Other

Stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

Vaccination and Raev.net

0
4 days
by in Other

Recently it has been brought to my attention that Googling for vaccination in Australia brings up links to a disreputable site full of anti-vaxxer morons. To try and boost the search results of reputable vaccination sites, this post will be pretty much full links. Not vaccinating your children is what idiots do, and if you happen to be one of them, you should read all about vaccination risks and other common misconceptions about vaccination provided in the last couple of link-words. Further more, websites like the Australian Vaccination Network (who I refuse to link to, and instead will be linking to Stop AVN) are totally, entirely full of shit. Here are the links contained in this post, in bullet-point format.

 

 

I’ll probably write another one of these one day when I’m not tired and trying to fill space quickly, but until then, this is all.

Dear Parking Garage, I Hate You. You Win Again.

2
984 days
by in Humour, Other, Rants, Uncategorized

As I drove my sweet silver baby down to the hospital (UNMC) this afternoon to bring my friend a few comfort items, I began to worry about the parking situation, as this is apparently one of THE places to be in Omaha on any given day. I quickly gave a thought to valet parking, but decided against it since you were right on my first left turn. Yes you, mister large concrete structure.

You seemed so friendly, open, and easy to use. There were signs hung all over you that said things like, “Green Parking”, “Do Not Enter”, and I’m pretty sure there were even a few that told me my right from my left. My car was pulled into your direction completely attracted to you because of this ‘easy to use’ face you pulled off. You also attracted me because you seemed to promise that I would not lose my way while driving in you, or lose my car when trying to leave the hospital.

Lies, they were all lies. I should’ve known better. You’re just a big concrete object full of lies and confusing directions after you’ve sucked numerous helpless cars in. I made my way in slowly, I looked for the closest spot, and I knew it would turn out to be a failure, but I figure it’s always worth a try. After realizing this was my first defeat, I continued on only to realize that I about turned the wrong way on your nice little “one way” track. Thankfully I went to this thing called school, and thankfully my family believed in literacy, so I quickly avoided making my mistake. I drove up one more track and found a comfy little spot not too far off from the entrance doors on that floor. I thought to myself that this would be easy, because nestled in your little large self were quite a few things I used as markers to remember where I parked. Things like the set of brown chairs sitting outside the glass doors, and the sight of this ugly shade of green chipped paint on your elevator doors and trim. The only thing that was going to be hard from here was finding my friend’s hospital room and the University Tower right?

Oh no, that stuff was simple. The signs and arrows were simple, and I made it about two doors away from her room before I double checked with a nurse on where my friend was at. I spent a few hours there, and didn’t leave until I knew she wouldn’t be alone. I even found my way back out of the unfamiliar side of the hospital easily, but then came the hallway where I had to pick a door to go through to get back to you. It was like I was on some sort of game show, and if I didn’t pick the right door, I wasn’t going to be rewarded with my car. I was tricked and I went straight out door one which was completely wrong, and I could tell the second I stepped outside because even though I didn’t see your brown chairs, the scenery also didn’t seem right. I tried a whole three times more in each floor on the elevator trying to figure out why the hell I wasn’t coming across the right floors again.

I finally got a little frustrated with you, so I decided I would just walk to where I felt my car was. This actually caused  me to walk in a full circle around your dark unfamiliar land. Suddenly you didn’t seem so friendly anymore. You just seemed creepy, and really really confusing. I began wondering if I maybe trusted you too much with my baby, because I just wasn’t finding her anywhere. I even thought for a bit that you had let her get towed away for whatever dumb reason, even though I knew I wasn’t doing anything illegal by where I parked. I finally got REALLY frustrated with you , and aftering landing on the same (wrong) floor yet again, I just exited your entire intimidating structure. I completely walked around your outsides, back to where my poor hatchback was sucked into you originally, and walked myself into your now poorly lit entrances. I walked up the way I remembered driving my car (without the one way near mistake) , and finally I was reunited with her. I love that car, and I’m not sure I’ll ever trust you or one of your kind again with it.

So I guess what I just wanted to get at is, I hate you. I really do. You are not the first parking garage I have lost my car, or a friends car in, and you probably won’t be my last. I think you’ll take great pleasure in the fact that you won again. You caused me to have a near freak out, because I had no other way of getting myself back home. You caused me to freak out because there is no way in the world I can afford to lose my car right now. You also caused me to feel like a complete and total idiot due to the whole walking around in circles thing, which is really what you wanted to do isn’t it? Well, congratulations. I hope you’re happy, and now I’ll have to make sure to be extra careful with you lying piles of confusing ramps and signs. That’s all for now, bye.

FUCK TREEHUGGERS.

