Animals and earthquakes make good lovers.

My friend Jessica “I drink whiskey and dance” Pace sent this to me today, and I find it interesting.  Read it, fool!  I find this kind of stuff amazing.

BEIJING - First, the water level in a pond inexplicably plunged. Then, thousands of toads appeared on streets in a nearby province. Finally, just hours before China’s worst earthquake in three decades, animals at a local zoo began acting strangely.

As bodies are pulled from the wreckage of Monday’s quake, Chinese online chat rooms and blogs are buzzing with a question: Why didn’t these natural signs alert the government that a disaster was coming?

The fact that many of these signs were ignored boggles my mind.
I whole heartedly believe that animals can predict earthquakes.  I have been in several earthquakes and have observed crazy animals.  During the last big earthquake in seattle, about….8 years ago, I was sitting in my house and all of a sudden molly started barking really loud, ran down the stairs and right into the back door.  She started whimpering and pawing the glass.  I let her out and she ran into the most open part of the lawn and laid down.  About 2 minutes later the earthquake hit and shook all of the water out of my pond.  Molly kept laying on the lawn for about 5 minutes after its over.

Just so you all know, Molly is my dog.

The idea that animals can perceive things that most of us lowly humans cannot should be nothing new to anyone.  From a wide assortment of animals using the earths magnetic field to navigate to insects seeing in the ultraviolet or infrared spectrum to super hearing or smell to spider-mans lack of ability to perceive the crappyness of a script, animals have us beat in the sensing department in almost every instance.  I have no problem believing that animals who are sensitive to these things can perceive the mild electromagnetic fields created when rocks are compressed or broken, or the mild shocks that are far to weak for us to feel that would normally precede an earthquake.

Unfortunately modern science is so pig-headed and stubbornly stuck on technology as a means of deduction they fail to realize a source of insight that is right under their nose.

What the thumbs?

Just exactly how lazy can we, as Americans, get? I mean, we are already recognized as the laziest, most gluttonous country that isn’t France, but this thing that I saw on the television while eating my 1 pound pineapple-topped burger and giant steak-fries takes the cake, so to speak. There is now a bicycle that shifts itself.

a bike with an automatic transmission.

Now, I don’t know how how much exactly you people know about riding bikes. On a mountain bike there are shifters that are operated either through manipulation of a lever with your thumb (something that can be done without even repositioning your hand) or twisting a part of the handle-bar (something that can be done without even moving your thumbs). This shifting is done by a derailer that switches the chain from gear to gear.

SO

Seeing as how shifting gears on a bike is something that is done without moving more than two or three muscles, I ask again, what is the point of having a bike that does this for you? Kids do nothing more than play video-games these days, so one would think that their thumbs are more than up to the task and if you cant be bothered to even twist your wrist slightly forward or back there is little chance that you would be out riding a mountain bike around.

My friend brought up the idea that maybe they could be used on those bicycles that have the little motors that push you around on your Schwinn. And hes right, they have those. They are called motorcycles and they don’t shift themselves either (mostly).

Abject laziness and technological innovation make strange bedfellows indeed.

“Peoples” rant

I have come to the conclusion that there are a great and many varied personalities on this planet. No doubt you are thinking “that Jeremy, he’s a quick one,” and you are correct, but the truth is that very few of these personalities are ones that make any sense to me.  Let me give you a couple of examples:

I am willing to bet that at some point you have come into contact with the people who talk.  These people are all around us, and make up a vast proportion of the peoples that I can’t really abide for very long.  Odds are you have a friend like this that you only kind of put up with.  I am talking, of course, about the type of people who do not partake in conversation.

They own it.

These are the people that do not contribute meaningfully toward any type of mutual communication, opting instead to simply wait until you are done with WHATEVER you are talking about, then blurt out the thing that they were/are/going to be thinking about. This can be either their part of the conversation you are having, disjointed and out of turn in the shared stream of consciousness, or something that has nothing to do with your subject matter; instead moving on to whatever this rather obtuse individual had pop into their head while they were paying no attention to you.

