Golden Cock - Twat of the Year

I've been watching a lot of Top Gear lately, and they have a tradition at the end of the calendar year to award the presenter who's given a spectacular example of stupidity throughout the year with the prestigious Golden Cock award. Naturally, I think this is a fantastic idea for the rest of the world, even if I probably shouldn't use the same name.

So in an effort to get myself writing again (did anyone notice I wasn't aside from me?) I'm going to spend the next few days, and possibly well into January, picking LESTAQ Magazine's Twat of the Year (on that note, Mark Zuckerberg is disqualified, although sometime soon he ought to get a lifetime achievement award).

Obvious nominees include people I don't like, but I'll make every effort to include people whom I otherwise like but made a complete twat of themselves in the interest of fairness. This way, I won't spend the next several years awarding the thing to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and The Collective Employee Base Of (Insert Telecom Company Here).

Tomorrow, the first nominees and why!

Back in time

For the past three days, Terre Haute's fairgrounds have been host to a "Diesel Extravaganza". As it turns out, this consists of assholes with giant trucks accelerating hard all over town, primarily on Hwy 41 of course, and blowing black smoke out of their oversized tailpipes. Now these are not ordinary diesel fuel vehicles, they are modified to have big stovepipe-style exhaust pipes. They are also apparently never maintained or cleaned, so that I am not even kidding a little when I say big fucking cloud of black smoke.

I honestly cannot remember seeing this much black smoke covering the roadways in front of me since I was a kid. That's not specific enough though, I can't remember any vehicles spewing this many toxins into my face since I was in grade school. This, for those who don't know, was in the early nineties. When you combine this with the fact that Terre Haute has very few wi-fi hotspots, people who dress like they're waiting for the new single from Third Eye Blind to come out, and people who actually chew tobacco, I cannot believe I'm still in 2009. I'm almost certain I'm stuck back in time.

News flash, Kurt Cobain just shot himself! Well, we think he did, but his wife might have done it! Pearl Jam have announced they aren't making any more music videos! What will MTV do to fill the airtime? Babylon 5 just started their 3rd season, and it's getting more intense by the second! Star Trek Voyager is slated to begin production later this month. Apparently the captain is going to be *gasp* a woman!

Ugh, I can barely even make fun of this stuff without it causing me pain. I can't believe, with gas (and diesel) prices being what they are (and what they were this time last year), there are still people with big giant smoke-billowing gas-guzzling do-it-yourself monster trucks driving up the road. These people either have far too much disposable income or don't know how to properly spend the income they do have, like on education and dental work for their kids. I'm not the only one who feels this way, too. I've seen many other drivers waving the smoke out of their faces and coughing as these dickless jokers speed off to the next filling station. Those are probably the only people really happy about this event: gas station owners who sell diesel. It's gotta be like Black Friday for them ... although that doesn't necessarily refer to the ink used to write their sales, more to the colour of everything near a road.

Businesses = idiots who want my money

Businesses must be, as a rule, run by retarded people.

Liz and I opened a joint bank account the other day. This has caused no end of problems, not one of which was our fucking fault. First, her direct deposit tried to go into her old bank account, which being closed, would not accept it. This is a similar situation to what happened with my direct deposit fuckup except slightly better except not, because the bank account in question 1) existed at some point and 2) belonged to the person who was getting the money.

The bank people claimed she would be able to access our account via her existing online banking username and password. We would have appreciated it if the bank people had been so kind as to inform us at that time that they were lying to us. She is currently only able to access the account using my password and name. This is not a problem apart from the fact that the bank people are dirty god damned liars who lie to people and don't tell the truth when they do it. Also, her debit card doesn't work, which we kind of figured would happen and we never even bothered to ask about.

Today, and this is where the complaint against dumbasses running businesses comes in, we sat down to figure out why our account had got so low. We looked at our online ledger which showed us no fewer than fifteen pending transactions. When we removed from consideration the deposits, there were thirteen pending transactions. Many of these transactions are from Thursday, when we went to Indianapolis, or Friday, when we were in town, or the weekend. Now I certainly know that banks don't do a god damn thing on the weekends, and they had, for some inexplicable reason, President's Day off. But the fact that since Thursday none of our transactions have gone through is not the fault of the banks.

This indeed has happened once before - to Liz when she was closing her personal bank account. She had a pending four dollar transaction on her card, which was at Chik-Fil-A, the famous mall crappy chicken "fast" "food" "restaurant". She hadn't used the card since the first day of that week, and the day we closed the account was either a Wednesday or a Thursday. Either way, they'd had three days to take their money. Apparently businesses aren't in any hurry to be paid for things, which is odd, because if you actually try the Wimpy approach ("I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today," from Popeye cartoons) they will laugh in your face and probably spit at you and call the police because there is a crazy person in their place of business and they don't have to put up with that.

And I thought debit cards removed the money from your account instantly, and credit cards chalked up a running tally for you to pay later. Maybe I need to redefine. Or they do.

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Now playing: Daft Punk - Face to face [Cosmo Vitelli rmx]
via FoxyTunes

WARNING: this post may piss you off.

Goddammit, stupid people, stop breeding!

I mean you, {name deleted} of Fort Wayne, Ind., my future (I shudder to think) sister-in-law.

Let's look at the facts. You have two children by two different men. I don't have a problem with that as such, until there's the part where you don't care for them. That's the part I have a problem with. You're not a mother, you're a baby dispenser (a crude term, but it's becoming more true as time goes on).

