The Missing Piece

Why the Internet Was Invented, Volume 1

2012-02-01T11:01:00.001-07:00

Greeting followers of The Great and Powerful Daniel P. Daniel! I'd like to start a new monthly addition to The Missing Piece. What do you say? That's what I thought, too, but then I realized that I don't have the resources to clone Gillian Anderson. So, as a secondary, less-awesome suggestion, at the beginning of each month I am going to share with you the links that I found worthy of the internet in the previous month. They are certainly not all of the links that I perused, and it will definitely not be a comprehensive list of all of the trending memes (read: no shitty cat pictures). It will hopefully be a short list of the links that made me laugh, cry or think. Some of them will be interesting. Some (well, most...who are we kidding) will be strange. And some of them may get you fired or registered on the FBI's potential offender database. So browse with care. You may be a lot weirder in the end than when you started. Hopefully you find them interesting as well, and I don't get detained indefinitely by Big Brother for SOPA/PIPA violations... Enjoy, and be sure to let me know if there are any that I missed.

Life-Altering Videos:

It's Time.
Her Morning Elegance - Oren Lavie
Einstein vs. Hawking - Epic Rap Battles of History
The American Dream
Hello
Stephen Fry from the Intelligence Squared Debate
Blockhead's Revenge
The Bark Side
Star Wars Uncut
Return of the (Farting) Jedi
The Three little Pigs
Motorcycle vs. Car Drift Battle
Flying People in New York
Why James Bond is an Arse

Miscellany:

Android Apps That Are Actually Useful

2011-11-21T10:49:00.001-07:00

A couple of months ago my trusty flip phone finally circled the drain after several years of unfaltering service. So I bit the bullet and upgraded to a smartphone. All I really wanted was a phone with a decent camera, but as I soon found out the only option for that was to go with the smartphone. I’d been dragging my feet on the upgrade for a while despite the constant pleas from Her Indoors. I’m not sure what it is about these phones that I dislike so much. I’m a serious tech geek in all other aspects of life, and I’m an early-adopter on most other pieces of technology. However, with regards to phones I tend to lean more into crotchety old man status. I think it is probably the way people constantly rely on them to relay every painfully useless morsel of information about their life to those in their social circle. At the same time they make people more socially inept. I see groups of friends gathered together to have a pint, but rather than being present with their mates they’ve got their faces focused on their mobile device. People are constantly answering messages, checking emails, doing web searches while in the middle of a conversation with no indication of what they are doing. It’s rude. In my mind it’s the same as turning your back on someone that is talking to you mid-sentence and engaging someone else in a conversation. Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be a rant against mobile devices. They are amazingly versatile and powerful pieces of technology, and they can be very useful if configured properly. In the end I purchased HTC’s Incredible 2 because it had a great combination of features, and I’m not an Apple fanboy.

So after a few months of use I thought I’d put together an incomplete list of applications that allow the mobile device to actually be somewhat smart and marginally useful. Of course Android devices come preloaded with a crapload of questionably useful applications. The top preloaded apps on the Droid are: Camera, Flashlight, Kindle, YouTube, Google Maps, Navigation, and Quick Office. To be fair these are the only preloaded apps that I ever use. All of the dozens of other applications that are preloaded are just wasted space and are particularly annoying since you cannot uninstall them. Lame.

Over the course of a few months I have downloaded and uninstalled dozens of apps that I thought were cool or useful, but here are the ones that remain. These apps are all free, by the way. So here is Daniel P. Daniel’s list of essential free Android apps for your device in no particular order…actually let’s do this in the order that I downloaded them, shall we?

1. SoundHound: Ever wonder who the artist is that is singing a song while you’re buzzing down the highway? Want to settle an argument about which album the song was on? What is that song anyway? Identify it with this gem.

2. Google Earth: This is easily the most powerful free app on the market. You can use Google Earth to fly around the planet with the swipe of a finger. I found this app surprisingly useful on a recent hunting expedition in Routt National Forest. Since this app finds your location via satellite it will work in areas that have no cell service. If you pre-load the maps of the areas you plan on visiting this single free app will replace your compass, GPS, and maps. If you are looking for a more full-bodied GPS/ Topo map application check GAIA GPS (http://www.gaiagps.com/), but it is not free.

3. ConvertPad: ConvertPad is a simple and powerful unit converter. Nothing glamorous here, just a full-featured app that is fast and easy to use.

4. BJCPDroid: This is a must have for any beer snobs in the group. BJCPDroid gives you the beer judge certification program style guidelines in the palm of your hand. Fully searchable by style, and it even comes with a standard reference meter to gauge the color of the beer in your other hand.

5. Gmail: I think we all know what this is.

6. Facebook: Although it takes a bit of getting used to the interface, the Facebook app gives you everything you need to post drunken pictures of yourself online and check in from the stall of your favorite Mexican restaurant’s bathroom.

7. MP3 Ringtone Box: Apparently every smartphone user needs to have the annoying capacity to customize ringtones to every person in their contact list, and the preloaded apps that come with the Droid are surprisingly dismal. This application makes millions of popular mp3 ringtones and sounds available to you for free. The best part of this app is that you can also create your own ringtones from mp3 sound files via their sound editor.

8. Zedge: This has a pretty good list of pre-edited ringtones and notification sounds, but I prefer the Ringtone Box app above for most of my ringtones.

9. Google Goggles: This is a surprisingly under-marketed piece of software. It allows you to perform a web search by simply taking a picture. Goggles uses image recognition technology to recognize objects and return relevant search results. Identifies products, famous landmarks, storefronts, artwork, and popular images found online. Goggles can translate words in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. You can scan barcodes to get product information, scan QR codes to extract information, add contacts by scanning business cards or QR codes, and even solve Sudoku puzzles. Nice work Google.

10. Google Sky Map: This is the sister app to Google Earth. Simply point your phone anywhere in the sky, and the Google Sky Map will instantly turn Cousin Billy Bob into Copernicus.

11. RealCalc: This is a simple to use scientific calculator. ‘Nuff said.

12. Alarm Clock Xtreme: I find it annoying that the Droid doesn’t come preloaded with an alarm clock. I mean, how am I supposed to know when I’ve been sleeping too long at my desk? Anyway, this app is great, and it comes with loads of possibilities for customization.

13. TED Mobile: TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting ideas worth spreading. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, and Design. The talks are inspiring and enlightening. Much better that scanning YouTube for people getting kicked in the crotch…well, pretty close.

14. Photoshop Express: This app allows you to edit and share photos virtually anywhere. Simply touch to crop, rotate, adjust color, and add artistic effects. Then send them into cyberspace.

15. Spirit Level Plus: Finally! I don’t need to carry my four-foot level around wherever I go. Everybody carries a level around with them, right? Well now you can.

16. IMDb: Handheld access to the international film and movie database. This app is essentially the movie version of SoundHound. I just use it to settle arguments.

17. Baby monitor: Baby Monitor is an app that helps you in watching your baby even when you don’t want to be in the same room with it. If your baby is asleep and you are in another room, the baby monitor will detect if your baby is crying and alert you by a call or a text message to whatever phone number you like.

18. Random Mahjong: Awesome app for killing time while dropping the deuce.

19. Vlingo: Vlingo combines voice to text technology with its "intent engine" to help you quickly complete your desired action. Simply speak to your phone or type a command through the action bar to get just about anything done while on the go. I find this application immensely useful while driving. However, talking at my phone makes me feel like a weirdass, so I only use this app when I’m alone.

