’m looking at you, Teamsters.  Personally, I am not in a labor union.  Workers at one old facility I worked at voted to unionize after I left.  Years after the union was voted in, they are shutting down manufacturing entirely there by the end of this year.  Lots of good there.  I’ve heard from a person who worked there that everything went downhill after the union moved in.  This is just my personal anecdote.  I cannot speak for any industry in particular.  I will say that illegally trimming tree branches that provide shade to strikers is as dick a move as tear-gassing BLM protestors to get your picture taken holding an upside down bible in front of a church in DC.

By the way:  I cannot think the word “union” without my brain pronouncing it “onion”.

Today’s rant: Monk-verse

I am glad that TV characters exist in a different universe than my own.  More specifically, I am happy that fictional detective Adrian Monk exists in a different universe than my own, specifically because of the mortality rate and the criminality of characters who are up to two degrees of separation from him.  Here are the best lists that I can come up with of people one or two degrees of separation away from Adrian Monk who have either been murder victims or were murderers:

 

Victims, 1 degree of separation:

Wife

Group therapy patients

Upstairs neighbor

Manager at his bank

 

Victims, 2 degrees of separation:

Wife’s midwife (spoiler alert!)

Brother’s neighbor (woman)

Doctor’s cleaning lady

Assistant’s pizza deliverer

Lieutenant’s uncle

Nurse’s uncle (jeez, I’d hate to be an uncle in that universe)

2 victims of person who held grudge against Monk

Father’s boss

Old crush’s cleaning lady

Upstairs neighbor’s paperboy

 

Perpetrators, 1 degree of separation:

Flight passengers

Person against whom Monk brought evidence to a grand jury

 

Perpetrators, 2 degrees of separation:

Wife’s college professor (spoiler alert!)

Brother’s neighbor (man, husband to victim)

Doctor’s office neighbor

Doctor’s colleague

Nurse’s writing teacher

Captain’s girlfriend

Person who sued wife

Co-juror’s boyfriend

Father’s other boss

Assistant’s new sister-in-law

Man who had crush on assistant

Old crush’s ex-husband

Upstairs neighbor’s new girlfriend

Host of show that father-in-law produces

Upstairs neighbor’s magician mentor (when 2 people want you dead on separate occasions, maybe you suck)

Bank manager’s tall co-conspirator

Today’s rant: unsolicited requests

I once asked a telemarketer if he has accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior.  When he said that I shouldn’t push my religious views on other people, I said he shouldn’t push stupid bullshit over the telephone, wished him a fond “fuck you”, and hung up on him.  It is what Jesus would have done. 

Last year, I got a text message from the NRA asking me to call Lady G himself Lindsey Graham to oppose gun legislation.  I replied “Fuck the NRA.  Eat my taint.  Take your gun, shove it up your ass, and pull the trigger.”  Jesus would not have said that.  He would have said to use a cross.

As you can see, I hate when people contact me for things that have absolutely nothing to do with me.  Yesterday, I got an unsolicited email from a person representing a job recruiting agency asking if I wanted a position as a spare parts buyer for a company’s “Supplier Business Operations” team.  I used quotation marks because I wanted to highlight that it is a self-inflated title that a company made up to sound more important.  It sounds a lot fancier that the simpler term “buyers”.  “I’m a supplier business operator!”  No, you’re a buyer, and there’s nothing wrong with being a buyer.  Regardless, that is not my field of expertise, and anyone who actually read my resume would not associate that job with me.  I responded back criticizing his waste of time in emailing me, saying “please tell me exactly what in my resume made you think that it would be profitable to take the time to write me an email about buying shit when absolutely nothing in my resume even comes close to that job description.”  The person responded back saying it was a mass email and apologized.  The claim that it was a mass email means either he puts no thought into finding job candidates or his agency’s policies and procedures put no thought into finding job candidates.  It’s the “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” maneuver.

I think my body hates the air.  Different parts of my body start bothering me when the air changes for any reason.  Low barometric pressure makes my right hip ache.  Pollen shuts down my sinus cavities and makes my right eye swell and turn red.  My dog’s various odors make me cough and gag in the morning when I have to clean up after her.

The “Reels” function on my Facebook mobile app is something I wish I could delete.  The best thing I can do is “Hide” them to see them less often, but mathematically, there is only so often I can do that before hitting “Hide” does absolutely nothing.  There is an asymptote that is eventually reached.  If I cannot delete it, at the very least, I should be able to have a “thumbs down” button for the videos that are played.

This paragraph is written on Tuesday, March 21.  The former Cheeto in Chief has said for the past week that he expects to be arrested today.  It’s a pleasant thought… really pleasant, actually, but the mere fact that he said it makes me doubt it will actually happen.  This is a hairpiece that said COVID will go away by Easter 2020 and never gave a replacement for the Affordable Care Act whenever he said he would.  He has the timing of a flat-Earther.