0
1282 days
by in Environment, Other, Rants

After reading this: http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2210 Apocalypse Fatigue: Losing the Public on Climate Change; even as the climate science becomes more definitive, polls show that public concern in the United States about global warming has been declining. What will it take to rally Americans behind the need to take strong action on cutting carbon emissions?

I decided to respond by saying this:
Fuck you.
I’m gonna keep burning gas and other carbon producing fuels, I see no reason to change. we can genetically engineer algae and bacteria to process it (co2/other greenhouse gasses) into fuel (bio-butanol, etc),  besides the earth has created more co2 on its own than humans have in the entire span of their existence. It all comes down to control. They want you to do what they want. No freedom in sight. They want to tax you to death because you’re living. The tree-huggers are the biggest communists out there, trust me I know, I used to be one. My suggestion is this: burn gas, eat meat (fuck you PETA, I’ll eat what I goddamn well please. Can you bring it to me still bleeding? (I was a vegetarian for 2 years, I felt like ass the whole time.)), get laid as much as possible, die happy.  Ahem, waitress? Another steak please. Whats that?  Sure I’ll take it wrapped in bacon, just make sure the steak is pink in the middle.

edit 11/17/09 GMT -6: removed “in a single volcanic eruption” as it was pointed out to be factually inaccurate by someone QQ’ing

Bob’s Educational Corner: Intro and Cabbages

6
1290 days
by in Health, Other, Politics

Greetings and salutations, fair citizens, and welcome to the first installment of Bob’s Educational Corner! I’ll be giving you important and informative insight into whatever seems prudent, so put on your learning hats and let the adventure of learning begin!

Have you ever eaten a cabbage? Delicious, isn’t it? With its crunchy exterior and chewy candy center, cabbages are at the heart of America’s war on not-deliciousness. But did you know cabbages are filled with essential oils, and provide enough vitamin A to kill a full grown elephant? Today, we’re going to take a look at the humble cabbage, and find out why it’s America’s favorite breakfast cereal!

In the year 1492, Christopher Columbus and his best friend, Jesus Christ, discovered America. They were captivated by its vast plains, beautiful mountains, and promiscuous college students. But what they loved most were it’s native plants, especially a small green bush that smelled faintly of elderberries. They found that, when boiled or steamed, it gave them the energy to carve Mount Rushmore. Further, when pickled, it was an effective cure for hangovers and scurvy. The two decided to name the plant “cabbage”, an  ancient Egyptian word for “kind of looks like lettuce, but isn’t”, and a new era of culinary excellence began.

Cabbage was an instant success. In the first week of release in Europe, it sold over 1.2 million copies, becoming the first North American fruit ever to go platinum. It was highly sought by the nobility, who craved its decadent texture and rich baritone singing voice, and by the peasantry, who loved how you could boil it for a while and then not starve to death that week. Cabbage was so successful, in fact, that famed artist Leonardo DiCaprio featured it in his masterpiece “The Sistine Chapel”. It was a golden time for the cabbage, and for Europe.

By 1602, however, the cabbage furor had died down. While still popular as a cure for shingles, and for its uncanny resemblance to Rob Reiner, most people thought of cabbage as a kid’s food, or something only eaten on holidays. There was even a town, just outside Sicily, where no one had never even heard of cabbage. Of course, the entire populous had been killed by barbarians several decades earlier, but the fact was undeniable: cabbage just wasn’t as popular as it used to be.

It was almost 200 years before cabbage returned to the public eye.  In 1927,  the Wright brothers, Orville and Ellivro,  were attempting to invent the world’s first humorous answering machine message. They took a cabbage, hooked it up to their old Dodge Dart, and questioned it about foreign affairs. Much to their surprise, the cabbage was not only well versed in politics, but disintegrated Ellivro with its heat vision! Orville asked his other brother, Wilbur, to replace him, then replaced the car with a weasel he’d been saving for a special occasion. Sure enough, both brothers gained the power of flight, and the cabbage skyrocketed back into the spotlight. Demand was immense, and soon the Wrights sold the distribution rights to 20th Century Fox, who created several successful spin offs, including coleslaw, those little things on the end of shoe laces, and Jimmy Buffet.

Today, cabbage is used in everything from xylophones to brussels sprouts. Odds are good that, in the past hour, you’ve used products containing over 17,000 cabbages- more, if you own a television. So the next time you’re eating a big bowl of poached cabbage, take a moment to reflect about how much you owe to it. If I were you, I’d give it a little salute- thank you, cabbage, for all that you do- and thank you, America, for giving us the cabbage, and the freedom to eat it!

Death and the universe.

1
1307 days
by in Drugs, Health, Other, Philosophy, Rants

Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking about death, and dying, and how the universe actually functions. Of course no one knows this, and some people turn to religion to satisfy their fear of dying, that there is an afterlife in heaven, and there they can live on after death and even be reincarnated.