20. GEICO BroStache: Yeah, yeah. I know it’s silly.

21. Google+: G+ is Facebook’s up-and-coming competition, and (like I said before) I’m an early adopter. This app would be a whole lot cooler if it had the “What’s Hot” links that standard G+ has.

22. Pandora: The Droid operating system comes preloaded with Slacker, but I already have all of my stations figured out on Pandora. I can’t be bothered to do the same on Slacker, so here we are.

23. SwiftKey X: The stock keyboard for the android is OK at predictive text, but the SwiftKey X keyboard steps it up a huge notch and has mastered the art of predictive conversation. It is fast, customizable, and uses swipe gestures, which makes this a necessary addition to the “must have” apps.

These mobile devices can be customized to be as unique as their owners, and not everyone uses them in the same way. However, I think this is a pretty good starting point for any new Android owners out there. What do you think? Am I missing any big hitters?

Occupy This...

2011-11-18T11:42:00.001-07:00

I know we don’t usually wade toodeeply into the political fray here at Daniel P. Daniel’s blog, but there is amovement afoot that at least bears mentioning and discussion. Amidst the Arab Spring, the recession/depression/banana/whaterverthefuck,the two wars, and the build-up to next year’s elections people are massing bythe thousands all across the United States and elsewhere on our fair planet tocry foul against the top 1% of the wage earners. The Occupy Wall Street movement has gainedmomentum among the middle class, and those enlisted to “protect and serve” arestarting to push back. The delicate theatricalact that is the dance between protesters and police is being played out on the world’sstage as it has so many times before. What is this Occupy Wall Street movement, and why are the participantswilling to be beat about the neck and face with a police baton to shout at thestatistical 1%? What do they hope togain? Let’s take a moment to dig a bitinto this, shall we?

According to the web site www.occupywallst.org: OccupyWall Street is a people-powered movement that began on September 17, 2011 inLiberty Square in Manhattan’s Financial District, and has spread to over 100cities in the United States and actions in over 1,500 cities globally. #ows isfighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinationalcorporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street increating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations.The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims toexpose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair globaleconomy that is foreclosing on our future. Shit yeah, stick it to the man! Thisis of course a noble goal, but it is one that is entirely unattainable. People have been fighting against the powerof banks and corporations since the day currency was invented. I think the important question to ask hereis: why is this happening when the economy is bad? Why not rise up when the economy is good? The answer to these questions should tell ussomething about the movement itself.

The majority of the participantsof the Occupy movement are white, male, independent voters that have collegeeducations and are gainfully employed. Youwon’t find too many poor, Mexican immigrant farm workers participating in themovement even though they are the ones that should be shouting the loudest. The people of the movement are people thatfeel entitled. These are people thathave had good lives and now, maybe, they are getting a taste of what it feelslike for the rest of the world, which is why this movement is happening whentimes are rough. There is no reason tocomplain when the living is easy. Noreason to pick at the fabric that binds them. Here’s the problem: these guys work for corporations, and the corporatehierarchy is populated by this richest 1% that people are so fond of mentioning.

I don’t really understand this 1%idea. Statistically, there is always ahighest 1%, right? Why is that numberany more significant than any other? Becauseit sounds good, and it's easy to keep in mind that we are talking about one ina hundred. However, it is also importantto realize that the lower half of that top 1% has much less than those in thetop half; in fact, both wealth and income are super-concentrated in the top0.1%, which is just one in a thousand. Basically,the top 1% just sounds good to say, and most Americans don’t understanddecimals. Here’s a good article aboutsome historical trends regarding the 1%: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html. Wealth will always be concentrated at the topof the scale because money is needed to make money. It will be and always has been that wayregardless of the form of government or currency that is chosen. It will be that way even if we decide totrade in chicken beaks and shiny rocks. Does that make the people in the top 1% evil? Not at all. They are likely to be out of touch with reality and hardship, but notalways evil.

People like to think that corporationsare filled with black-souled, sulfur-smelling evil doers because corporations seemto make questionable deals and they are big targets. However, corporations are not necessarilyevil – they are necessarily apathetic. Apathyand evil are not the same. They have tobe apathetic in general because they must guard their profits to ensure thattheir shareholders make money on their investments. This begs the question: who are theshareholders? Anyone that owns stock orhas a pension plan, a 401k, a retirement plan, life insurance, etc. thatinvests in the stock market (and reaps benefits) is basically a shareholder. Do you hold on to mutual funds that losemoney or do you drop them down the toilet like yesterday’s lunch burrito? I thought so. Fundamentally, corporations must make money tosurvive. This generally happens whenconsumers purchase their goods. Let’stake your favorite fast food chain as an example. They want to produce the final greasy productand get it into your fat hands for as low of a price as possible and sell it toyour fat face for as high of a price as you’re willing to pay (speakingstrictly about money here, not health, self-esteem, happiness, etc.). How do they accomplish this? By pushing around their suppliers anddemanding that the beef (for example) they buy for their burgers only costs ananocent per ton. The small, sometimeslocal, suppliers agree because the fast food jocks sell so much product that itwould kill them to lose the business. How do the local suppliers (who are not large corporations, by the way)cut costs? Any way they can regardlessof the health and safety of the work force or the quality of the product. Now, in this example, who is at fault? Is it Mega-McFood Corp or is it the suppliersthat bend to them? Hold your monitorupside down for the answer. Actually, itis neither. The blame lies squarely onthe shoulders of the chunky consumer that thinks it is OK to cram six ten-centburgers in his face every day. In theU.S. (and most of the rest of the developed world) we live in a consumer-driveneconomy. If consumers demand productsthat are produced in a manner that promotes the health and well-being of theplanet and the workforce they will get it. It is up to the consumer to tell the corporations what kind of productsto sell. Consumers can’t yell atcorporations for protecting their own bottom line when they field complaints thata gallon of milk is $0.02 more than last year. We, as consumers, give them power, and essentially force them intoaction.

Imagine a world where all of ourfood is produced organically, all of our energy is renewable, all of ourclothing is made by consenting adults, everyone has healthcare, and cute babybunnies ride unicorns over rainbows. Howdo you think those organic fair trade sandals are going to be produced, Hippie? If you guessed “Jesus will provide them” Iappreciate your naiveté, but you are wrong on many levels. There will still becorporations that manage the production and sale of these goods. Unless we pull all of our money out of banksand bury it in the backyard with our dead pets and grow our own clothes fromfound seeds we will always be beholden to corporations and banks, and it willalways be our responsibility to force their actions by the choices we make asconsumers. We can’t keep buying theleast expensive option and act surprised when we find out that Chinesethree-year olds are making the toys for our five-year olds.

Take a look at the picture. It is pretty accurate. The people of theOccupy movement complain about the corporations that they support directly byworking for them or indirectly by purchasing their products. It seems a twee bit hypocritical to complainabout the corporations that they do business with on a continual basis. This hypocrisy was highlighted recently whenthe protesters became outraged that their personal possessions were taken awayby the morons at the NYC police department (admittedly a shitty move by thefucksticks at the PD). Those possessionsthat they cling to are made by the corporations that they are railing against. By the way, banks and corporations have neverlistened to protests. I can’t think ofone instance in which a carefully worded chant spoken through the people’smegaphone has ever shown a bank the error of their ways. Protests will not convince politicians to putanti-bank legislation on the ballot, either. That would be a political death sentence. And, unless voters say that there should beno professional politicians, no politician is going to willingly give up theirjob no matter how socially beneficial their choice would be.