This paragraph is written on March 22.  Go figure, he’s full of shit.  He’s trying to get people to notice him again, despite the fact that if he was for some reason arrested, he would most likely voluntarily arrive at the DA’s office with his lawyers and Secret Service, be processed, taken straight to an adjoining arraignment hearing room where he would skip everyone else in line, plead not guilty, then be released on his own recognizance before going back to Florida.  If there are any handcuffs involved, they will never see daylight outside of a building.  It’s all bullshit.

If the person is dead, is it still slander or libel?

Today’s rant: What a drag

There’s 3 weeks left until the beginning of baseball season.  I don’t think I’m gonna make it.  I have no other good distractions available.

 

If American culture survives another 100 years, I would love to know how historians of the future judge the overt use of the word “woke” in our politics.  I suspect it would be something like how the word “communist”  or “socialist” was and still is used to describe anything that a politician doesn’t like, despite having nothing to do with the working class’ struggle to topple the bourgeoisie oppressors in order to achieve an economic utopia.  Seriously, conservatives, I do not think that Lenin had wet dreams about eliminating hamburgers because cow emissions cause ozone depletion.  I don’t even know what the fuck that last sentence was supposed to mean, but you made that argument during the debate about the Green New Deal, so you sleep with it.

 

I firmly believe that now is a great time for entertainers to start boycotting states that have anti-LGBTQIA+ laws put into place, given how nonchalant conservative states have been about anti-trans youth laws lately.  WWE, don’t have SummerSlam in Tennessee.  Please.  There are plenty of other football and baseball stadiums in the country, and I’m sure you can sell out the building.

 

It is my interpretation that we, as a people, accept migrants and refugees dying in capsized boats as an inevitable and acceptable loss of life.  “Oopsy.  Oh well.  I didn’t know any of them and they took a risky form of transportation.”  This is thousands of people a year just going into the water and not coming back up.  Furthermore, I cannot say that I personally care.  There’s too many people already.  Honestly, I think I would’ve been happier if Elian Gonzales didn’t survive.  It’s just interesting to me that society as kind of given up on them.  

 

It blows my mind that Finland and Sweden want to join NATO.  These are historically neutral countries, but they were finally pushed over the edge by Russia being a bag of dicks and invading Ukraine.  Good move, comrade.

 

I am a New York transplant living in South Carolina.  Among the things to come out of the infinite wisdom of the South Carolina state government lately is the “Defense of Children’s Innocence Act”.  Wow, that’s a broad title.  That’s the kind of title that is engineered to give the reader a good feeling in their tum-tum while at the same time say absolutely nothing about what it does.  Might as well be called the “Happy Cupcake Snuggie Act”.  In this “act”, it says that “Any business where drag shows are held is deemed to be a sexually oriented business for all local government ordinances relating to a sexually oriented business.”  The text justifies the tie between drag and sex by providing its own definition of a drag show.  My biggest problem with the definition given is the following statement:  “and is intended to provide sexual stimulation or sexual gratification”.  They made that statement up.  I know that because I have been to drag story time with my kids.  All you typically see at drag story time is someone dressed like Lady Gaga or Britney Spears dancing, lip-syncing (like Britney Spears), and reading a book.  I also know they made that statement up because I have been watching professional wrestling since 1997.  So when the then-World Wrestling Federation was having bra and panty matches in the late 1990s, they would comfortably have qualified as a sexually oriented business from my 13 to 15 year old perspective. 

Here’s a piece of nuance that is intentionally overlooked by the wording of this “act”:  drag performers do not do the adult-related entertainment part of their job at a children’s function.  To an intelligent person that should come as no surprise, otherwise they would not be invited back.  While professional wrestler John Cena grants more Make a Wish appearances than anyone else on the planet, you never hear of WWE having Hell in a Cell matches for the Make a Wish Foundation.  Why don’t they do that?  Because they don’t do the fighting part of their performance in front of Make a Wish kids!

 

I’m surprised that this is the topic that conservatives are making such an uproar about in South Carolina.  I guess all the other major problems are fixed now.  People with substance abuse problems are getting the help they need, right?  They don’t need to resort to spending the night in jail or in the Emergency Roomjust so they don’t have to spend the night outside, right? Everyone outside the halls of the State House has a bed and 4 walls to sleep in tonight, right?  And if they do, those building are up to code, right?  No fire hazards?  And I trust all the teachers are getting paid well.  Because, you know, “children’s innocence” and all that.  Don’t want to lose all those good teachers if their pay stinks.  We want to incentivize them to stay and get more people to join teaching as a profession.  We’re doing everything to make sure that happens, right?  And DSS isn’t having a hard time doing their job, right?  I certainly hope not, because it would be really weird if all those things were still major problems before you decided that drag shows were the higher priority.  Personally, my hierarchy of priorities has worrying about my kids’ exposure to drag shows fitting in on page 598 between giving 2 shits what my wife says about putting too much basil in the tomato sauce and wondering if Tiffany blue and turquoise are the same color.