Now being a bit of a conversationalist myself, I believe that in order to have said conversation both sides must be actually listening to each other and playing off of each other’s ideas. Call me old fashioned, but a conversation should be a two-sided thing. When it is not, it is called a lecture or a speech, and it is so annoying that it makes me want to stab myself in the neck just to have a reason to recuse myself from the situation.

Another person is one known very well to those of us in the service industry.  These people are the bane of any barista’s existence, and many of the food-servers out there as well.  These are the people who have turned my job, which I used to love so very much, into a daily ordeal consisting of barely repressed rage and deeply buried homicidal imaginings.  Indeed, these people are the subject of a great many sneering and exasperated looks and are subject to the full brunt of wit that they can not understand is directed at them, but makes me feel morally and intellectually superior (thus makes me giggle).  These are the entitlementists.

I know, I know; this word does not really exist. Well it does now, as I have the power to summon forth from the ether collections of letters that make perfect sense when taken in context.  Unfortunately, these people are very real, and are a very real threat to my sanity.

These are the people who, through some combination of money, privileged upbringing. social retardation or the lack of a swift kick in the skull, feel that they have some sense of entitlement to the labor of another based upon a paltry sum payed to a business for the constrained actions of its employees.

Yes, you may purchase that meal.

No, that does not allow you to assume that I will be going out of my way in any way, shape, or form in order to meet your needs.

The belief amongst these people is that paying for a good or service entitles them to forgo the normal morals and common sense behavioral rules of civilized society, allowing them to degenerate to the level of common swine: discarding refuse, creating unholy messes and basically stinking up the place with their fundamental lack of concern for the repercussions of their actions.

These people are also the most likely to end up with a burned-down house in the event of a psychotic break suffered by one of the disenfranchised laborers whom they have wronged through their egregious disregard for social more.

These are but a couple of the peoples that inhabit the world which I navigate every day. I am sure that they are familiar to you. If not, be on the lookout, for they are residing in a bar/restaurants/coffee house near you, waiting to foist their superiority complex on the unsuspecting populace of their local watering hole/social gathering place.

Have you run across other people you would like to vent about? Leave me a comment and let me know! (see that? Audience participation.)

I say boo to you, Stevie boy.

I have to give it to ya, Steve Jobs.  You are a genius.  Charging people to even talk to your support center when the computer that they bought from you 8 months ago decides to stop regcognizing its hard drive is one of the best ways I can think of to wrangle more money out of people who have already doled out far-above-market-price bucks for one of your shiny white creations.

Indeed had I know that I could load up one of your plastic-encased number-crunchers with an entire year of my life, including pictures of the amazing things I’ve done, papers and research components that make up my entire portfolio for School, and all of the music that I have bought to support my burgeoning DJ career just in time for it’s hard drive to suddenly and inextricably perform digital suicide I would have built up my collections to the macbook’s critical mass sooner in order to streamline the process of shoveling money at you hand over fist.

Granted, it is partially  my bad for not getting a second hard drive and backing up my collections of gigs upon gigs of music and pictures and important documents; but at the same time there was a reasonable expectation on my behalf that a computer that is not even a year old and is supposed to be the pinnacle of Personal Laptop Engineering was going to up and die.

So I say boo to you, Stevie Boy.  I tip my hat in grudging respect at your marketing and profit-raking savvy.  I do this while at the same time slowly filling a tube sock with wood screws in the off chance that we meet, so I can let you know what it feels like to have a part of you forcibly removed, then charge you for directions to the hospital.

I failed to support the country

Or at least I am going to. You see, I am a part of a certain group of people who are going to use our US Economic Stimulus checks for nefarious purposes (as opposed to nefarious porpoises, which is an entirely different story).

Thats right, I am going to use my money, handed down from on high to aid the faltering US economy, to buy high-end Japanese electronics. I’m not even buying them from a US company, I am doing it all over the interweb.

And I don’t feel bad about it.

I don’t feel bad at all, and there are a couple of reasons: A) If I was to buy something here in America, it would be 2 months of rent and (maybe) a tank of gas and B) My 600 dollars, of which a large deal will be swallowed by taxes and sequestration in my change jar, is not going to do a damn thing for the economy when we are 4 trillion dollars in debt and getting deeper by the Bushy decree.