If change is truly what iswanted, the people of the Occupy movement shouldn’t wait for November to voteanyway. They should vote with their checkbooks. They should join the Buy Nothing movement if theywant out, or buy products locally if they want to keep their money clean. Don’t camp in a public park and be surprisedwhen a bunch of remedial, mouth-breathing, lack-witted, ball-washing, doucheholes with lizard brains (read: police) spray them in the face with pepperspray (manufactured by Dow Chemical). Ofcourse that is their right as a U.S. citizen; just don’t tell me it will evermake a difference to the corporate landscape. And, by the way, comparing this movement to the Arab Spring is particularlyoffensive considering Wall Street isn’t kidnapping and torturing dissenters ortreating women like pets (any more). Occupy your desk, Whitey, and be the change that you want to see in theworld. Leave the uprisings to the peoplewho are truly repressed.

The Top 20 Horror Movies of All Time

2011-10-17T13:36:00.000-06:00

Hey there, blogophiles. The Halloween season is upon us, and as youmay have guessed by some of my previous posts I am hopelessly addicted to horrormovies. If horror movies were IV drugs Iwould have collapsed my jugular vein long ago. So I thought that I’d spread my addiction a bit further in honor of theseason and regale you with my list of the Top 20 Best Horror Movies of AllTime. I could have made a list of theTop 100 Horror Movies of All Time, but usually those lists tend to turn into TheOnly 100 Horror Movies That the Writer Has Seen and are a tedious waste oftime. However you can be sure that thetwenty that have made my list deserve to be there even though they have bumpedout some notable selections. Also, Ihave composed the list entirely of influential, well-made films that push theboundaries of the genre. Don’t expect tofind any of the beautifully cheesy B movies that we all love, such as: Frankenhooker,Rawhead Rex, The Stuff, and The Giant Spider Invasion.

Without any further ado (orfanfare) I give you Daniel P. Daniel’s list of the Top 20 Horror Movies of AllTime. Read it if you dare {enter Vincent Price laugh track}:

20. The Hills Have Eyes (2006): This is the most recently made film to make the list and one of only fourthat made the cut from this century. Although Wes Craven’s original was truly demented, Alexandre Aja seeshis demented and raises him one disgusting. This gives new meaning to the term “nuclear family”. Is it creepily horrifying? The ayes have it.

19. The Birds (1963): Nohorror movie list can be complete without including at least one film from themaster of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. This is one of his best. Certainly not as shocking and perverse as “Psycho”, yet this moviesomehow leaves you with a feeling dread and helplessness even though theassailants are only birds. There isnever an explanation as to why the birds placed humans on their shit list, butonce the onslaught begins there is no turning back.

18. 28 Days Later (2003): Super-fast, rage-infected, blood-puking zombies. Need I say more? Danny Boyle’s dystopic view of the future isboth frightening and involving. This nodto “Dawn of the Dead” quickly devolves into a gore-fest, but, remember, it’sthe animal rights activists’ fault.

17. Hellraiser (1987): Clive Barker kicks open the door to Hell in this surreal freakshow. Some would argue that the sequel“Hellbound: Hellraiser 2” is a better all-around movie, but I think that thevery introduction of Pinhead and the seriously effed-up Cenobites into theworld makes “Hellraiser” a better movie despite some of its shortcomings.

16. Poltergeist (1982): They’re heeere. We have beensubjected to haunted house movies for nearly 100 years, but Tobe Hopper andSteven Spielberg leave them all in a quivering pool of pink ectoplasmicjelly. The innocence of the prototypicalfamily in the non-descript suburbs allows the audience to lend credence to eventhe most impossible situations, and nearly 30 years later I'm betting sales ofclown dolls still haven’t recovered.

15. Saw (2004): JamesWan really came out swinging in his directorial debut. “Saw” is a snuff film on steroids – gruesome,gory and real. Jigsaw puts his victimsin incredibly intricate controlled environments and forces them to makehorrifyingly difficult decisions...much like life in general. Survive and you’ll appreciate what you have alittle more.

14. Jacob’s Ladder (1990): If I had to describe this film with one word it would be:unsettling. Although this movie isunfairly shrugged-off as nothing more than a cult feature, the freakishlynightmare visions straddling reality and hallucination have you continuallywondering what is real after all.

13. Friday the 13th (1980): Of course this one had to be #13. I saw this movie at the drive-in with myparents (I know, right?), and thanks to Kevin Bacon getting an arrow shovedthrough his throat from below a bed I still can’t sleep on bunk beds. This film spawned an incredible 13-moviefranchise that has been the backbone for the horror genre for 30 years. Jason Voorhees is the ultimate indestructibleslasher racking up over 150 kills throughout the entire franchise, yet hesomehow walks the line between hero and villain.

12. Silence of the Lambs (1991): This film won five Academy Awards, a Golden Globe and numerous otherawards which makes it impossible to exclude from any list of the greatesthorror movies of all time. The acting byJodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins propel this deeply disturbing and excitingpiece of cinematic excellence into the mainstream and truly freaks everyoneright the eff out.

11. The Shining (1980): All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Stanley Kubrick truly is an unparalleledweirdass, and it bleeds through in this brilliant adaptation of Stephen King’sbook. This movie is carried by the incredibleperformance of Jack Nicholson {I’m not gonna hurt ya. I’m only gonna bash your fucking head in.},but somehow Shelly Duvall seems a lot creepier to me.

10. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): If Nancy Doesn’t Wake Up Screaming She Won’tWake Up At All. This is really WesCraven’s coming-of-age film. With“Nightmare” Craven really comes into his own, and the performance of RobertEnglund as Freddy is nothing short of brilliant. {One, two, Freddy’s coming for you.} And who can forget the tour de force performancegiven by Johnny Depp? Anyone?

9. Alien (1979): In Space No One Can Hear You Scream. Ridley Scott tears the roof off of the sci-fihorror genre and blasts us into the 21st century a few decades early with thismasterpiece. Suspenseful and thrillingthis movie is aided along the way by brilliant set design, and it set the barfor all sci-fi horror to come. The alienbursting from the chest of John Hurt is easily one of the scariest moments inmovie history.

8. The Exorcist (1973): Religion truly is disturbing, and this movie proves it. {The power of Christ compels you!} The cast and the storyline draws you in bymaking every piece of this film seem utterly plausible which makes it anunforgettable movie that doesn't just get under your skin - it stays there.

7. Dawn of the Dead (2004): I chose Zack Snyder’s take on George Romero's1978 horror classic for one reason: Richard Cheese singing “Get Down with theSickness.” Zombies, shopping malls, gore(the zombie birth scene is particularly hard to take) and celebrityassassinations – what more could you ask for?

6. The Thing (1982): John Carpenter takes the gloves off in thisremake of the 1951 original. Along with“Alien”, “The Thing” helped launch a new wave of sci-fi horror films. Action-packed and visually amazing for itstime, this movie is probably why to this day I don’t like huskies…or Norway.

5. Audition (1999): This movie is so insanely creepy that I had a hard time even writingthis paragraph. Japanese horror at itsfinest. Takashi Miike creates apsychological train wreck so compelling that you just can’t look away eventhough every nerve in your body is begging you to. This one makes “Fatal Attraction” look like“Mary Poppins”.

4. Evil Dead II (1987): Sam Raimi and the ultimate horror movie hero, Bruce Campbell, enter thelist with this brilliant horror-comedy sequel. The joy which the cast and crew take in creating a masterpiece ofslapstick gore is obvious. “Evil Dead 2”is a must-see for all connoisseurs of truly demented films.

3. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974): Supposedly based on a true story, Tobe Hopper's second entry into mylist is a landmark low budget horror movie which is absolutely a modernclassic. Grainy, disjointed andfrightening, if this movie doesn’t make you want to run from the theater thenthere is something seriously wrong with you. Plus, this movie proves that hillbillies are much scarier than zombies.

2. Jaws (1975): I had a hard time keeping this out of the Number 1 position. {Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanishladies…} Spielberg plays on ouringrained terror of the unknown like no other movie made before or since. {Farewell and adieu you ladies ofSpain…} The score alone is enough tomake you white-knuckle it through the movie. {We’ve received orders to sail back to Boston…} To this day I can’t step into a kiddie poolwithout heart palpitations. {And sonever more will we see you again.}

1. Halloween (1978): The Night He Came Home. This isthe movie that launched John Carpenter’s career into superstar territory andset the standard for every horror movie to follow after it. Scary, suspenseful, thrilling, creepy, andmore, but what really sets this movie apart can be summed up in three words: William Shatner mask {shudder}. Top marks all around.

Honorable mentions: Trilogy ofTerror, Ju-On, Suspira, The Fly, Night of the Living Dead, Psycho, Cujo

So what do you think? Did any of your favorites make my list?

The Meat Highway

2011-05-28T21:56:00.011-06:00

A couple of weeks ago my lovely wife and I were watching old episodes of Man VS. Food aghast at how much food some people try to pack away in one sitting. It isn’t just that Adam Richman eating 18 chili dogs or slugging down 5 gallons of milkshake at some random tavern is disturbing. That’s a given. It’s the normal portion sizes that everyone else is eating at the restaurants which he showcases that are equally disturbing. We notice the same phenomenon when we go out to eat, watching the wait staff wheel out a three-inch thick steak and a nine-pound double-baked potato covered in bacon (mmm…bacon) to some guy sitting at the bar by himself. Why do Americans eat so much? Why do we even try? This post isn’t going to attempt to answer these questions which are undoubtedly rooted in our hunter-gatherer genes that still haunt us by urging us to store fat away for the “lean” times. Sometimes our genes are mean to us. A trait that would likely be very useful if we lived life in the wilderness causes us to turn ourselves into sedentary Jabba the Hut protégés in modern times. Anyway, as we sat on the couch spilling Chex Mix and booze all over ourselves at 11:00PM my wife posed the brilliant question: How many animals do we kill for food and then just throw in the trash because our portion sizes are way out of whack? It’s a great question on many levels. We pump massive amounts of energy and human effort into the animal husbandry industry just to throw some portion of it away (which consumes still more energy) because a normal person can’t finish a 40oz. porterhouse without wanting to commit suicide after they force down the last bite. This isn’t something that my wife necessarily worries about since she is a vegetarian because she doesn’t want to support the meat industry. Actually, to be totally correct she is a pescetarian which means that she still eats seafood, just not mammals or poultry. I guess since fish don’t breastfeed it’s OK to drown them and freeze them alive. Anyway, as you may know I don’t eat beef or consume milk (a.k.a. #3) so I have my own suitably arbitrary dietary ethos as well. Still, let’s see what damage we can do to the question at hand - how many animals do Americans throw in the trash every year?

In order to determine how many animals we chuck it’s critical to know how much food we consume and how much food we waste. According to the USDA and other independent research, every year Americans produce somewhere on the order of 356 billion lbs. of edible food. Of that ~96.3 billion lbs. are thrown out, or fully 27% of all of the food that gets produced. Take a look at the chart for a complete breakdown. The main factors that increase the amount of food waste in households include the following: seasonality - more waste occurs in summer months; age of children in the household - younger children waste more food than older children; gender - females waste more than males; racism – if you’re racist you don’t give a damn that people are starving in China; income - higher-income individuals waste more than lower-income individuals; setting - more waste is associated with hospitals and military mess halls than with school and company cafeterias; and size of household - larger households waste more than smaller households because of a greater number of children in the household. I consider this as proof positive that kids and women are destroying the planet. At any rate, fruits, grains and vegetables make up the lion’s share of the waste, but the main focus here is on the roughly 8.2 billion pounds of meat that we waste annually. These numbers are truly staggering especially when you consider that these estimates do not include food wasted on the farm, in fisheries, and during processing. I’ll touch on that a bit later. For now let’s just consider some of the implications of those numbers, other than the fact that we’re a caste of slovenly, overfed, entitled, ignorant, elitist bastards.

On average, each of us consumes about 3-5 pounds of food each day. If even 5 percent of the 96 billion lbs. of wasted food were recovered and redistributed freely, that quantity would represent the equivalent of a year’s food for each of 9.6 million people. Why is 9.6 million an important number? It is roughly the number of people in the U.S. that go to bed every night hungry and/or underfed. If we somehow managed to save 100% that would be enough food to feed the entire population of Germany for a year. Of course they would grind it all into sausage; that goes without saying. Instead, we throw it in the garbage. Speaking of garbage, the EPA reported that food waste accounts for about 8.5 percent of municipal solid waste collected from households and businesses. If 5 percent of retail, food-service, and consumer food losses were recovered rather than chucked into landfills, about $84,262,500 annually could be saved in solid waste disposal costs for landfills alone. These savings would increase to $421,312,500 with a 25-percent recovery rate. At 100% it would be ~$2 billion or $16 per household. OK. That isn’t too impressive, but if anyone has $2 billion dollars lying around that they want to give me…

While we’re on the subject of money, let’s look at this another way. Go to the bank and pull $6362 out of your kid’s college fund. They are never going to use it anyway. Now take $1720 of that and light it on fire. Trust me; this is a well though-out experiment. How’d that make you feel? Crappy? Maybe a little stupid? Admittedly, I probably should have suggested that you leave the bank before committing arson. Now perform this experiment every year until you die or the kids disown you. The average U.S. household spends $6362 per year on food (~12% of annual income) including both groceries and restaurant expenses. 27% of that goes into the trash. That adds up to around $181 billion per year across the nation. Can you think of anything useful to spend $1720 on every year? Nah, me either, might as well throw it out.

Take a look at the chart again. The far right column is an estimate of how much energy was put into the production, transportation and processing of that wasted food. Approximately 2030 trillion BTU of energy were embedded in wasted food in 2007. This energy embedded in wasted food represents approximately 2.78% of annual energy consumption in the United States. Doesn’t seem like that much does it? Well, that’s twice as much power as was produced by wind and solar sources combined last year. Nice work, hippies. Turns out that rather than investing billions of dollars into some renewable energy portfolio and shoehorning infrastructure where it isn’t wanted we could do more for the environment by being more efficient eaters. Typical.

OK. Now let’s finally get to the question at hand. How many animals are wasted every year because we don’t know how to order, serve or prepare food properly? Based on the average size of processed cattle, pigs, and poultry it turns out that somewhere in the ballpark of 700 million animals (not counting seafood) are essentially raised and killed for food then transported directly into landfills each year without passing through anyone’s colon first. That’s right, 700 million – more than two for every man, woman and child in the U.S. Approximately 5.5 million cattle and 12 million pigs get chucked into the dumpster with the rest being filled up with chickens and turkeys. That is enough meat to pave a two-lane highway with 1” thick steaks for 8800 miles…over 1/3 the way around the planet. If you take seafood waste into account the road extends to 9600 miles and gets a lot smellier. Remember that’s just consumer and retail waste. These estimates do not include food wasted on the farm, in fisheries, and during processing.

