Would you like retards with that?

There are many reasons why I never ever ever eat at McDonald's, not the least of which being that I start farting about halfway through my burger and then don't stop for three and a half days. But also, I just find it utterly depressing that I have to deal with an entire team of people who are quite literally as stupid as a person can possibly get without qualifying for a bona fide "disorder."

I ordered a Happy Meal for my daughter tonight. A Chicken McNugget Happy Meal. There are two choices when one orders a McNugget Happy Meal: a 4-McNugget meal or a 6-McNugget meal. So when I stepped up to the register and placed my order with Tardface, I said, "Yes I'd like a four McNugget Happy Meal, please." So you can imagine my shock when I looked at my receipt ten seconds later and realized my credit card had just been charged fourteen dollars for a Happy Meal that should have cost about $4.50.

"Well you said you wanted four Happy Meals," responds Tardface.

Okay, I'm sorry, Tardface. I know you're stupid. But I also know that the corporation that employs you understands that you're stupid and so has broken down everything you must do into about thirty simple phrases: Big Mac, Fries, Number Six, Super Size... I simply can't imagine that I am the first person to ever come in here and verbalize this particular order to you. I know that you know that you have a four McNugget meal, so... why, Mister McDonald's employee wouldn't you have at least clarified what you thought you heard me say before charging me for four freakin' Happy Meals? Especially when you can clearly see I am standing her with ONE DAMN KID!

Now please go get your slightly-smarter manager to come give me a refund while I continue to fart in your general direction.

In the event of a sudden change in cabin humor...

God help me, I love airline employees with a sense of humor. Even a stupid joke that you might not otherwise laugh at is rendered about ten times funnier when it is said over a P.A. system in the airport or on an airplane.

Cases in point:

I was flying from Bangor to Philadelphia a couple summers ago on one of those tiny puddle-jumper planes and the male flight attendant doing the safety lecture said, "Insert the flap into the buckle and pull the strap to tighten. If this is too confusing, exit the plane immediately as you're probably too stupid to be flying."

On another flight, the pilot came over the speaker and announced that there was a long line for the runway and we would likely be sitting here for almost an hour. But there was some good news. Can you guess what that good news was? Yep, he just saved a bunch of money on his car insurance.

And just this morning, as I sit in the New Orleans terminal with about a thousand other people after Allstar Weekend, this man with a very thick Cajun accent comes over the P.A. and says, "For anyone on standby for any flight... for any flight... standing will not get you on a flight any faster, so please feel free to grab a seat."

Seriously, under any other circumstances, none of these mildly humorous jokes would have made me laugh. But coming from somebody working in an industry where people are by nature pissed off at the public as a whole and you as an individual, it's just priceless comedy.

Mo-o-om... Marvin keeps taking my miles!

My family recently booked a flight on US Airways. A few days later I got an email from them encouraging me to sign up for their “Dividend Miles” club. The basic gist of the email was, “Hey, if you sign up right now you can still get these miles.” But they didn’t stop there. The email continues on to say, “If you don’t sign up right now, we’re going to give your miles to Marvin!” I’m sorry, but why should that be the detail that ultimately convinces somebody to sign up for this program? If you’re not inspired enough to earn frequent flier miles for yourself, why should losing them to “Marvin” (swear I’m not even making that name up) in any way sway your decision?

Apparently US Airways is trying to appeal to the three-year-old sensibilities in all of us. I can’t tell you how many times my daughter and niece—who are three and four respectively—have broken down crying simply because one of them wanted to play with a toy that the other one already had. “Mommy, I want the Littlest Pet Shop Bulldog!” Mind you, the crying child wanted nothing to do with that stupid bulldog thirty seconds ago, but now that her cousin has decided to play with it, that is suddenly the only thing on earth that could ever possibly make her happy. You can try distracting her with food, movies, other toys, but no. As long as her cousin continues to possess a bulldog that should have been hers, nothing else will make her happy. The three-year-old mantra seems to be: “I don’t want this. I don’t want that. I want what YOU have!"