 

Just say what it actually is.  This isn’t about children.  They hate drag performers.  This is not defending children’s innocence, because no drag performer has ever walked into a school or a library or a church and started shooting up the place.  This is codifying discrimination.  PROVE TO ME that drag shows are a threat to children’s innocence.  Police report or doctor’s note, or it didn’t happen.  If you cannot do that, THEN WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE EVEN TALKING ABOUT?!

Today’s rant: news wrestling entertainment (nWe 4 life?)

 Senator Rand Paul has the strangest rage boner I have ever seen for Dr. Anthony Fauci.  He can demand all the investigations he wants.  I’m not trusting the pseudo-science ravings, conspiracy theories, or sub-human intelligence of some stupid politician who looks like someone tried to launder Martin Short and didn’t leave him in the dryer for long enough.  I’m trusting the guy with the medical degree.  End of story.

Last week, the Comptroller of South Carolina reported a $3.5 billion accounting error.  I’m not going into detail what a Comptroller does, because I don’t know.  Don’t be surprised, neither do you.  All I know is that I used to be a writing tutor at my state college, which meant I was a state employee and the state Comptroller’s signature would show up on my paycheck.  Then the Comptroller got into legal trouble for using state money to pay for transportation for his invalid wife.  Then he got into more legal trouble for using state money to hire a lawyer because he got into legal trouble for using state money to pay for transportation for his invalid wife.  Then he got reelected despite all of the previous information being public knowledge at the time, then he resigned in disgrace, in that order.  This is how I knew in college that government and the voting public were fucking stupid.  He did a very bad job comptrolling everything.  Anyhow, that was almost 20 years ago.  Fast forward to South Carolina’s predicament, money given to help pay for state colleges was not reflected in the budget over the past few years.  The state budget was off by $3.5 billion, but someone in the Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office said “There should be no impact on anyone, certainly not on the budget process, not on the tax rebates that everyone received.”   That means that SC state politicians before this year read the state budget and thought they had an extra $3.5 billion laying around inconsequently and absolutely none of them thought, “You know, $3.5 billion sure could feed a lot of hungry people.  Sure could buy a lot of beds and space for people without homes.  Maybe if I toss some to the teachers, they’ll stop complaining about how little they are getting paid.”  Greedy fucks.  Makes you wonder how much other money they are sitting on to make them think a $3.5 billion oopsy-poopsy isn’t that big a deal.

If you need any further proof that cable news channels are not news, but in actuality ratings-driven entertainment and opinion, just look at the latest shit from CNN and Fox News.  At least with WWE, they admit what they are selling you upfront.  It’s in the fucking title:  “entertainment”.  With cable news, instead of “superstars” and “professional wrestlers”, we have “senior political analysts”.  Instead of “announcers” and “color commentators” reading a script and getting verbal queues through an earpiece, we have “anchors” and “prime-time talk show hosts” reading a script and getting verbal queues through an earpiece.  Funny enough, CNN’s Don Lemon shows why going off-script is bad.  He’s trying to ad-lib and be more entertaining, and from what I read in news headlines (because I don’t care enough about him to read the full article), his ad-lib comments regarding Nikki Haley were not going over well.  Who’s on his way to getting fired?  Whoa, he’s halfway there. Whoa-oh!  Lemon on the air!  Don…DON!  Don’t do that shit.  Just Google “Abraham Washington WWE Kobe Bryant” and you will see why.  On the other side of the psych ward, we have Fox News, my least-favorite adorable mammal-based media outlet.   They are being sued for the stupid bullshit they said after Cheetos McHairpiece lost the last election.  As a result of being sued, court document showed that their people knew they were spewing bullshit, but said it anyway to keep their ratings up.  That comfortably disqualifies them from being called news and justifies them getting sued.  It’s the same reason why “boneless wings” are not “boneless chicken wings” at Applebees and why “langastino” has to be used when “Red Lobster” tries to pass it off as actual lobster.  Fox, you are no better than family restaurant chains.