When an animal is killed or dies for whatever reason before it gets sold for slaughter it is considered a “death loss” to the farmer. Death losses can be from any number of causes including weakness, illness, disease, getting squashed by their mother, suffocating in mud, predation, etc. The USDA keeps very good records of these death losses for all major animals used for meat in the U.S. Seems like if we care about the waste we should care about these ones too, right? So how many animals does this turn out to be? The death losses for cattle and calves in 2009 added up to ~4.1 million animals. For pigs that number was 8.9 million. I’ve pretty much ignored waste and losses from sheep and lambs in this post because they are only about 1% of the meat that we consume, but if you’re curious their death losses were ~610,000 animals. For the lowly non-mammals that we eat every day the situation is much worse. Chicken losses added up to a staggering 107 million animals. Oddly, the death loss numbers for turkeys wasn’t immediately available, but they most likely aren’t much better off than chickens. Assuming the same proportion of losses as chickens, that puts the turkey number at around 20 million. Oh, and let’s not forget seafood. There are no solid estimates at the overall number of seafaring critters that we kill, but it is estimated that worldwide approximately 23% of fish landings are by-catch, which are thrown back into the ocean, usually already dead or dying, instead of being sold and consumed. In 2008 Americans consumed over 4 billion pounds of seafood which implies over a billion pounds of seafood was dumped back into the sea. How many fish, shrimp, dolphins, crabs, eels and whateverthefuckelse are there in over a billion pounds? One shitload.

So, all told somewhere in the ballpark of 840 million animals in the U.S. alone (not counting seafood) die every year, basically for no reason. They are raised for food and they either are too sick or weak to make it to the slaughterhouse, or we pitch them in the trash because we are horribly inefficient consumers. What can be done to prevent all of this carnage? I have no idea. However, instead of looking for the magic green pill that will make all of our energy problems disappear perhaps we should start to get real and ask the hard questions regarding our personal efficiencies. Always ask yourself how you could be doing the task at hand more efficiently, and only then will we be able to begin to help other beings and move away from the path we are on today.

Jesus! I feel like "Kum Bah Yah" should be playing in the background. Excuse me while I give myself a grundy...

Master of My Domain

2011-05-19T13:10:00.005-06:00

As some of you may know I have been pursuing an advanced degree over the last three years. For those of you that were not aware of this I know what you’re thinking: “Daniel P., you already know everything there is to know about practically every subject imaginable. Why would you possibly need another degree?” Well, my loyal followers, although I like the way you think the world has a funny way of throwing bullshit challenges at you for no reason…especially the business world. Without getting into to many of the gory details suffice it to say that my place of employment required another piece of paper from me in order to get me into the Engineering VIP room. They agreed to pay for it and afforded me time during the day to attend classes, so I am grateful for that. Truly, I am. However, I have serious problems with the way “corporate” America today classifies people based on how large their student loan debt is. Rather than go into some long diatribe about worldwide corporate policy and the exclusionary hoop-jumping, spanking-machine, Fraternal Order of Water Buffaloes nonsense that requires people to obtain more and more pieces of parchment in order to ensure inclusion into a narrow segment of wage-earners let me sum up my feelings on the matter in a single sentence (I know, it’s not very Daniel P. Daniel of me to avoid a long diatribe): Knowledge and experience are not the sole property of academia. What do I mean by that? I believe that I can learn any subject just as well (perhaps better) by purchasing whatever texts I need and reading them. It’s a novel concept, I know. I don’t need to pay some self-centered, socially-inept elitist to stand in front of a white board and mindlessly flip through PowerPoint slides of material contained within said texts in order to master a subject. Why? Because I already know how to learn, Jackass. End of discussion.

Having said that, I’m glad to have the whole process finished so I can hang up my silly square hat, tassel and hood and be done (hopefully) with academia for my foreseeable future. Three years is a long time to juggle kids, wife, work, social life, school, blog, and world domination. Actually, I initially thought that it would be longer than that. Since my first degree was not an engineering degree I assumed that I would have to go through some sort of accelerated undergraduate curricula before jumping into the graduate fray (if at all). So I dutifully went to the office of the undergraduate advisor with my transcript in hand to try to lay out a reasonable path forward. Little did I know how difficult that would turn out to be. Our conversation went something like this:

DPD: In light of the classes that I have on my (ancient) transcript what subset of the undergraduate classes will I be required to take in order to get an engineering degree.

U. Advisor: All of them.

DPD: “All” is not a subset. Perhaps you should sit in on a few classes yourself. Surely I don’t need to take these elective courses.

U. Advisor: We believe that the elective courses are very important to broaden the educational horizons of all of our students.

DPD: Bullshit. Look, Mack. If my horizons get any more broad I’ll be able to see the back of my own head. Plus, I’m qualified to teach several of these classes. Now, let’s take a better look. Shall we? Which of my math/physics/English/other courses can transfer over?

U. Advisor: Well, we might be able to knock a few of these off, but all of OUR physics classes are calculus based. So you’ll still need to take 30 classes.

DPD: First of all, all physics is calculus based unless there is a “Physics for Home Ec” class that I don’t know about. Second, with all my other responsibilities it will take me ~15 years to complete 30 classes. I’m not some 17 year-old kid that you can bully into paying the university for 150 credit hours of time-wasting nonsense just so I can “broaden my horizons”. Now take a look at that transcript again before I shove it…

At this point the noise from our discussion must have disturbed the slumber of the graduate advisor next door, and she barged in before I had a chance to leap across the desk and beat the undergraduate advisor about the ears and face.

G. Advisor: What’s going on in here?!?

DPD: Larry here is totally incapable of doing his job, and he hasn’t looked up from his desk once in a half an hour which makes me believe that he knows it. Either that or he’s undergone a seriously botched cervical fusion operation recently.

G. Advisor: What are you even doing in here? Leave poor Larry alone and come talk to me.

After a brief conversation in her office the graduate advisor agreed to throw me into the Master’s program on the spot to let me sink or swim. No tests. No applications. Sign here and you’re in. Done. Sometimes it pays to be blessed with a silver tongue. This time it knocked 30 classes down to 10 and got me out of the classes with the bugger-eating teenage masses. Here are a few of the highlights:

First Class: The Physics and Chemistry of Materials – Boy, this one was a snoozer. There was some good information there, but it turned into an Idiot’s Guide to Chemistry for Engineers…not very useful when you’ve taken as many chemistry classes as I have in the past.

Hardest Class: Advanced Engineering Mathematics – Great googly moogly! Not only was the last real math class that I took 15 years ago, but this one was taught by an insultingly condescending Russian douchebag. I feel like I may have learned a lot, but I immediately blanked it out of my memory like a Hanoi Hilton survivor.

Easiest Class: Wind Energy – This class had a lot of great information, but it was also my last class. So I couldn’t be bothered to do shit. I literally didn’t even open the book once. Money well-spent.

Best Class: Anatomy and Physiology for Engineers - This class was right in my wheelhouse. It covered a lot of great information, and left me with some actual useful knowledge without the unnecessary busywork and trauma. This was one of those classes that the professor got out of the way and let the students learn the material. Top marks.

Most Bullshit Class: Graduate Seminar – Oh…my…holy…Christ… This may have well been called the Captive Audience class. No homework. No assignments. Mandatory attendance. Bull-effing-shit. I even lobbied the department to allow me to pay more so that I wouldn’t have to be there. Sadly they didn’t go for it.