Of course as an Atheist I can not prescribe to this doctrine, and I must have logical explainations for things, however there is no logic in the operation of the universe in the slightest.

Ever tried to think of what is there, if the universe doesnt exist, or didn’t exist before? Ever tried to imagine the expanse of the universe, the distances from us, sitting here uselessly floating around our little star while a googol (1 followed by 100 zeroes – its actually a number – seriously) other stars and planets do the exact same thing, almost an infinite distance away from us, and yet we have no fucking idea what the hell is out there, why its out there or why we even exist.

Why do we exist? what would the point of the universe be if there was no life? It would be a totally dead vacuum of rocks and debris, of atoms and molecules just floating without purpose. Everything that exists beyond life serves no purpose at all, it just lives as much as a non-living thing can and dies as it is consumed by another non-living thing. In a way the universe is alive, but it is not conscious. We are conscious. Yet our existance is puzzling, why are we here? What is our purpose? Who put us here, or what? and how did we become what we are?

I believe in evolution, and I believe that life was created as an accidental combination of all the right molecules in the right place at the right time, but why? If it happened here, it has happened on the other googol planets too. So there is also intelligent life, probably more so than us out there. Its just a matter of time. They would be wondering the same thing. What is the universe for? and why are they there? they will not be able to explain it for the universe can not be explained. No one lives forever, and eventually everything will cease to exist once again.

But that makes room for the the argument that the universe is infinite; that this universe has happened an infinite amount of times, and that the atoms we are created from, when we die, go on to do other glorious things, but in an infinite amount of time the quarks and electrons and neutrons will all reconnect to create us in our perfect form again, the universe crunching and banging over and over an infinite amount of times, on a loop, until we are created again, over and over and over, infinitely….

…Or is this a universe like groundhog day? when the universe crunches again, does it turn into the same original substance that the big bang was created from? in which case the explosion from the matter being ejected into space would be exactly the same as the first time it happened, and will continuously happen exactly the same, and we are born and die over and over – again infinitely.

Infinite. A number that does not technically exist. But in the universes terms, it must. Trying to think of this is enough to make my head spin, and I can not possibly comprehend it at all. Perhaps the universe is just a one-off. Perhaps after death, we are dead. Perhaps when the sun dies, it is lost forever, perhaps when the atoms fall apart, into their pieces of quark, neutron, electron, other shit (I’m no physicist) they remain floating in the endless vacuum forever. Endlessly. The universe dead. No hope for a reincarnation.

But this is boring is it not? To have the universe end in such a way. This is not a popular doctrine for a reason as it is majorly depressing to think that all of this is a waste of time, and that nothing will come of doing anything – but that is exactly how it works as an infinite universe aswell, but atleast we will live again.

When I used to think about death, I used to think I did not care what happened with my dead body. It was just a shell and I was certainly not using it anymore, but now I think I would like my body to be buried, and a tree grown on top, so that I, and my atoms (which are not mine. they were someone or something elses before yours and mine) can fulfil the needs of another life form, and for that life form to be a fruit bearing tree, my atoms would be further fulfilling the needs of another creature, in turn fulfilling the life of more. The great circle of life.

Which is another thing – The human body is made up of so many thousand different cells all with a different purpose. If you look at the bluebottle jellyfish it is made up of 4 different organisms in a symbiotic relationship. they each help maintain the others and thus sustain their life. However doesn’t the human body work the same way? Were we originally symbiotic organisms, made up of a thousand different parts, that over time merged into one gigantic system. The skin protects us but requires nutrients, which the blood provides, which needs oxygen which the lungs provide. The heart requires the electrical impulse from the brain, and the blood. The cellular structures of everything in the body still hold their original link in the DNA strand, the symbiote has become entrenched in our DNA. In total, we are not one organism. We are several million or more all in a symbiotic relationship. We do not control our organs, they are voluntary for a reason. the brain is entwined with them so they survive, pain, hunger, heat, cold, all to keep our symbiotes from dying. This relationship is great, but when one of the DNA pieces is broken, then comes genetic disease, which is a total failure of one symbiotic organism to maintain the rest of the organisms. The human body is wonderous, but again is another thing we will never understand 100%…though it should not stop us trying.

Anyway, this is a majorly long, ranting philosophical post, I had to get it out on text and into the world as it was taking up valuable thinking space. I feel a weight has been lifted from atop my thoughts. They’re now freer flowing and all is well. This post is also possibly the result of gabapentin, tramadol, codeine, and caffeine, interacting as a chain of chemical reactions in the large chemical reaction chamber of my brain.

Dan out – massive rant out in the public for all to see – my crazy thoughts published on the internet. Perhaps some people will find this too long and not read it. Perhaps some will take it to heart and really think about it. who knows. who cares? I’m just gonna write this again an infinite amount of times. :) Enjoy

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