Speak of the Devil Part 3

I'm a little bit late on this one, since a lot of people have already made joke about it, but it's really bugging me, and I want to talk about it. Now, I think there's a question that we all want an answer to...

WHY IS THERE A FINAL DESTINATION 5!?

It seems pretty damn unnecessary to me. But more importantly, they called the fourth one "The Final Destination", which was pretty damn stupid. I'm glad they figured out that not putting numbers on the end and just using the same damn title again is stupid and confusing, but now they've just made it ridiculous. You can't STOP numbering the sequels for one installment and then start doing it AGAIN. That's horsecrap, and you know it. It's like when we had Guitar Hero 1, 2, and 3, then Guitar Hero "World Tour", and then Guitar Hero 5. THAT'S STUPID. YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO DO THAT.

Of course, it couldve been worse. They could've called THIS one "Final Destination 4", which would've made me throw something through the nearest window. Or hey, they could've called it "5inal Destination", which seems to be popular lately. You know, the "replace letters with numbers" thing used to work when the number either looked like the letter or sounded like the word you were replacing. But now apparently you can just do whatever the hell you want. I'm looking at you, "Se7en". A seven looks nothing like a V, and you know it.

Distracted By the Shiny

I feel bad for people who actually have ADHD. You know, because I know a couple people who actually DO benefit from being on the medication, because it helps them stay focused and understand what's going on. And you know, I have absolutely no problem with that. But then there are the other two groups, who I just can't stand. There are the kids who just claim to have ADHD as an excuse to not do anything and act like pricks, who I just want to punch in the mouth, and there are the parents who put their kids on Ritalin for being different, who I imagine have robbed us of many fantastic artists. Screw you guys.

Now, I say that I feel bad for the kids I know with real ADHD. Not because they have ADHD, because they're all perfectly functional and doing well with it, but because all these other morons have made it so people think THEY'RE the same way, which has gotta suck pretty bad. See, because we all know it's massively overdiagnosed, so we never know if someone's lying when they say they have it. The best way I've found to tell the difference is to ask them what they're like when they're not on meds, and if it makes a difference. Everyone I know with real ADHD is perfectly fine with taking the medicine, because it HELPS them. Of course, this method has a high chance of getting punched balls, so as always, exercise caution.

Of course, none of this means that ADHD jokes still aren't hilarious, because they are. Someone running away while yelling "Ooh, shiny!" will never get old to me.

This Blog Brought To You By Hayden Christiansen

Not everything needs a celebrity endorsement. There is currently a jar of mayonnaise in my house* with an endorsement from some NASCAR driver guy on it. I can't remember his name, because I'm pretty sure my brain immediately blocked it out of my memory five seconds after reading so as to preserve my complete lack of NASCAR knowledge and keep my sanity intact, but it did make me wonder who exactly would have their opinion swayed by the fact that a NASCAR driver recommends a certain kind of mayonnaise. I mean, celebrity endorsements are annoying, but at least make sense when the person is at least somewhat connected to the product. If Tony Hawk says "Buy these skateboard wheels, they are good", I will probably believe him, because Tony Hawk is good at skateboarding. But if he told me "Buy this block of cheese, it is delicious", I would probably first question Tony Hawk's experience in the cheese industry first.

So the only real connection with our NASCAR mayonnaise friend here is the logic I assume went through the head of the ad executive who commissioned the campaign."White people like mayonnaise. White people like NASCAR. Therefore, combining the two will sell more mayonnaise to white people." Which I imagine the target audience might find a bit insulting. Not that I'm not guilty of insulting people who like NASCAR, but it's probably not the best idea to offend the people who you want to give you their money. But what do I know? I don't run an advertising agency. For good reason at that.

Or perhaps there's some sort of bizarre connection between mayonnaise and NASCAR that I have no knowledge of. Perhaps they have recently instated new rules involving mayonnaise, and I am a fool for not knowing about the wonderful world of mayonnaise driving. But I doubt it. 

*I say it's in my house instead of "I have a jar of mayonnaise" because mayonnaise makes me puke. This is information that you needed to know. In other news, I was unable to spell "mayonnaise" correctly on my first try.