That’s about it. Now I am done, and I am free. Everybody says, “Well I’ll bet you’re relieved to have that done!” Yes and no. I’m glad that I don’t have to deal with the scheduling nightmare anymore. I’m glad that I have the paper that explains the nuances of the secret handshake. But all that this school experience has left me with in the near term is work. Work to recover things that were put off until this trial was over. I’ve got to work to get back into shape. I’ve got to work to catch up on all of the chores around the house that I’ve been putting off. I’ve got to work at re-cultivating a relationship with my wife and my friends. Work. So, no, I’m not relieved to be done. I'm not proud of my accomplishment. I’m pissed that I had to go through the hazing ritual to begin with, and I probably won’t be relieved until I emerge like a phoenix from the ashes of my life that this experience has left in a pile. Make no mistake, Daniel P. Danielites, I will eventually feel that relief even if I have to crawl out of purgatory to experience it. Then I'm comin' to get ya. Stay tuned.

The Irish 12 Days of Christmas

2010-12-14T06:35:00.004-07:00

Everybody knows how annoying the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" can be. Even Bing Crosby can't save me from wanting to jam a candy cane in my earhole whenever I hear it. Well, here is a series of letters that describes how it would actually be to receive the gifts listed in "The 12 Days." Awesome.

Day One

Dear Nuala,

Thank you very much for your lovely present of a partridge in a pear-tree. We’re getting the hang of feeding the partridge now, although it was difficult at first to win its confidence. It bit the mother rather badly on the hand but they’re good friends now and we’re keeping the pear-tree indoors in a bucket. Thank you again.

Yours affectionately,
Gobnait O’Lúnasa

Day Two

Dear Nuala,

I cannot tell you how surprised we were to hear from you so soon again and to receive your lovely present of two turtle doves. You really are too kind. At first the partridge was very jealous and suspicious of the doves and they had a terrible row the night the doves arrived. We had to send for the vet but the birds are okay again and the stitches are due to come out in a week or two. The vet’s bill was £8 but the mother is over her annoyance now and the doves and the partridge are watching the telly from the pear-tree as I write.

Yours ever,
Gobnait

Day Three

Dear Nuala,

We must be foremost in your thoughts. I had only posted my letter when the three French hens arrived. There was another sort-out between the hens and the doves, who sided with the partridge, and the vet had to be sent for again. The mother was raging because the bill was £16 this time, but she has almost cooled down. However, the fact that the birds’ droppings keep falling down on her hair whilen she’s watching the telly doesn’t help matters. Thanking you for your kindness.

I remain,
Your Gobnait

Day Four

Dear Nuala,

You mustn’t have received my last letter when you were sending us the four calling birds. There was pandemonium in the pear-tree again last night, and the vet’s bill was £32. The mother is on sedation as I write. I know you meant no harm and remain your close friend.

Gobnait

Day Five

Nuala,

Your generosity knows no bounds. Five gold rings! When the parcel arrived I was scared stiff that it might be more birds, because the smell in the living-room is atrocious. However, I don’t want to seem ungrateful for the beautiful rings.

Your affectionate friend,
Gobnait

Day Six

Nuala,

What are you trying to do to us? It isn’t that we don’t appreciate your generosity but the six geese have not alone nearly murdered the calling birds, but they laid their eggs on top of the vet’s head from the pear-tree and his bill was £68 in cash! My mother is munching 60 grains of Valium a day, and talking to herself in a most alarming way. You must keep your feelings for me in check.

Gobnait

Day Seven

Nuala,

We are not amused by your little joke. Seven swans-a-swimming is a most romantic idea but not in the bath of a private house. We cannot use the bathroom now because they’ve gone completely savage and rush the door every time we try to enter. If things go on this way, the mother and I will smell as bad as the living-room carpet. Please lay off. It is not fair.

Gobnait

Day Eight

Nuala,

Who the hell do you think gave you the right to send eight, hefty maids-a-milking here, to eat us out of house and home? Their cattle are all over the front lawn and have trampled the hell out of the mother’s rose beds. The swans invaded the living-room in a sneak attack, and the ensuing battle between them and the calling birds, turtle doves, French hens and partridge make the Battle of the Somme seem like Wanderly Wagon. The mother is on a bottle of whiskey a day, as well as the sixty grains of Valium. I’m very annoyed with you.

Gobnait

Day Nine

Listen you loser! There’s enough pandemonium in this place night and day without nine drummers drumming, while the eight flaming maids-a-milking are beating my poor, old, alcoholic mother out of her own kitchen and gobbling up everything in sight. I’m warning you, you’re making an enemy of me.

Gobnait

Day Ten

Listen, Manure-face. I hope you’ll be haunted by the strains of ten pipers piping which you sent to torment us last night. They were aided in their evil work by those maniac drummers, and it wasn’t a pleasant sight to look out the window and see eight hefty maids-a-milking pogo-ing around with the ensuing punk-rock uproar. My mother has just finished her third bottle of whiskey, on top of a hundred and twenty four grains of Valium. You’ll get yours!

Gobnait O’Lúnasa

Day Eleven

You have scandalized my mother, you dirty Jezebel. It was bad enough to have eight maids-a-milking dancing to punk music on the front lawn but they’ve now been joined by your friends ~ the eleven Lords-a-leaping, and the antics of the whole lot of them would leave the most decadent days of the Roman Empire looking like “Outlook”. I’ll get you yet, you old bag!

Day Twelve

Listen, Slurry-head. You have ruined our lives. The twelve maidens dancing turned up last night and beat the living daylights out of the eight maids-a-milking 'cos they found them carrying on with the eleven Lords-a-leaping. Meanwhile, the swans got out of the living-room, where they’d been hiding since the big battle, and savaged hell out of the Lords and all the Maids. There were eight ambulances here last night, and the local Civil Defense as well. The mother is in a home for the bewildered, and I’m sitting here up to my neck in birds’ droppings, empty whiskey and Valium bottles, birds’ blood and feathers, while the flaming cows eat the leaves off the pear-tree. I’m a broken man.

Gobnait O’Lúnasa

...and to all a good night...

The Third Annual Misanthrope's List

2010-09-12T11:48:00.005-06:00

Well, folks, here we are again. Another year has passed and a fair number of you have managed to piss me off in some way or another. So here it is – The Third Annual Misanthrope’s List. Take a gander and see where you land. If you’ve managed to make it on the list more than five times then I’m probably either married to you, divorced from you or want to kill you. Either way it’s the annoying things in life that make you feel alive, right? Enjoy!