I guess we never really grow out of that. That’s where the whole “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality derives from. Your big screen standard def TV was just fine two years ago until everybody around you started buying plasma HD. Now, god forbid they have something you don’t have. US Airways understands this mentality better than we do apparently. And the thing is, I’m almost certain the scare tactic works amazingly well on their customers: “Oh god no! I can’t imagine that I’ll ever fly enough to make these Dividend Miles worth the effort of signing up, but damnit I will not let that bastard Marvin (who might actually find some use for them) get his grubby little hands anywhere near my miles.”

Well hey Marvin, you can have our miles. I don’t think my three-year-old is going to notice.

Anyone? Anyone? Anyone know who Darwin is?

Today I clicked on perhaps my very first "targeted Google ad" ever, and found something profoundly interesting. Apparently Ben Stein ("Beuller... Beuller...") has made a documentary which is coming out later this year. The doc is called EXPELLED and it addresses a recent trend in academia whereby scientists, teachers, students and really anyone involved in the realm of academic thinking are ostracized for merely suggesting that Darwinism might be wrong. As someone who is an unapologetic Christian but who has read up on evolution and finds the ideas behind it intriguing and fascinating (if not necessarily foregone conclusions) I am very eager and curious to see this film.

I want to stress—and the website stresses over and over—that the aim of this film is NOT to preach Intelligent Design or to make a case against evolution. What it does is expose the “invisible hand” of “Big Science” which has been bullying otherwise intelligent researchers into accepting evolution as it is currently understood, or else. Well established scientists and college professors are being fired, denied tenure, and cut out of research funding simply for pursuing “fact” and “truth” no matter where the road may lead. It’s a trend that is disturbingly familiar in our current vernacular, something that transcends science and religion: anti-war voices being told to “just shut up” by conservatives or global warming skeptics being called “treasonous” by Al Gore acolytes just to name a couple.

If an idea or theory is self-evident why the need to discourage dissenting voices and research? No matter what your religious or scientific beliefs, if the idea of challenging the “Establishment” and encouraging “free thinking” intrigues you, then I encourage you to check out the film’s website. Watch the trailer and read the online literature. And when the movie comes out later this year, go see it with a truly open mind.

http://www.expelledthemovie.com/

At my feelers, unleash hell

As a father, I am really really looking forward to the age where ant farms become appropriate toys. I loved my ant farm as a kid and I can’t wait for the excuse to have one again. For the uninitiated, a typical ant farm consisted of two-panes of glass (or plastic) spaced a couple of centimeters apart which you filled with soil from your yard. You’d go gather up about twenty or thirty ants from the same colony and transport them home in a peanut butter jar. After jimmying them one-by-one into the ant farm with some food (the instructions suggested sugar water curiously enough) you’d just sit back and let them go to work for about a week, digging tunnels and settling into their new home. After that the real fun would begin.

You’d start by going out and collecting about twenty ants from a different anthill. Your next move was really a matter of taste. You could drop all twenty of the rival ants into the ant farm at the same time and watch as both sides fought to the bitter violent death, leaving behind only one or two befuddled sentries. On the other hand, you could drop them in two or three at a time and watch as the colony ganged up and tore them to pieces. Occasionally, one of the intruders would put up a good fight and take down a couple of the ravenous mob (especially if you were lucky enough to find a colony of red ants), but in the end he was still inherently doomed.

This was the way I chose to put my rival ants to work. I’d gradually up the number of intruders over the course of an hour or so, giving my colony plenty of practice against increasingly difficult odds. Then, after I felt that all of my little six-legged soldiers had been sufficiently trained up in the art of war, I’d give them a real challenge. I’d go out and find myself a big freakin’ SPIDER and drop that into the farm. Here’s where the action really got interesting. Unlike ant-on-ant battles, which pretty much always came down to whoever had the bigger army, you never really knew how a spider would fare against an entire colony. A spider is obviously big enough and tough enough hold its own against four or five ants at once. And if he positions himself properly the narrowness of the tunnels can actually work to his favor, preventing the ants from swarming him in numbers he can’t easily handle. But ants are nothing if not coordinated. It all boils down to how fast they can rally a multi-pronged attack, sending flanking units to the surface to come around and attack the spider from behind. Once the ants can pin down the intruding monster on both sides, forcing him to split his attention, it’s only a matter of time before they get past his long legs and onto his back. After that, the outcome of the fight is pretty much a foregone conclusion. Now it’s just a matter of how many ants the spider will be able take down with him.