But They're Pretty, Yeah

I think it's sort of weird how we give flowers to people as gifts. I mean, flowers are nice and everything, but once you get them, what are you supposed to do with them? Usually you just set them down that night and try to figure out where you're going to put them once you sober up. Then once it's, oh, 5:30 in the afternoon, you decide you should probably put them in some water. Unfortunately, you don't have a vase, because you don't have any children. So you figure you should go and buy one. After realizing that vases are not actually within your budget because you spent it all on booze, you end up either letting the flowers die or sticking them in a coffee mug filled with tap water. And then they die anyway.

What I'm saying is, I don't really get why there's such a pressure for guys to get their dates/girlfriends/sex slaves flowers. And it's pretty specific, isn't it? You gotta get her a dozen red roses, or else she will never love you. If you get eleven, she will probably leave you and take all of your booze money. And I guess thirteen would just be showing off. I guess I just like to think that women are less shallow than that.

But that's alway been a bit of a thing for me. Any woman who leaves you because of something stupid like that probably wasn't worth being with in the first place. Why do you gotta impress her? If flowers impress her that much, she probably doesn't leave the house very often. They're all over the place outside.

God Works In Mysterious Ways

You'd think that if God is supposed to be all-loving and perfect, he wouldn't ask us to praise Him* so much. I mean, asking, nay, demanding that everyone praise your name and talk about how great you are all the time doesn't sound like something a perfect being would do. It sounds a bit conceited, doesn't it?They say you should always tell praise Him in your prayers, I guess just in case He forgets that he's awesome or something. I don't know, maybe God has Alzheimer's. He's pretty old.**

Hey, maybe God never said that he wants to be praised all the time. I wouldn't put it past some of those jerkwad Middle Ages priests to change up the scripture like that. Maybe God's sick of people kissing his ass all the time. I probably would eventually. I mean, He's God. He's basically a giant superhero that lives in the sky. He probably wishes we'd all just work on trying to make the world not suck.

By the way, if God knows everything, why do you need to pray? That's like watching an episode of CSI when you already know who did it. It's kind of pointless.

*I forgot about capitalizing all the pronouns until I had already written most of this. I sort of debated with myself on whether I should do it at all, but it just seemed weird not to.
**Welp, I'm going to hell.

Look At How Vibrant It Is

HDTVs don't really impress me that much. Not because I'm incredibly pretentious and consider it not good enough for me, but just because I don't really care about picture quality that much, and I can barely tell the difference anyway. I'm sure that to...whatever the picture quality equivalent of an audiophile is (Videophile? Firefox's spell-check says that's a real word, so I guess so. Then again, it also considers "Scientology" a word, so it's not above accepting made-up words.), that makes me an embarassing plebean who just doesn't understand how mind-blowing HD is. The thing is, I don't really care.

Of course, now that they're starting to become almost ubiquitous, it's sort of unavoidable. Plenty of people have them, but I'm not really sure it's worth the money just so you can see more individual hairs in Jack Bauer's perpetual stubble. It seems more like a luxury for people with absurd amounts of disposable income, or weirdos like my dad who go on and on about picture quality. Try as they might, they will never get me to care.

It's all better than 3D TVs though, at the least. I don't think I even need to explain how stupid those things are. Here's a big shock for you, Sony: Nobody wants to wear your stupid glasses when they're watching TV. In other news, it looks like crap even with the glasses. Nice try though.

And Of Course, Spotted Dick

Sometimes you have to wonder how smart advertisers are. I mean obviously, all of them are manipulative swine who love nothing more than to take all your money, but there are certain things that make me wonder if they realize what they're really doing. As an example, I'm going to use Vince Offer, the Sham-Wow guy, because he is completely insane and apparently punched a hooker in the mouth once.