The whole “your” / “you’re” mess. Why is it so hard for people to figure this one out? When people send me a message that says, “Your a dick!” I think, “My a dick? What does that even mean?” You’re is short for “you are.” Your is not. Smarten up.
Pictures of lottery winners. Nobody, and I mean nobody, cares that Jim Bob and Ethel Mae just won $35 million. And I certainly don’t need to see photos of these morons in their native habitat.
People that have almost quit smoking. Oh, Good Christ! Why do I care that you failed at doing something six months ago? If you don’t have anything better to talk about then stuff a couple more of those things in your face so I don’t have to listen to you whine about your bullshite addiction.
People with corn teeth. Hey, Barnaby. Grab a toothbrush every now and then and scrub your glassies, Mate. Either that, or yank those fuckers out so I don’t have to stare at your mouth while you talk.
The words “ginormous” and “redonculous.” They were funny the first time, but so were parachute pants. You don’t see me still wearing those, do ya? If either of these words shows up in the dictionary, I’m going to start speaking solely in Aramaic.
When there is a really short car in a parking spot. Driving around a parking lot for ten minutes looking for an empty spot is bad enough. Then just when I think I’ve caught a glimpse of relief and start to turn into a space some hippy has their escape pod hidden between all of the SUVs. Balls!
Whatever that airport smell is. Nobody can tell me what exactly that smell is, but I think it’s the perfect combination of jet exhaust, crappy terminal food and sweaty tourists that binds to the Piss-Me-Off receptors in my nose.
Speaking of airports…the TSA. Also, affectionately known as the Take Shit Away people. Does anyone honestly believe that these “security” personnel are keeping the world safe by taking nail clippers from 80 year-old grandmothers and prohibiting bringing leftover soup on the plane because it may be explosive? What the? Totally useless and completely wasteful.
That little pocket at the bottom of a normal sized pants pocket. What sadistic tailor thinks this is a useful addition to menswear? The only thing this irritating piece of fabric is good for is trapping my keys so I cannot extract them from my pocket without tearing a hole in my pants. Annoying.
People that put the new toilet paper roll on top of the holder instead of actually replacing it. Seriously, it takes four seconds to put the thing on the holder properly. (Yes, I timed it.) What’s the thought process here? “Four seconds!?! Who has time for that? I’ve got to be to work in two seconds!” Come on…
Big guys named Tiny. This is really creative, people. Why not just quit dancing around the issue and call them F@cking Lard Ass? Unless tiny refers to some other part of their anatomy, of course.
Facebook applications, games, quizzes, etc. Ditto fans of anything. Let’s get this straight right now. Nobody wants to help you find your lost virtual puppy or help you build a fekking fence on your goddamn fake farm, and who the Hell cares if you are a fan of Chinese food?!? Knock this shit off immediately.
People with a chronic toothpaste-on-the-face problem. Hey, Slob. Why bother scraping the slime off of your grill to make yourself presentable in the morning if you aren’t going to follow it up by wiping the drool off of your chin. God, I hope that’s drool.
Accidentally tearing off scabs. I’ll tell you a secret: I’m a picker. I love picking scabs, especially my own. So when I forget that I recently had a junk show on my bike resulting in me losing 45% of the skin from my legs then I jump nonchalantly into my pants the next morning peeling away a scab the size of a dinner plate I cry a little bit inside…and a lot outside.
A whole nother. Alright, Lenny. “Another” is a single word. It isn’t “a nother.” What the Hell is a “nother” supposed to be anyway? Can you have a pile of them? They apparently come in fractions since a whole one is a big deal.
Trying to mouse-select multiple paragraphs of a Word document that spans several pages without scrolling all over the place. Zoom! Too far up. Zoom! Too far down. Zoom! Nope, too far up again. Zoom! Down…irritating. Yeah, I’m a nerd. Get over it.
Bad apples. I try to eat an apple a day just like the doctor ordered. However, when I bite into an apple and instead of a crisp sour-sweet crunch of joy I get a mouthful soppy brown mash I want to kick that doctor in the nether regions.
Misspellings on Craigslist. I could be wrong, but I don’t think anybody is going to respond to your add for a “Free Hot Tube.” Sounds dirty and maybe a little creepy. Reread your shit, Jerky.
People that mouth out what you are saying to them as you are speaking. Hey, Weirdass. Turn the other way when I’m talking to you if you can’t get your neuroses under control. You’re creeping me out.
Biblical language. Jesus is the light and the way! I have absolutely no idea what that means. Nobody does. Creating sentences by randomly omitting words and shoehorning your favorite imaginary friend into the subject doesn’t make you sound pious or religious. It makes you sound ignorant and foolish. Mission accomplished, I guess.
Dealing with insurance companies. Everybody involved knows this transaction is going to suck worse than doing squat thrusts in a cucumber patch, so can we just skip to the part where you lie to me and I make disparaging remarks about your choice of vocation, arsehole?
When people say “really?” or “seriously?” with an incredulous inflection. How and when did this catch on? I wish it would catch off…soon.
People that say tuna fish. As in, “I’ll have the tuna fish sandwich.” Well, I hope it’s a tuna fish sandwich. A tuna pig sandwich would be disturbing. Just saying “tuna” will suffice, thanks.
Dream catchers in cars. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think you should be sleeping while you are driving. Just an observation.
The phrase “…at the end of the day.” As in: “At the end of the day all that matters it that you’re happy.” Well, what about at the beginning of the day? How about right effing now? Why do I have to wait?
Pointless physical exercise. Don’t get me wrong. I love being active: hiking, skiing, sports, etc. However, exercising solely for the point of exercising (like jogging, push-ups, and sit-ups) is utter bollocks. There was a time in my life when I enjoyed this crap, but happily I’m over it.
When I’m sitting at someone else’s desk and some other jerk wanders by and says: “Whoa, Sarah! You’ve really changed.” Ha! Hahahahahaha! Hooo! Heh heh. Heeeeeee! Oh, that’s a good one! Now, come a little closer so I can break your nose, Smartguy.
When I'm standing at the urinal or toilet and I feel like I might be having that dream. You know that dream. The one where you’re taking a 12-minute beer piss in your dream only to realize that you are in fact taking a 12-minute beer piss all over your significant other in bed. No sir, I don’t like it.
Eeeeelegal. It’s pronounced just like it is spelled. il-LEE-guhl. It’s not that hard.
When I blow up a massive inflatable pool and then the kids don’t want to use it. Alright, you little Hellspawn. I just passed out six times, had an aneurysm and lost an hour and a half of my life blowing this thing up. Now get in there and have fun before I tear your lips off!
When people break apart their food to eat it. Over the course of millions of years we have evolved very specific implements to deal with breaking food into manageable pieces for consumption. They are called teeth. Breaking your muffin apart with your hands doesn’t make you look dainty or proper. It just makes a mess. Quit it.
Talk about the weather. I can do without this crappy social grooming exercise. If you are that socially awkward why don’t you just pick the bugs out of my back hair and eat them like a normal primate?
When companies advertise that you can "Save up to 20% or more!!" Sweet! So basically you're telling me that I can save anywhere between zero and 100%. Thank you for alerting me of my mathematically potential savings, Kepler.
Women that ask you to hold all of their shit when they go to a public bathroom. Hey, ladies, you have something men don’t have when we go to the bathroom – A LAP! Set all of your garbage there, will ya?
People that say, “Life is short.” Well, geologically, yes, life is short, but so far it’s the longest thing I’ve ever done.
Legally drunk. Look, Officer, if I’m legally drunk then why don’t you f@ck right off? Come back when I’m illegally drunk. Now pour me back into my car.
People that are “more than happy” to do something. Is this even possible? I think the American Psychiatric Association has a place for people that are more than happy.
When someone’s B.O. smells like food. Sometimes people have body odor that smells so bad that it seems like they are storing an Italian beef sandwich in their armpits. What are they using for deodorant? French onion soup mix?
