Change Your Underwear… Switch Your Foot

So I was working away on the couch here in WA, Jessica was nursing Evie and watching the TLC show “Yet Another Home Tweaking Show Where We Surprise Someone By Blatantly Lyeing to Them.” A commercial ‘break’ came on and I immediately looked up because I recognized the Switchfoot song “Adding to the Noise.” Ironically the song is about turning off the noise that the culture throws at you (television, radio, and anything else that’s distracting to life). The commercial? Victoria’s Secret! Weird.

Prophets on Profits Should Be Stoned

Money.CNN.com [not linking because they’re not getting my page rank] has been predicting the demise of the housing market for months and months now. And it may quite well be going down but do they have to post it once a week somewhere on their site? I think they’re running a scam over at that site anyway, but the ‘news’ that they post is just bonkers at times.

You don’t take the content of this site literally very often, and I don’t take the content of their site literay or as reliable… ever 😉

Spider

Abby didn’t go to sleep right away for her nap. She came out and said, “I can’t go to sleep, there’s a spider on the paper towel by my bed.” I went to tuck her back in and get rid of the spider. I looked over and failed to see the spider. The problem is that I was looking for the wrong thing. The Spider was the flight options on the Frontier Airlines napkin Jessica had snagged for her bookmark last Wednesday!

Spider

Higglytown Zeros

There is a TV show for children called ‘Higglytown Heroes.’ I just saw them sing a song about how a trucker was a hero. I’m not saying that being a trucker is a pointless job. I am saying that dressing him up in the cartoon wearing a wife beater is probably a bad choice. Singing about how he delivers monsters to rivers, hats for cats and bowling balls for people is also a questionable message. I don’t think of the people who stop at the porn towns [stops on long stretches of road that have an adult store and a gas station only] as heroes. Maybe it is just me.

The White Christmas That Almost Was

Here in the Northern Hemisphere our Christmases have a bit of a chance to actually be white in December (see: Phil does Chritmas in Australia). We had 1.5 inches of snow last night, but this is Washington state so promptly after dropping frozen precipitation it switched to rain. Therefore the white Christmas was replaced with a slush Christmas. Which really doesn’t have the same ring to it, unless you’re a 911 operator, in which case you just get different phone calls about the same goofballs doing the different crazy things.

New Category Inaugurated

The press and researchers have done such a good job at reporting and generating reports on the obviouos that I’ve created such a category.

Our first post under this category takes us to CNN where you can read that the number of people driving while talking on their cell phones has gone up. That is like saying the number of people on the earth is going up while the population increases. If more people have cell phones more people will be driving while talking on the cell phone. The number has gone up where people who listen to XM satellite radio while driving. That of course is due to the number of people who subscribe to XM satellite going up.

My Clock is Tacking

I have been all screwed up in my sleep pattern lately. I got about 2 hours of sleep between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Wednesday to Thursday I got about 7 hours and then last night I made up for it by going to bed at 8:30 and getting up at 6:00. I’m feeling better now and am ready to face Washington… even if they’re not ready for me 😉

Compromise: Best Buy Shopper

I don’t care for Best Buy. Their policies require employees to lie about their ‘service accounts’ so at to try to manipulate into buying extended warranties. However, they had the absolute best price on a wireless router that I needed while here in Washington State. When I was paying for the router the gal who was checking me out (taking my money, not looking me over, in case you thought I was getting into trouble) asked me if I was going to have someone else install it. This Netgear router is so easy to install that people who know nothing about routers can plug it into their broadband modem and install it with great ease. I told her that I was going to install it and she stopped there. I could tell the question was priming me to see if I wanted to fall under their FUD attack. One thing I hate about companies now is that they’re trying to milk you for extended warranties, service plans and blatantly charging exorbitant fees due to potential failure of the components. They advertise, “Buy this Sony product, its the best most reliable product on the market.” And then immediately they come back, smashing you in the face with, “If this product goes out, Sony doesn’t cover X, Y, and Z.”

If I lived my life with that sort of fear I wouldn’t ride in cars, planes, trains, buses or ride bicycles (let alone try to learn how to ride my new Unicycle). I wouldn’t have had children with Jessica. Heck, I wouldn’t have married Jessica due to fear that the relationship would have failed. Can you imagine reaching for a knife to cut up some chicken and then having a FUD attack? I see things playing out like this:

Self, you can’t pick up that knife, if you drop it or slip you could cut your fingers damaging your tendons, nerves and skin. You could be permanently injured due to the knife. Wait! If the chicken is carrying food-borne germs and diseases I could cut myself and infect myself with somem fatal disease and then die due to the chicken in combination with the knife. Worse! I could cut the chicken, then myself, then drop the knife into my foot causing me to be pinned to the floor by my foot and die not being able to reach the phone to call for emergency help. Self, you better cut the chicken with the scissors after sterilizing them with bleach just in case they have other germs on them from cutting the wrapping paper. I don’t know where that’s been to…

And the lunacy goes on and on! The government, and even your own parents, probably, wanted to protect you with warnings of caution, but instead of mildly presenting warnings they told you things like, “Never run with scissors. Always pay your taxes. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Don’t run with your shoes untied. Don’t drink out of the milk carton. Don’t masticate, you’ll go blind. Don’t chase your brother with a hatchet ever again or we’ll permanently remove your hatchet privileges.” All of these have a bit of wisdom in them, but they’re just rules instead of principles which are applicable to broader ranges in life. Wow, I’m way off from where I started…

To put it simply: I love the router but I wouldn’t get an extended warranty plan on it because I’m buying it because its a good router. I wouldn’t buy a Honda if I didn’t think it was going to be a good car for my money. I wouldn’t buy a Kitchen-aid mixer if I didn’t think it was the best mixer on the market. I wouldn’t buy an Apple if I thought it was going to up and crash on me and give me a blue screen of death like some warmed over Windows 95 box. When companies try to hit you with a FUD, hit them back with some diatribe about how you’re afraid to touch anything on their shelves because what if someone didn’t wash their hands in the bathroom after making a messy situation of their hygiene, or sneezed or maybe accidentally drooled on the shelf. Further, you want them to sign a contract stating that they will take care of any medical attention that you might need do to getting sick within the next 48 hours from being in their germ infested store. See if they like being FUDed themselves. Oh, and make sure the manager is there to be embarrassed in front of other customers… it’ll be more fun that way.