Now, as anyone who's seen the commercials he's in can tell you, Vince has some unbelievably stupid lines and looks like a weasel suffering from a severe tic. And wouldn't you know it, everyone loved it. And to be fair, I do too, because that man is clearly out of his mind. And that's what makes me wonder, did the people who put this commercial together KNOW that this was ridiculous? They had to, didn't they? Did they make a commercial absurd and laughable because they KNEW people would find it funny, thus giving their product far more exposure?I don't know, they might have. It depends on how evil they really are.

It's the same thing with the Shake Weight, and pretty much any other product that isn't sexual, but so obviously is. The people who made this CAN'T have been that ignorant. These are full grown men. They HAVE to notice these things. The question is, are they doing it on purpose? Either way, it worked, because they sold like a billion of them. Great, now we've told the advertisers that we will fall for their ploys, if the ploy is even there. I guess that's fine though, because eventually we will reach a point where every commercial is unintentionally hilarious. I could live with that.

Boring Food and Drink

I sort of have to wonder about the person who decided that salads were a good idea. See, because I'm pretty sure the idea of putting a whole bunch of leaves in a bowl together and calling it food came before the idea of ranch dressing, and eating a salad without any sort of anything on it is like trying to eat a tree. Eating a salad with dressing, on the other hand...is pretty disgusting too, but at least there's actually some sort of flavor involved, and has the added bonus of making you puke your guts up if you try to eat more than one bowl. I realize that different people have different tastes, and plenty of people like salads, but I'm sure there's got to be a better way to eat healthy than to have to start eating the weeds you pulled out of your backyard.

You may have guessed by now from all of my incredibly subtle implications that I think salads taste like bags of lawn clipping, but less exciting. See, if you eat a bag of lawn clipping, there's the chance that a poisonous spider or something will jump on your face, and then you get to take an exciting field trip to the trauma ward. If you find a spider in your salad, that probably just means that you need to clean your kitchen more often. There are very few experiences more boring than eating a plain salad. Maybe eating a plain salad while filing taxes and drinking iced tea.

Speaking of iced tea, I also hate iced tea. If you could somehow liquidize nothing, it would taste like iced tea Drinking iced tea is like drinking air, followed by an extremely bitter and vomit-inducing aftertaste. The only way to improve iced tea is to fill it with so much sweetener that you might as well be drinking snow cone liquid, which actually isn't that bad of an idea. It'll probably kill you, but at least then you don't have to drink iced tea anymore.

Buy All of the Drugs

Commercials for prescription drugs always scare me a little bit. They always suggest that you ask your doctor about their specific drug, and I am reasonably certain that that is not how the doctor-patient relationship is supposed to work. So you have some commercial for Make-Your-Life-Suck-Less-Icil, and they'll be all "If you have an existentially unfulfilling existence, ask your doctor about Make-Your-Life-Suck-Less-Icil." I'm pretty sure if you said to your doctor "HEY! The commercial lady said that I need this RIGHT NOW!", he'd probably inform you that you are, in fact, not the doctor, and to let him do his goddamn job.

People complain about "Big Pharma" a lot, which I think is a really stupid term, but it is pretty damn irritating when you realize that medicine is a business just like everything else. I mean, I don't want to deride people for trying to make money, since they're just trying to stay alive like everyone else, but it sort of doesn't seem right, does it? I mean, you're in a business that improves drastically the more people stay unhealthy. In fact, you are producing an item that becomes useless once it's successful, which is a conflict of interest on several different levels.

Of course, I'm still not going to be one of those nutjobs who completely dismisses modern medicine. Because seriously, screw you guys. If you let your kid die because you think "God will save him", you deserve to go to hell. They're kind of like those idiot in New York who made their kids pull out of school to hold signs on the streets about the rapture. You sort of feel for those kids, but then you realize that those are the idiot fundamentalists of tomorrow, and it gets sort of morally ambiguous.

And On the Third Coming, He Should Have Rockets

If there ever is a second coming, Jesus is going to be in for a bit of a dilemma.* I mean, how is he going to actually convince people that he's the real Jesus Christ? If some guy walked to you and started saying that he was the son of God, and that you should drop everything you were doing and follow him around the country, you would probably call the local mental hospital and have him committed. I know the whole idea of Christianity is "believing without proof", kind of like Santa Claus, but I don't think that would work very well. Hell, maybe the second coming ALREADY HAPPENED, and people just dismissed the guy as some crazy cult leader.

