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Fuck that gorilla

You’ve all heard this story already, right? Kid falls into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati zoo. Big silverback named Harambe ends up dead, shot by zoo employees to save the boy.

This story, deserving no more than a “Wow that’s wild, glad the kid is OK” type response, is instead currently blowing up the internet and the 24 hour news cycle, because of course it is. So of course, I have decided to come out of my long self imposed exile in order to add my voice to the fray.

And what my voice is saying is, fuck you all. Seriously, just fuck you all. Where shall I begin?

To everybody whining that the gorilla shouldn’t have been shot: 

Fuck you.

As soon as you come up with a better method of assuring the safety of that child and the zoo staff that works faster and more effectively than a 30.06 round, you can go ahead, invent a time machine, go back in time, train the zoo staff with it, and save Harambe. But shit, if you’re going to do that, you might as well just grab the kid before he falls in the damn enclosure in the first place, asshole.

The gorilla wasn’t doing anything wrong!

Fuck you.

Objectively, this is true, but completely irrelevant. The gorilla was being a gorilla.  Unfortunately, he happened to be going about his business of being a gorilla while a human child was too close. So yeah, it’s absolutely not his fault he got shot. But he got shot just the same, and it was still the right decision.

Harambe was protecting the child/just playing!

Fuck you.

First of all, stop projecting. When you bare your teeth, it’s called a smile. When literally any other animal on the planet does it, it means “look what I’m about to eat you with.” You don’t fucking know what that gorilla was “thinking.”  Nobody does. And even if the best primate researcher on the planet happened to be standing there to interpret his actions for us, a bullet was still the proper response. It does not matter if he was “only playing” or “protecting” the child. He could have easily “protected” him to death in an eye blink. He could have crushed the kid without even realizing it. What do you propose the zoo staff do? Even if you’re somehow completely sure Harambe was “playing” what is your game plan here? See if he’ll play catch with you and throw you the kid? Think about it for half a second and you’ll realize how much it doesn’t matter.

But it was a rare mountain gorilla, there’s only 95,000 of them left!

Fuck you.

That is the dumbest argument I’ve heard in my life. So now there’s only 94,999.  I’m sorry, a human child was in danger. Here’s a simple chart I made showing the relative importance of human lives vs other animals lives:

SimpleChart

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can’t see the dot for the other animals because it’s off the bottom of the chart like a mile.  Ain’t nobody got time to draw a mile long line in Paint.

I don’t care if Harambe was the last of his species.  Bullet in the brain pan, and it’s not even a close decision.

It’s the mother’s fault, she wasn’t watching the kid!

Fuck you.

Oh, and also, irrelevant. It literally does not matter how the kid ended up there, the gorilla ends up dead in every scenario. Kids do stupid shit. That’s why they’re called kids. When I was a kid I fell out of a tree and caught my ankle in the crook of a branch on the way down and hung there screaming until my neighbor (who happened to be the closest) came running over and got me down. Was it my mom’s fault for not watching me more closely?  Shit no. What’s she supposed to do, stare at me 24/7? Screw that.

Stop judging the mom. It’s not like she was dangling the kid over the edge or something. The kid did what kids do, which, as you may remember me saying a paragraph ago, is STUPID SHIT. He crawled through a fence and fell down a bank. This is only news because there happened to be a gorilla at the bottom of the bank.

The zoo should have higher fences, it’s dumb how easy it is for a kid to get in with the gorillas!

Fuck yo– oh hang on. You actually do have a point here.

It IS pretty silly how easy it apparently is for a four year old to get into an enclosure with a 450 pound mountain gorilla. Somebody should probably fix that. But unless you steal the time machine from the people building it to take their fool proof instant gorilla sedation system back to train the zoo staff, fixing the fences isn’t going to save Harambe.

That’s all I got time for today kids, consider yourselves chastised.

Posted in In The News.


This is how my brain works

The other day I was having lunch with a couple of coworkers. We were at a British themed restaurant, and they were playing Britishy music. A familiar sounding song started playing, and I turned to my coworker and asked,

“What is this song? ‘Listerine’?”

“What? No. I don’t think so.”

“Who sings this song?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s that British band.”

“…The Beatles?”

“No, too far back. From the 90s.”

“…Oasis?”

“No, not Oasis. The guy from this band married that one chick.”

“…”

“You know. Blonde. Skinny. She sings. She was in that band.”

“I have no idea.”

“No Doubt! That was her band.”

“Oh, Gwen Stefani?”

“Yeah! The guy who sings this Listerine song married her.”

“Ok…”

At this point, I pulled out my phone and googled “Gwen Stefani husband”

“Gavin Rossdale! That’s the guy. He sings this song. What was the name of his band? I want to say Bush, but that sounds dumb… Oh wait, Wikipedia says it is Bush.”