When people think of little boys and ants, they usually conjure up images of us incinerating them with a magnifying glass, or dousing them with gasoline. They really don’t give us enough credit. We came up with way way way more f---ed up ideas than that. Ant farms gave us a staging ground to recreate the Roman Coliseum! We made countless drones fight for their lives purely for our own amusement. We let swarms of opposing armies slaughter each other just to see who would come out on top. We put trained fighters into the ring with the equivalent of Bengal tigers just to see how many would die before vanquishing the beast

Now I know what you’re thinking: serial killers in training. But trust me, no mass murder has ever wasted his time executing insects. They killed cats and dogs and birds and things. Things with faces. Things with personalities. Things you can love, sympathize and identify with. But who ever identified with a freakin’ ant? And I mean a real ant, not that cute puppet thing from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Sure we were messed up. All boys are. But hey, at least we purged our homicidal curiosities on creatures that everyone kills on a daily basis. Is it really so messed up that we got additional entertainment value out of it? And is it really so messed up that I can’t wait to share that joy with my son?

Home runs or, ya know... HOME RUNS?

So Roger Clemens just went before Congress to testify about his “alleged” steroid use. I know I may not be the best person to comment about this whole matter considering I could really give a damn about any sport that I am not actively engaged in, but who the hell even cares if a baseball player wants to take steroids? If the Major League Baseball Commission (or whatever that ruling body is) doesn’t care enough to give frequent and mandatory drug screenings to their players, why should the government even get involved? If the powers that be want to ruin their own sport (have you noticed that, unless it’s the Red Sox, Yankees or Cubs, nobody REALLY cares about who goes to the World Series anymore?) I say let them – it’ll be one less game that makes me feel like a little girl because I can’t name any of the players or their stats.

Frankly I just don’t get the whole steroid thing anyway. Why somebody would willingly inject a foreign substance into their body – something that has been shown to cause (amongst other things) heart attacks, strokes, tumors and kidney failure – just so they can hit a ball a little bit farther is beyond me… especially when you consider the reason why a guy becomes an athlete in the first place. Professional athletes may feed you a line of crap about their “love of the game” or the “thrill of competition” blah blah blah. If that were really the reason the started playing baseball there would be no twenty million dollar contracts. The main overriding reason why guys desire to become big time athletes is simple: to get… LAID. Even those ridiculously lucrative contracts are only there to serve that main purpose. So if the main reason you got into professional sports was to get laid, then why would you take a substance that also shrinks your penis, makes you impotent and gives you acne and man boobs? Wouldn’t that pretty much rule out any laying of any kind? People talk about ‘roid rage as another side effect of steroids. Personally, I don’t think it’s the steroids. I think it’s the realization that after doing everything humanly (and chemically) possible to become the best athlete they can possibly be, in the end these guys are nothing but flaccid, tiny pricked neo-virgins with slightly better batting averages. I’d want to kick the shit out of somebody too if that happened to me.

So I say open up all professional sports to steroid use. If Roger Clemens, or whoever, wants bigger muscles and doesn't care about the eenie weenie peenie, more power to him. Once the women of the world realize that all those athletes they’ve been lusting after can’t even hold an erection, it’ll give my fellow audio/visual geeks a little more bedtime action.

Place head on table. Smash repeatedly.

So let me see if I understand this correctly. The Republicans have narrowed the race down to two guys: one who half of them can't stand because he's "too liberal" and another who half of them can't stand because he's a Mormon. What's more, they absolutely cannot shut up about it.

Seriously GOP, are you people TRYING to get Hilary elected?