In the Bible, the people who dismiss Jesus (at least, before he shows off his superpowers) are always portrayed as ignorant, because they aren't seeing that he is OBVIOUSLY the son of God. But you know, you can't really blame these people for having a healthy amount of realistic skepticism. I mean, would you really believe this guy right away? If anything, some of the disciples are outright weirdos for going with him in the first place. I don't know, I think regardless of any time period, it's a good idea to not immediately follow strange bearded people.

So that's why I think that if Jesus wants to come back, he needs to do it really spectacularly. I know that goes against all the claims of how he's supposed to be humble and not show off and all that, but nobody's going to believe him otherwise. Maybe a little song and dance number in the sky with some angels. That'd get people's attention. And simultaneously cause every atheist on the planet to suffer a heart attack and die.

*I'm putting on my "agnosticism" hat!

They Have a League For It, Seriously

Some people aspire to be athletes. I don't personally understand them, but I certainly see the appeal. Other people want to be actors or musicians. Again, and admirable goal, and a reasonable thing to strive for. And some of us just have something we're really passionate about, like medicine or animals, and we work hard to make a living out of the thing we love. All of these things are perfectly fine, because they give us something important in our lives to strive for. And then there are the people who want to be competitive eaters, and those people scare the hell out of me. Usually, I try to have an open mind about these kinds of things. You know, I try to remember that just because I don't understand something doesn't mean other people can't enjoy it, but there is no excuse for how disgusting and wasteful competitive eating is.

What kind of child does it take to say "That's what I want to do with my life"? Probably not a very well-adjusted one. Your parents would probably be pretty damn disappointed in you. While all of your friends were outside playing, you'd be seeing how many pieces of fried zucchini you could eat in thirty seconds. They'd probably send you off to a boarding school to try and stop you from being such a weirdo. Your two possible futures would be competitive eating and food-themed supervillain.

People often make jokes about how people in third-world countries would be shocked by ideas like "appetizers", where we eat food before we eat food. One can only imagine what the reaction would be to competitive eating. "Oh yeah, he eats like 50 hot dogs in a minute. What? Oh no, it's incredibly painful for him. He doesn't even really like hot dogs. Hmm? Oh, because we pay him to do it." I don't think there are many things that are more stereotypically "American" than that, with the possible exception of "competitive eating but also there's guns".

Yet Another Ramble About Space

It sucks that we're going to have to start relying on the Japanese to colonize Mars these days, since America has apparently given up on manned space travel entirely. Now, I talk about space travel, and colonizing space in particular, way more than any rational human being ever should, but it really shouldn't be that hard to see why. There is an inherent wonder, so to speak, in the idea of traveling off into the unknown to see what the rest of the universe is like. I mean, when you see all of the crazy things that evolution has created on THIS planet, it's downright invigorating to imagine how things could be in other parts of the galaxy. It's really not hard to imagine why our ancestors were so desperate to explore the rest of the planet. It's exciting! Who knows what could be out there? And considering how many times they were proven wrong about what they thought the Earth was right, imagine how many things about space we could have dead-wrong. We need to get back out there and start finding things!

We originally started the Space Program to compete with the Russians, right? No one's denying that, right? That's probably one of the few things that everyone can agree on, in fact. So if we're already admitting that we aren't above doing things just because we want to prove to everyone that we're awesome badasses, why are we pretending that we aren't interested in funding a program that's sole purpose is essentially "Oh my God this is so goddamn cool"? Sure, there's also science-y stuff, but mainly we're just doing it because space is awesome. And in an age when people are really not impressed by America anymore, including Americans, why the hell not? We spend plenty of money on other stupid stuff, we might as well spend it on something that might let us get out of the whole global-warming thing.

We started getting really good at this sort of thing, and now we're giving up. No, screw you guys, we can do better than that. Start taxing the rich as much as you possibly can, and then put all the money into space travel. I want to have a moon base by next year.