Now I know that there are some of you out there saying that I’m un-patriotic (completely untrue) and that I don’t really understand the math and economics of what is going on (totally true) but those people don’t realize some thing fundamental about my condition: I need a new mixer.

And headphones.

So if those people are willing to send me 400 bucks for a new mixer and 100 bucks for new headphones, I am more than willing to go buy new clothes at a wholesome American clothing outlet so that they can pay their bills to Asia, where all of their clothes are made.

Cynical Catharsis?

So in my Nazi Germany class this week ,a bizarre conversation got started and I need to vent about it.  The discussion was about whether or not a current generation can be held accountable fr the misdeeds of previous generations ago, be it a decade, a century or a millenia.  Obviously this was about the Holocaust, but it stepped into Slavery and other such historical sore-spots.  We were arguing whether the past gave certain advantages to certain groups (i.e. the victors in any given situation), and whether or not we should feel bad about that in the present day.  It is a really interesting idea, and something that has been kind of mulling around in my head.  Please let me know waht you think about that idea, or leave any questions for clerifications.

I thought I’d leave you with teh thing that I write in class while this debate swirled around me.  I have some really, really smart classmates, and it was neat to hear their different ways that people tackled this problem.  Anyway, here is what I wrote in class:

“Are advantages given to us through the upsetting of norms in society because of the dominance of the majority, because of the subjugation of people through the past, a reason for us to feel bad?  Are they reasons for us to feel bad about things that our people have done in the past?  Absolutely not, I think.

One cannot be held responsible for the crimes, excesses, and or issues of their grandparents.  If this were true then farmers everywhere would be held responsible for the pain and suffering of the feudal serfs during the agricultural revolution.  If one were to be held against the misdeeds of their forebears then those who live in America would be held continuously to task against the gains made by our country on the backs of the poor and the enslaved from Europe during the 16th century immigration to the Americas.

One has to be cognizant of the fact that there is a big difference between a tacit recognition of a crime, (a public knowledge of a wrong, known trauma to a people) and the need for an apology, or specially reparations, for the actions of our forebears.  If a people is required to be continuously inundated with negative opinion and derisive attention regarding things that happened before they were even born, then there is no real way for them to acknowledge the issue, learn form it, and move on to fix what they see as a problem in their collective psyche or history.  Continued depression, guilt, or feelings of responsibility over the past would render a people impotent to grow and basically hold the entirety of humanity responsible for the bad things that have happened since the birth of civilization (and possibly before, if one were to take into account inter-tribal atrocities long held in oral and collective memories).

While there is the possibility of apology on a governmental scale (the issue of slavery rings loudest here), I will not be held accountable for something that happened before my ancestors were even in the country.  I believe that yes, slavery happened, and it sucks that it happened, a lot, but I feel no need to apologize for it.  Likewise I do not believe that the people of Germany should be held responsible for things that happened during WWII.  Those few of that generation who are still alive can be made to pay for it, but something tells me that due to the continued attention given to it they do pay, in a multitude of ways.  But how can a people grow and get beyond a tumultuous past if they are forced daily to live in it?”

That is what I wrote.  I feel that I have to clarify some things about it, but I have to go to a concert so Ill fix it later.

The end of the bollocks.

Words cannot describe how happy I am to be done with my Geology 390 class.  While it was interesting on the odd occasion that I actually went, the ability to think “I never have to listen to a teacher say ‘I dont know, even though its on the syllabus and in the book and in my notes, I cant answer your question’” is a glorious feeling the likes of which I have not felt before.

Sweet, Sweet relief.

That being said, there are a few things that I will be missing about school:

1) The girls.  There are girls all over the place, and for some reason they all think that in order to go to school they must dress EXACTLY as they would if going to a fancy restaurant or maybe a lesser club.  While i never really found this distracting in class, it was an added perk, for sure.

2) Certain teachers.  Some of the teachers that I have come in contact with through my vague and wandering journe through college have enriched my life in many ways.  None of them actually gave me money, unfortunately, but these teachers actually made school fun.  Be it the stuff they were passionate about, the way that they taught, their attitude about interactions with students or simply the fact that they actually knew what they were talking about, there were several teachers whom I will really miss taking classes from.