I have no idea what a “gutfeld” is, but if it’s claiming to be the highest-rated late-night comedy show in the country, there’s a lot of things that need to be understood.  Firstly, there are already a dozen late-night comedy shows to choose from every night, and most of them lean liberal.  That means that half the country’s population splits into those 12 or so to choose a favorite.  Mathematically, that means that the other half of the country’s population breaks off into a VERY small pool of conservative leaning late-night comedy shows.  That means a bigger piece of the pie.  Big whoop.  Secondly, I’d rather make jokes about conservative stereotypes and be called a pussy snowflake sheep than make jokes about liberal stereotypes and be called racist.  By all means, you go ahead and do that.  Seriously, I don’t think you really understand why we hate you.  Fox, everything you do reinforces the conservative stereotypes of racism, greed, and ignorance.  What stereotypes are you going to call the libs?  Spend too much money, deviant, perverted, and anti-white?  I’ll take that any day of the week and twice on Sunday, especially the deviant perverted part on Sunday.  Thirdly, combining my first 2 point together, it seems as if having the highest-rated late-night comedy show situated on a conservative news channel just means you hold the most attention of shit-brained uncritical people who have nothing better to do at 11pm on a weeknight when they should be sleeping because they have work tomorrow, like the rest of us.  This is what Trump never understood.  Ratings don’t make you better when the people who watch you are fucking stupid!  

That being said… CNN, don’t do it.  Don’t have a late-night comedy show.  Aw, fuck it.  Go ahead.  I’ll never watch it.  There is no “best” cable news channel, and your strife to become is pathetic. You sell a shit product, and you get shit attention.  This is again why cable news should be illegal.

Today’s rant: classified

 It has recently come to my attention that my rant about claiming that Cheetos McHairpiece tried to illegally stay in power has been redacted, like a confidential document.  Hey Cheetos, you know all about those, right?

It’s not like I’m wrong.  There were broadcasted phone calls to Georgia with his whiny little voice asking for enough votes to win Georgia.  If you have not heard those phone call snippets, you’re living under a rock.  In the end, I think my rant was redacted by Blogger because I used hot trigger words like “fraud”.  Fuck you, Blogger.  How come cable news can say it but I cannot?  A talking head in front of a camera on a cable news network is an extremely low bar to clear in terms of media.  If they can say it, so can I.

The Super Bowl was last night.  I liked it.  It had a good national anthem, a good halftime show, and an entertaining back and forth game.  However, the entire game doesn’t hold a candle to last year’s FTX Super Bowl ad with Larry David.  Holy shit, that did not age well, and it is spectacular.  TL;DR, Larry David existed through the historical ages, incorrectly chastising new inventions like the wheel, coffee, the toilet, and portable music, then in 2022, he chastises FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange based in the Bahamas (RED FLAG), saying he’s always right about things like this.  The conclusion of the commercial:  Larry David is wrong and FTX is going to be awesome.  Back in our reality, 9 months later, FTX went bankrupt because it was funding a sister company in its own cryptocurrency, and when people realized it was worthless bullshit, they imploded.  It would be like if I paid my kids allowance in the form of Beanie Babies:  it’s not like they can use those to buy things at the mall.  Please, search for the ad on YouTube.  It’s over 3 minutes long and will immortally bask in the irony of its future demise.

Today’s rant: what I learned in 2022

 I am getting really pissed off when I go to a fast food restaurant, order a dessert, and hear “I’m sorry, the ice cream machine isn’t working.”  It’s not enough that I don’t get my dessert, but that is the ONLY machine that continuously fails.  Nothing else fails in the joint.  I have never heard “I’m sorry, the soda dispenser got a rat stuck in the filter” or “I’m sorry, the deep fryer overflowed” or “I’m sorry, the grill melted.”  You want to know who never, ever has a broken ice cream machine?  Fucking Carvel.  They don’t fuck around.  It’s a goddamn shame that doesn’t exist in South Carolina.

 

So, what did I learn in 2022?

- I learned the phrase “Top Secret” doesn’t mean shit.

- I learned I’m a whore if the price is right.  A coworker at a job I left 5 years ago texted me to ask if I would come back as a contractor for more money than I’ve ever earned before.  I said only if the Quality Manager (the reason I quit) wasn’t still there.  So here I am, losing at least 2 and a half hours each day driving roundtrip for the highest hourly wage I have ever been offered.  It’s temporary, but the best part is I have the smallest learning curve I have ever experienced when starting a new job.

- I learned how to swallow my pride and shake the hand of a former bully.  I went to my 20-year high school reunion and that was my least-favorite part.  I had to do it because his wife and high school sweetheart did a lot of organizing for the event.  I felt obligated to compliment her for her work when she walked over to my table, and naturally there he was, so shook his hand.  I hope I don’t have to do that again for another 20 years.

- I learned that a man has more rights by buying a firearm than a person born with a uterus choosing what they do with it.  More specifically, I learned that idea is now endorsed by the Supreme Court.  I’ve travelled back in time 50 years.

- I learned that slapping on the name and logo of a cryptocurrency company just because they give you money to do so does not mean the company is acting legitimately.  I’m staring at you, MLB umpires.  You look stupid.  Just let Angel Hernandez wear all of those logo patches simultaneously.  His look will match is competency as an umpire.

- I learned I am getting tired of driving up and down the east coast for holidays.  It’s cheaper than flying and Amtrak, but it is tiring and achy as fuck.