The Universe Is Broken Part 5

The idea of plumbing scares me a little bit. Not in a 1950s B-horror "Oh my God there are snakes coming out of my toilet"* sort of way, but in a "This is clearly some sort of sorcery, how the hell did they figure this out" kind of thing. I mean, when you read about how the Ancient Romans apparently managed to get indoor plumbing, it can get a bit bizarre. That's too much for my brain to handle NOW, and I'm using the goddamn Internet.

Then again, that sort of comes out sounding like the insane ramblings of someone who is really into conspiracy theories. "Ohh, you know who puts that water in your house? The GOVERNMENT! The government is evil, as we all know. Who knows what kind of horrific things they're doing with those pipes! I bet plumbers are secretly FBI agents, planning to take over the world through the limitless power of poor water pressure!" I think you need to have a balance between blind trust in the state and being a paranoid wreck with no social skills. Yeah, I still don't like you, 9/11 Truthers, no matter how many angry comments you leave on my website.

See, if the government wanted to put mind-control poison in our water, they would've done it a long time ago. Just because something would be scary doesn't mean the American government is all over it.

*Although I did read somewhere that this actually happened to someone, and "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" has never lied to me before.

It's a Dragon Shaped Like Al Pacino

I always wonder about people who get tattoos. I'm not one of those people who gets all worked up whenever I see someone with tattoos, screaming about how they're going to regret it at the top of my lungs and frightening nearby children, but I do always wonder a few things. For example, I wonder how many tattoos are gotten while sober. See, because the stereotype for tattoos is getting completely plastered and waking up with a tattoo of Colonel Sanders performing lewd sex acts on various endangered species with no memory of how it got there, but there's also plenty of people who just go out and GET tattoos. Or, even more so, plan for weeks and weeks for what they want their tattoo to look like, where they want to get it, and all that good nonsense. And then I guess these are the sort of people who die in horrific and slightly hilarious accidents at a young age, because you very rarely see a ninety-year-old man with a full back tattoo. Or maybe old people are more sensible, and they decide to actually wear shirts from time to time. I don't know, I don't have any tattoos.

I've always thought that you should get a tattoo that will look even better once your skin starts to wrinkle. You know, like a tattoo of an elephant or something. That way, it'll just become more and more realistic. And people will look at you and think "Hey, check THAT guy out. He made a stupid decision, but he PLANNED AHEAD with it. How smart of him!" People would be even more impressed if you managed to convince them that you made that decision while drunk. Although I'm not sure why a ninety-year-old needs to impress people. I'm pretty sure at that point you can just go "Check it out, I'm still alive! Hooray for science!" More old people need to take advantage of that. Saving two bucks at the movie theater isn't really taking full advantage of being old.

How about just tattoos that look like moles and stuff. So you can secretly be a rebel, and still be buried in a Jewish cemetery? Or you could just wear clothes with patterns on 'em. You know, without all the needles and stuff. That could work.

You Will Be Hit By a Bus

I hate psychics. Well, actually, I guess that isn't entirely true. I can't hate psychics, because there's no such thing as psychics. I hate the people who CLAIM to be psychics, because they are awful, awful people. Now, there are two distinct groups in this little category of insanity: delusional people and scam artists. Delusional people are either mentally ill, and have therefore come to believe that they have mystical powers through the infinite energy of being balls-out crazy, or they've just been somehow convinced that they're magic. Either through hippie parents or just an insurmountably large ego, these people think that they're just super-duper special. And yeah, they're idiots, but I don't hate them nearly as much as I hate the other group, the scam artists. I don't think they need any introduction, really. These are the people who KNOW they have no powers. They're well-aware that there's no such thing as psychics, and they're just doing it to rip off gullible people. And they're bastards.

Speaking of those gullible people, they annoy the hell out of me too. You know, the people who base major life decisions over what their horoscope says. If a girl ever breaks up with you because her horoscope said you were bad news, I wouldn't worry about it. If she's dumb enough to believe that crap, she probably wasn't worth it in the first place. Actually, it sort of annoys me that they print horoscopes in the newspaper. I know that they have fine print about it not being real, but that does NOT seem like the right place to be writing random crap some jackass with a telescope made up off the top of his head.