3) An excuse to go to vending machines.  Yeah, I know this is lame, but I dig the excuse to say “hey, Ive been in class all day, I needs me some sugar.”  Mind you, this does not mean lovin’, but snickers.

4) An excuse to not be a grown up.  This is probably the one that I will miss the most.  I can sit on my ass every now and then for an entire day reading and justify it.  I have yet to get a full time, labor intensive job since moving to Vancouver becasue I have been too busy with school.  Now that that is over, here I come, Real-World.

I’m sure that there are other things I miss, and Ill probably write about them later, but right now I have to go format the Footnotes on the last paper I will ever have to write for school, masters program aside.

Contradictory messages

I just love it when the power goes out.  I get to sit across from the hospital, its lights ablaze with freely flowing power from its powerful and loud Diesel generator so that it can supply the needs of the sick while bathing the neighborhoods of the healthy in a noxious cloud of low lying and painfully thick exhaust.  They probably do this to drive up business.

Just a thought.

The weather man is my enemy.

I have come to the conclusion that the weather man ahs sold out to corporate America. You heard me, people, sold the hell out.

It is April here in the good ol’ Pacific NW. April. One year ago I was wearing T-shirt and shorts on a fairly regular basis. IT got cold at night, but not too much so. BBQ’s were a regular occurrence. Now, it freaking snowed last night. We knew it was coming, but that is because the weather man told me so. here is where my problem comes in.

These people have been telling us all week that it was going to snow.
“A foot in the mountains, an inch on the valley floors, god-damn locusts by morning,” these people have been coopted by their individual news-stations to tell people whate the hell ever they can to get them to watch the news. Now knowing the propensity for people here to freak out whenever they think that there is going to be any inclement weather (I seriously had the highway STOP here a few days ago during a rain shower), this feat shouldn’t seem like somehting that is tough.

Indeed it isn’t.

That being said, I am getting kind of tired of heading to work early each morning and not knowing if sunshine or hailstones or fireballs are going to be falling out of the sky. When they forcast that it is going to snow with thunderstorms, this is how I dress, so you can imagine my chagrin when I walk out of clas and it is sunny and (relatively) warm outside.

Anyway, I believe that the weather men are jsut telling us what clear-channel wants us to hear in order to get us to watch their crappy news, becasue the news is so depressing now that no one wants to watch it, even to see the weather.

Hybrid Tomato Tree of doom?

Ok. I have now seen advertisements for the “Amazing Tomato Tree” on TV, in the papers and in magazines. It is time for this to stop already.

Tomatos are supposed to grow out of smallish bushes on the ground. This bushtree is advertised to grow to 8-10 feet tall in basically no time and produce bumper crops of gigantic tomatoes every week. If I ever look out in my garden and there is an eight foot tall treeshrub sprouting tomatoes the size of my fist like some kind of licopene-funded biological slot machine, I am going to run screaming to my nearest armory and douse the entire neighborhood with Agent Orange.

Seriously.

Tomatoes are not supposed to be 2 lbs and literally the size of Chers head. Its just not natural. I can only imagine the bizarre chemicals and growth additives that come pre-loaded in the ‘decorative’ pots. It should be a sign that you dont plant them, it comes as a package (presumably to keep you out of what can only be a caustic and highly dangerous chemical environment). Barry bonds didn’t take the kinds of hormones that would allow a bushtreeshrubdemon to put off an entire crop of tomatoes every week. And Hybrid? Is it okay to call somethingthat grows out of the ground hybrid? I think not, friends.

I think not.

When I think hybrid I think of Jerri Ryan and her *ahem* implants on Star Trek. I think of that chick from Species or maybe the funny little cars that Toyota makes. I do not ever think “MmMm… hybrid (insert vegetable here) sure sounds good on my salad”

Now I’m all for genetic engineering in food. I yearn for the day that I am able to harvest a steak from a corn-stalk. That being said, I have seen attack of the killer tomatoes and know what is in the future. If there is one thing that scares me more than a future full of metal, soulless, uber-intelligent and heavily armed robotic killing machines, it is one full of intelligent, mobile and dangerously delicious fruit.

Mark my words, this will not end well.