I then typed “Bush” into Google, and spookily, it immediately suggested “Bush Glycerine” as a search request.

“Glycerine! The song’s name is Glycerine! Not Listerine!”

“…ok.”

And that is the story of how I figured out the name of the song that sounds like Listerine sung by that guy in that British band who married that one chick.

Posted in Miscellaneous.


I’m rich now, because of this one simple trick.

Or, well,I will be. Soon.

We got a new soda machine at work recently. That’s a pop machine to those of you who think two word phrases should be abbreviated using the second word rather than the first. You’re wrong, but I know you exist, so I threw you a bone here.

Anyway, this soda machine is quirky. A frosty beverage costs 65 cents, unless you pay by credit card, in which case it’s 75 cents. Ok, so there’s a discount for cash, that’s pretty common. But it doesn’t stop there.  A soda is 65 cents, but only if you put in exactly 65 cents. If you put in three quarters, you get a soda and a quarter back in change. So in that case, the soda only cost 50 cents. Similarly, if you put in a dollar, you get a soda and 50 cents change. However, if you put exactly 50 cents in, the machine will not sell you a soda, because sodas, as you will recall, definitely cost 65 cents.

So basically, you’re a chump if you put exact change in. But that’s difficult to do anyway, because the machine doesn’t take dimes. Quarters and nickels work fine, but dimes fall right through the machine every time.

You’re probably thinking “This is interesting, you found a quirk to get discounted sodas, how is this going to make you rich?” Ah, well, let me continue. The machine doesn’t take dimes, but it will, under the right circumstances, give dimes in change. I attempted to put exact change in once, but since it wouldn’t take my dime, I ended up with 55 cents in the machine. I hit the coin return, and the machine spit out two quarters and a dime in change. Do you see where this is going now? To test this further, my friend put just a nickel in the machine. The digital display said five cents had been inserted. Then he hit the coin return… and a dime came out.

Tomorrow,I’m coming to work with a hoard of nickels. I’m going to put them into the machine one by one and get a dime for each of them. I’m going to do this until the dimes in the machine run out. I don’t know exactly what will happen then, but I’m hoping once all the dimes are gone, the machine will start giving me a quarter for each nickel I put in!

And I’m going to keep doing this one simple trick until I’m RICH.

UPDATE: I just tried another test. The nickel trick is no longer working. Putting a nickel in the machine and hitting the coin return gives you your nickel back. Bummer. However, when I put a quarter and nickel in the machine and hit the coin return, I got a nickel and a dollar coin back.  A dollar coin!!! WTF? I tried again, with two quarters only, and got a quarter and another dollar coin back.

Bizarrely, the machine accepts the dollar coins. If you put it in, it registers that you’ve put a dollar in the machine. However, if you then buy an item that costs a dollar, you get fifty cents back as change. Because you should definitely always get change back from any purchase.

Finally, I put the dollar coin in and immediately hit the coin return. Can you guess what I got back? If you guessed a quarter and three dollars, you’re right!

I’m going to be rich faster than expected!

SECOND UPDATE: This morning the guy who services the machine visited the office. I gave him back the four dollars I’d gained from the machine (as, all joking aside, I wasn’t trying to get rich, I just had a burning need to figure out the extent of the machine’s brokenness) and explained what had been happening. He said the machine was programmed incorrectly and money was being put into the wrong bins, and immediately called a technician to come and fix it.

About an hour later, I went and got a Diet Coke. I put three quarters into the machine, and got a soda and a dollar coin in change. The machine paid me twenty-five cents for the soda!

I’m keeping this one.

Posted in Miscellaneous.


Plumbing woes

I took a shower in my downstairs bathroom last night. When I got out of the shower, I noticed something no homeowner wants to see. One of the tiles of the drop ceiling was water stained. It was over the sink, across the room from the shower, so it wasn’t just excessive splashing from my shower.

A little background. I just bought this house two and a half months ago. I bought the house and then immediately lost my job, so I’ve been basically stuck here all that time. I’ve come to know the place intimately very quickly, so I knew this was new and not something old I was just noticing.

I pushed up the ceiling tile. Or tried to. The drop ceiling is much too low, the tiles don’t actually pop up and out like they’re supposed to. But this tile was so water damaged it basically crumbled, and so I ended up just tearing it out. Now that the underside of the sub-floor was exposed, I could see three different possible culprits for the leak.

Two were copper pipes running across the ceiling. It was nice to see they were copper and not that older galvanized shit they used to put in houses a lot. The third was a PVC pipe that looked like a drain. Since the upstairs bathroom is right above the downstairs bathroom, I cleverly deduced that this was probably the upstairs tub drain.