Basically, astrology and psychics and all that bull are just religion without all of the positive things about religion (the good ones at least). Stripping away all the positive morals and reasonable back-up evidence, and you're just left with pure, unconditional belief. We can do better than that.

Science Doesn't Work That Way

A lot of the times, when you hear somebody complaining about how something in a movie, television show, book, or whatever was inaccurate, or poorly researched ("There's no WAY that plane could fly around that mountain! Planes don't WORK THAT WAY!"), you often hear it countered with something along the lines of "This is a movie about aliens who suck peoples' souls out of their kidneys, and that's what bothers you?" And that argument doesn't really work for me, because it sort of goes against the concept of fiction. When you establish some sort of setting or world where yes, aliens doing that is completely possible, then we expect everything AFTERWARD to make sense within the confines of our world, because you never established anything otherwise. If you show early on that this is a world where planes totally CAN fly like that, then yes, we will believe. But you can't change the rules later on, because we expect everything to be internally consistent.

Of course, this just brings up the argument of whether we should put so much effort into pointing out inaccuracies in the first place. The internet is certainly no stranger to that concept. For me, it works something like this: You should always try to make your movie as accurate as you can. If you make mistakes here and there, fine. It's unfortunate, but it doesn't ruin a movie like so many people seem to think it does. However, you should NOT base an entire plot point around an inaccuracies, because then it just feels like you're making crap up after having written yourself into a corner.

So yes, I do support fact-checking for movies, because these are professional works. I know it seems hypocritical coming from me, because this entire website is an accuracy train wreck, but this is also just some stupid thing on the internet. If I was a professional, I'd probably try a bit harder.

Helpful Disorder

I wonder if there are people who hear voices in their heads, but the voices are really friendly. You know, they give really helpful advice. Instead of telling you to kill your entire family, they remind you to call your mom at least once a week, or advise you not to drive your motorcycle off that cliff. I mean, most people who are schizophrenic are emotionally unstable because of it, so their voices are hostile. So that makes me wonder if there's any perfectly well-adjusted people who just happen to have voices in their heads.

Or how about someone who has multiple personality disorder, but the other personality isn't violent or crazy, just equally cool, but in a different way. Like, one of the personalities is really good with relationship counseling, and the other one's really funny and charming. Hey, it could happen. Of course, this would only be tolerable if the personality switches were predictable, like you switched off every day. Then you could plan things accordingly. And have separate Facebook profiles for them.

Of course, my real point is that this is all probably really offensive to people with those disorders, but unfortunately, I don't know any of those people, so I can't ask. But luckily, no one reads this anyway, so I'm probably going to be okay.

Seriously Guys, Carcycle

You know, with all the "weird car" ideas going around (eg: people building three-wheeled cars, people building cars out of random pieces of scrap metal, etc.), I'm surprised that nobody has attempted to homebrew a car that's controlled entirely by a video game controller. Of course, this is assuming that it would actually be possible to do, which I'm pretty sure it's not. However, every time I think that something cannot be done, the internet usually proves me wrong.* So I say someone has to do it. Even if it isn't street legal, which I can almost guarantee that it wouldn't be, he could still take it out into the desert and avoid killing any mesmerized on-lookers.**

Or how about a car that is steered entirely like a motorcycle, and in fact is a motorcycle, not a car, but it's like, inside. Like a motorcycle with an outside to it. Completely stupid and unnecessary? Yes. Ruins the point of what was cool about motorcycles in the first place? Absolutely. Hilariously awesome? Almost certainly so. I have no idea how this would work, but someone crazy on the internet needs to get to work on it. The universe demands carcycle.

Basically, I understand nothing about cars, so I must assume that anything is possible when it comes to them. Build a car out of air. Build a car that runs on the abstract concept of love. Build a car that runs on cars. BUILD THE DAMN CARCYCLE ALREADY.

*Like remember that guy that got 100% on "Through the Fire and Flames" on Expert? THAT GUY IS AN ELDER GOD.
**Fun Fact: 95% of experimental car test drives end with the death of at least one mesmerized on-looker.