The first child is healthy and a joy to be around ... until she got abused, and now she's scared as hell of anything remotely male. While pregnant with the second, you discovered you had a bleeding condition, causing you to need shots multiple times a day, every day. Your child is a special needs child whom you will have no chance of properly raising even if you could manage not to be a shitsucking fuckwit for a few minutes.

Then, you went to prison. You didn't even go for something fun, it was for CHEQUE FRAUD. Somewhere around then, you became a scary preachy evangelical Christian. All you need to do is change your position on Mexicans (that is to say, get off their dicks) and you'd be a dyed-in-the-wool Republican. After you got out of prison, you found out you had a uterine tumour ... of the same kind your sister, my fiancee, gets (except on her vaginal wall). The kind of tumour that feeds off œstrogen, one of the main hormones pregnant women practically shit out of every pore. Somehow, this didn't suggest to you that you should avoid having some tosser shoot his beans up your muff and you got pregnant AGAIN.

I'll admit your surroundings certainly aren't helping you. Your mother wants you to get a hysterectomy after the almost-certainly-doomed hellbaby is born. Perhaps I should've said "born", because there's no way that thing's gonna come out looking remotely human, sharing all that space with the tumours. Regardless, the medically not-fucking-idiotic course would be to get an abortion straight away, followed by the hysterectomy. Naturally, you won't do that, and your mother won't let you, saying she would disown you for an abortion. Never mind that she has no problem with her other daughter with this condition getting an abortion should she become pregnant ... I mean it's the same fucking reason, the same fucking procedure, what's the difference? Your mother wouldn't have to be there for Mrs Lestack's abortion? Or is she really that big a knucklefuck idiot?

Regardless, you'll either miscarry or die in childbirth. I don't think either one would teach you to STOP FUCKING WITHOUT PROTECTION, but just in case, I'm bringing you a gift next time I see you. Normally I would suggest getting you a gift card for a free abortion, but the problem with that is threefold: 1) I'm not sure they have those. 2) You wouldn't use it because you're a total fuckwit. 3) I need the money more than you do. So instead I bring gifts of a twelve-pack of condoms (that should last you a couple days), some RU-486 (same), and a wire coat hanger (that one is reusable).

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Now playing: Opeth - Death Whispered A Lullaby

via FoxyTunes

I wrote this on an "illegal" copy of Openoffice.org

A friend linked me to one of the dumbest stories of the year. The fact that the year began just over 20 days ago doesn't make me feel better about this situation.

The story's from a blog, so there's no dateline. There's also no dateline because the nice people at HeliOS didn't want to out a complete fucking moron to the entire universe. A teacher in the Austin Independent School District saw a student giving a presentation on Linux. The teacher confiscated the discs, called a “conference” with the student (as we all surely remember, “conferences” with teachers in anything lower than university-level would be more accurately described as dressings-down). She found out about HeliOS and sent an email to Ken Starks who runs the HeliOS blog. Among the utter idiocy published in this email:

At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.

No software is free, is it? Hmm, that means I must have “stolen” my copies of Firefox, Opera, iSquint, Openoffice.org, Yahoo! Messenger!, TweetDeck, TwitterPod, VLC media player, iTunes (when I used Windows), Last.fm, AVG antivirus programme, iAntiVirus (for Mac), Google Earth, Handbrake, and Twitterrific. Damn, that's quite the list of charges, isn't it? I think if it weren't for Opera I'd be okay, but since I have Opera, it's a Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison!

[…] if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods.

What the hell do you think Linux is, lady? Is Linux the “L” in LSD? Linux isn't a drug, it's a fucking open-source software platform! I tried Linux on a trial version of Parallels once and guess what? The only problem was Parallels wouldn't let me connect to the fucking internet! I would consider using Linux if I didn't have a good thing going with OSX and if I could program things my damn self. The latter, by the way, isn't a deal-breaker. I'd figure it out on my own if I had to program.

[…] putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back.


Now that's just fucking stupid. It's been approximately two years since Windows Shitsta came out and underwhelmed took a steaming shit on everybody who got it, and Linux is holding people back? I sincerely doubt learning to use a computer that works is going to disadvantage anybody. In fact, if more people were willing to try other operating systems, the so-called marketplace of ideas could stop being a capitalist's wet dream and become an actual way of determining what is good, what is bad, and what functions well enough for the time being.

This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..."

Even the idiot arguing for Microsoft Supremacy acknowledges that to “actually be of service to those receiving” these computers, they would have to be equipped with older versions of Windows. Now, certainly, old-ass software on old-ass machines can be of service. Okay, I'm totally lying. I've worked jobs where I had to use Windows 98 as recently as the past two years, and if there was one thing those machines didn't do, it was SERVE me in any useful way. Certainly I got to smack something around in a way I couldn't do to anything else at the job, but as computers, old computers with old systems are worth doo-doo.

Now I'm not a Linux or Mac evangelist. Well, I tell Windows users they need to get a Mac, but I don't go out of my way for it. I tell them this only after they've complained about how shitty Windows is. I offer them an alternative, and usually I get the same response: “I can't afford a Mac.” Linux is, in fact, free, and is, in fact, better than Windows. Granted that doesn't say a lot but it's true. Thanks to this idiot, I'm going to start trying to educate people who ask about the two significantly better alternatives. Thank you, Karen Namewithheld, for being so stupid to inspire me to action yet again.