There was no major dampness anywhere that I could tell, so it was probably not the water pipes themselves that were leaking. If they were, there would have been a lot more water and dampness, I figured. So that left the tub drain.

So I did what I always do when a home repair issue rears its ugly head. I ignored it. I went to bed and tried to forget about it. Maybe the problem would just magically go away?

I got up this morning and took a bath. After draining the tub and getting dressed, I went downstairs to check on the water situation. Unfortunately, the problem had not magically solved itself as I had hoped it would. Instead, there was water all over the floor under the missing tile. So, yeah. The tub drain needs fixing.

I briefly toyed with the idea of fixing it myself. I used my Google-fu to find some info on fixing leaky tub drains. I found several websites and a few videos. After a few minutes of reading about tools for removing tub drains and some stuff about plumber’s putty, I stopped. I’m a computer geek. I can fix and repair computers, but that’s about it. Every time I try a home improvement or DIY repair project, I fail miserably and end up breaking things. Sometimes my anger gets the best of me and I deliberately break things in frustration, thus making the problem worse rather than solving it.

So I did what guys like me do when they have these problems. I swallowed my pride and called a plumber. The first plumber I called said they couldn’t get anybody out to me until Monday. That’s no good, so I called another plumber. He was busy on a job, and said he’d call me back. He didn’t. I should have been a plumber. Or an electrician. Or a carpenter. It seems like those guys never lack for work!

While waiting for the second plumber to not call me back, I decided to put my troubleshooting skills to work. I’d read something about how there are various points in the drainage system that could be the problem, not just the main tub drain. So I tested it out by… taking a shower. I mean, why not? I’ve got nothing else to do. Afterwards I went back downstairs, and… no water!

So what does this mean? It means the tub drain doesn’t leak. That’s good! But where does the water come from then?

Turns out, from the tub overflow drain. The little drain under the lever that controls the plug. When I take a bath, the water overflows into that drain and then leaks out into the basement bathroom below.

So. My course of action was now clear. Stop taking baths. Problem solved! Check it out, I’m a plumber!!

As Red Green would say: It’s a temporary fix. Unless it works.

Posted in Miscellaneous.


Go to hell, Comcast

I know I’ve ranted about Comcast before, but fuck it, I’m going to do it again.  Because they deserve it.

I’m moving. This sucks and I hate it. What I hate worse, though, is trying to get Comcast to move my service. I’m busy with packing and, more importantly, avoiding packing. Plus I’m an introvert, so taking time to sit down to make a phone call is not something I’m keen to do. I went online, and lo and behold, Comcast has a form to fill out to request a move, right on their website!  Oh happy day!

Naturally, I filled it out, and forgot about it, assuming all was well. Then today I came to my senses, realized this is Comcast we’re talking about, and logged in again to check the status of my move request. What do I find? An email, tucked away in my stupid Comcast email account that I never check because who the fuck actually uses their Comcast email account?

It says, hey… guess what? Fuck you if you thought this was going to be handled online! We’re going to call you to “confirm.”  (Which of course means, they’re going to call to actually set up the appointment, because the form clearly does nothing at all.)  Worse, the number they apparently have attached to my account isn’t even one I recognize. So they may have tried to call me, but I sure didn’t get the message.

Worse, the email exhorts me to simply call them for faster service. “Just think. You’re a phone call away from experiencing XFINITY® and all that it has to offer at your new address!”  That’s an actual quote from the email.

I was always just a phone call away from this, assholes! The web form was supposed to help me avoid the goddamn phone call! What you’re really saying is, guess what? That web form? POINTLESS! It’s just there to get your hopes up, busy introvert! All it really did was trigger this form email!

So, it’s looking like I may not get my teevee and interwebs hooked up in a timely fashion at my new place. Why would I expect anything less from good old Comcast?

UPDATE:

I discovered that the phone number they had on my account is one they apparently provide me as part of my package.  So I logged in to their online voice mail thing, and found a message waiting for me, from the toll free number they wanted me to call. The entire message was a minute long, consisting of thirty seconds of their own hold music, followed by thirty seconds of silence.  Oh Comcast.  Can you do anything right?

UPDATE 2:

I broke down and called Comcast. It took FIFTY MINUTES on the phone to get them to schedule an appointment to come hook me up at my new place.  How could it take this long, you ask? I’d love to be able to say, but I CAN’T. Most of my time was spent listening to the guy type.  And type, and type.  And then put me on hold for ten minutes to speak with his supervisor. Then type some more. IT’S TWO ADDRESSES!  How hard can it be?  Apparently, it’s so hard it requires nearly an hour of typing and pondering to complete. How is this even possible? Because COMCAST, that’s how.

Posted in Miscellaneous.