Minus Jokes Are Easy

Right, so we're all reasonably certain that Google+ is going to fail. I mean sure, everyone loves Google, but there's a lot of issues here. Facebook is just...unbelievably massive at this point, and this seems like sort of a weak attempt to topple their success.* "But wait!" you cry, startling a nearby child. "MySpace was huge and popular too, and Facebook took them out! You are WRONG and STUPID Pineapple." Well, there's two problems with that. First of all, MySpace was crap. It was poorly optimized, full of ads, and ugly. Second, Facebook is not only popular with teenagers and confused pre-adolescents. EVERYONE is obsessed with Facebook these days. It's far bigger than MySpace ever dreamed of being. There is a movie about it. Come on guys.

But you know why I REALLY think it's going to fail? Probably not, but I'm going to tell you anyway. Because "Google" has already become a verb, so how are we going to talk about it. I mean, if you "Facebook" someone, that means plenty of things RELATED TO FACEBOOK. However "Googling" something specifically refers to the search engine. And "Google-plussing" sounds stupid. If Google started a DIFFERENT social networking site that was owned by them, but operated separately (i.e: How YouTube works these days), then it could have alright. But nope, they screwed themselves.

I'm not saying Facebook is eternal, of course. I think eventually, something will eventually come along to replace it, and that site will eventually be replaced as well. But it won't be Google+. Because it's too damn hard to say.

*I like to think that Google tried to buy Facebook, and Zuckerberg was all like "Yeah, no." So Google was like "Then we'll just make our OWN Facebook! Muahahahaha!"

Fireworks Are Awesome

I don't think most people are REALLY caught up in their patriotism on the 4th of July. I mean sure, there are tons o people who are nuts for America like, 24/7, and they are incredibly terrifying, but I also know plenty of people who feel absolutely no allegiance to this country who still love to participate (like, for example, me). You know why? Because we get to light things on fire in the name of our country. Every other day of the year, we try to pretend we're very noble and don't get off on setting off explosives, but not today. Today we get to just blow the hell out of stuff, and I'm perfectly okay with that.

When you think about it, it is a pretty stereotypically "American" thing to do, isn't it? Going nuts and burning things to celebrate something that happened over 200 years ago? That's totally the type of thing that Europeans think we do all the time. Then again, Europeans have soccer riots to own up to. Sure, we had that stupidity where some morons started a riot after the Lakers won, but at least no one got killed at that one. Someone did get their shoe store robbed though, so it is a bit tragic.

I also like how we do a lot of it in the name of God, since so many of the staple "patriotic" songs mention God. "PRAISE THE LORD!" (Boom!)

But It's Kinda Cool Sometimes I Guess

I always wonder about the people who show off while riding their motorcycles. Y'know, doing wheelies and all that absurdly dangerous nonsense. Granted, riding a motorcycle at all is already kind of showy, but it's still pretty confusing. Now, I'm not putting down showing off in front of strangers. That I don't really have a problem with. Sure, it's kind of douchey, but if you're really good at something pointless, you might as well make SOME use of it. But the thing about showing off in front of strangers is that you're supposed to do it for the heat of the grant. You do it for the cheering and the women calling out for your seed.* But when you're on your motorcycle, you can't hear anyone, and nobody can tell who you are.

So I guess motorcyclists ride around and ASSUME that everyone thinks they're awesome. I'm pretty sure you could do that with anything and get the same results. "Oh man, those guys over there are probably all talking about how awesome I am photocopying." So the motorcycle guy just gets an ego boost from things that other people may or may not be saying about them. Okay.

And you know, I'm usually not impressed by that sort of thing. Usually I just see them doing dangerous things and think "Wow, that looked really unsafe. Maybe that guy's suicidal. He should seek counseling."

Also, I'm pretty sure everyone who drives a car hates people who ride motorcycles. Lane-splitting and all that. That can't be good for your self-esteem.

*Or that's just what I assume, anyway. I have no discernable talent, so I can't really speak from experience.