Crazy as a zoo. “It’s like a zoo in there!” Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t all of the animals in a zoo caged and sedated? That doesn’t seem too crazy to me. I might want to go to the zoo more often if the animals were in fact all running around helter skelter terrorizing people.
Road rash. Few things in life suck as much as the puss-oozing, linen adhesive raspberry covering your whole hip that you get from sliding into third base, bicycle carnage, or rookie break-dancing mishaps.
Witty banter. “Hey, Dan. Are you working hard or hardly working?” Listen, Bud. I’m perfectly comfortable standing here in silence, so if you don’t have anything to talk about why don’t you just shut your yapper.
People that don’t know where their car fits. Hey, Lady! It shouldn’t take a 97-point turn in order to get your minivan into a parking spot. Practice at home before you venture out into the world and ruin my day.
Smokers that hold their cigarettes outside of their car windows. Psst. Come here for a second, Mac. I’ll let you in on a secret. You still smell like an ashtray! And the 18 pine tree air fresheners aren’t hiding anything either. Roll it up and inhale, Jerky.
Weird pets. Why in the wild, wild world of sports do people have ferrets, sugar gliders, and dangerous effing lizards running around their house? And cats?!? Don’t get me started on cats. What, other than a horrendous odor and an exotic disease, are they getting out of these things?
When the waiter asks if I’ve ever eaten here before. Um, no, but I’m pretty sure I can figure this one out without advanced instruction. I’m guessing that I choose an item form this piece of paper, let you know what my selection is, and you screw it up. Am I close?
People that can’t hear but get mad when you talk louder. What did you say? “…” Sorry? “…” Nope, still didn’t get it. “!!!” Well, you don’t have to yell! Grrrr…
Anyone who doesn’t like The Godfather. If you don’t like the best movie ever made then you suck, and I hate you.
Wedding invitations. Come on, girls. Why, dear God, why do wedding invitations have to come with 23 layers of leaves and tissue paper? It’s boring, overdone, trite, kitschy and agitating. The ones that spill glitter and confetti all over Hell’s creation really torque me off, too.
Anyone that gets offended by humor. Lighten up, Sister Mary. It’s just a joke, and it’s supposed to be shocking and off kilter. That’s why it’s funny. Get over yourself or go die a protracted, humorless death in silence if you don’t like it.
Whoever thought up the annoying “Got Milk?” ads. Let’s just ignore the obvious homoerotic undertones of smearing an artificial cumshot on professional athletes’ mustaches. That’s bad enough, but now I have to deal with less creative fekkers who copy this BS and twist it for their needs. Got Jesus? Got Cash? Got Whateverthefuck?
People that walk backwards on elliptical machines. What exactly does this accomplish? You don’t see anyone doing this on treadmills or stationary bikes, do ya? The miles don’t come off if you walk backwards, plus watching people do this makes me feel like I’m in a crappy Enigma video.
Guys that keep change in their wallets. Something is just weird about it, OK? Besides, I don’t like carrying change in general. It makes it harder to lie to homeless people.
Neon signs or lighted business signs that have lights burned out. It really looks like garbage. What’s the problem here? Business owners can’t pay Manny or their retarded brother three dollars to get on a ladder and screw in a bulb? Driving by the HOTel cORAL esSEX is funny, I admit.
Roadside memorials. I don’t mean to be totally insensitive, but what is that purpose of putting a cross at the bottom of an irrigation ditch? If someone dies in the bathroom of their shitty apartment you don’t barge in on the new renters every year and chuck flowers in at them while they are dropping the deuce, do you? OK, maybe I’m being a little insensitive.
Those stupid oval Euro bumper stickers. This is easily the worst European export since smallpox. If I have to try to figure out what “OB” or “HH” stands for while I’m behind you at a stoplight I may just get bored, slam it into 4WD and run over your dumb arse.
Guys that use the trap door. I don’t know about you, but I have better things to do than fiddle with buttons on my underwear when I have to go to the bathroom. In fact I’ve started following my son’s lead on this one. Now when I’m standing at the urinal I drop my drawers all the way down to my ankles and make awkward conversation with people around me. “I think I have to poop, too!”
Andrew Dice Clay. Comedy generally involves jokes with punch lines and audience laughter. Listening to some Jersey turnpike juicebag with Tourette’s syndrome attempt to string a line of offensive language together for no reason is agitating.
When you go to pick up one thing and something totally different magically ends up in your hand. Ever reach for your car keys, but by the time you get to the car you realize that the keys have somehow transformed into a ballpoint pen? How does that happen?
People that are against the death penalty. This one definitely warrants its own topic, but I can sum it up quickly. The death penalty isn’t supposed to be a deterrent. It is a penalty. If commit crime A then we may kill you. It’s a simple concept unless you want to mollycoddle some useless incorrigible cunts in prison forever.
Nylon head condoms. You usually find these on gentlemen of a particular ethnic category. It always looks like they are either squeezing their brains out or holding them in because of some traumatic head injury. Either way they look absolutely stupid, but I’m not telling them that.
When a wad of garbage flies out of my mouth in the middle of a conversation. It’s just awkward for everyone involved. Not only did I just hork a wad of unknown detritus onto the forehead of whoever I’m talking to, but now we have to do that uncomfortable eye-lock for six minutes where we both pretend that didn’t happen until the thing dries up and sloughs off. Don’t like it.
Exerwalking. Did some sadistic physical trainer tell these people that exaggerating their movements and looking like a sixth-place finisher in the Special Olympics burns extra calories? If you’re going to walk, just walk, Buddy. Leave the silly stuff to John Cleese.
Being a cashier. By the time I swipe my card, enter my PIN, hit “OK” thirteen times, hit “No” twice, and then sign I begin to wonder what the moron on the other side of the counter is actually getting paid to do. I have worked pretty hard in life to ensure that I don’t end up being a clerk, but now I’m getting forced to be one with every transaction. Crappy.
Restaurants that don’t have their specials written down. “Would you like to hear the specials tonight?” No, I would like to see the specials printed neatly on a piece of figgin’ paper like everything else, Fuckstick. I’ve just slugged down a dozen mixed drinks waiting for my effing table, and you expect me to remember your grocery list?!? Shut it.
Recycle Nazis. “You’re not going to throw that plastic bottle away are you!?! Here, let me take it home, and I’ll recycle it.” Fine. Transport it another 50 miles before it ends up in the landfill if it makes you feel any better, but don’t give me that look like I just clubbed a baby seal unless you want to be next on my To-Club List.
People who ask for honest feedback but get upset when they get it. Don’t ask me if I think you’re a bad person unless you’re mentally prepared to hear that I’d rather have my kids play hide-and-seek in John Wayne Gacy’s basement with Michael Jackson and an archbishop from Boston than have you watch them. Don’t get huffy. You asked.
That awkward moment after you watch a movie with a group of friends. You know, when nobody wants to break the silence and say anything because they think they are the only one who thinks gay porn was an inappropriate choice. Heh, gotcha!
That second when you think you’ve misplaced something, but then immediately realize the lost object is in your pocket. Getting old sucks.
Accidentally typing an entire page with Caps Lock on. I’m not the best typist in the world, and I have to watch where my fat fingers are wandering. So when I look up after five minutes of typing and the screen is screaming at me I almost sully myself every time.
Full bicycle outfits. When did wind resistance trump looking like an asshole? The four seconds that you may save on your 30-mile bike ride definitely does not warrant a spandex leotard, Lance. The guys that wear this garbage on stationary bikes are priceless, though.
Crows. Close your eyes and imagine waking up to the soft twitter of songbirds outside your bedroom window as the sun is coming up and a cool spring breeze blows in. Nice and relaxing. Then: CAW!!! CAAAAWWRR!!! CACAWW!!!! What the fuck?!?
The greatest thing since sliced bread. Why is sliced bread our yardstick pioneering inventions? Setting the bar pretty low aren’t we?
Having this conversation with a woman you have just met or haven’t seen for a long time: “…That’s great. Good to hear it. So when are you expecting?” I’m not pregnant. “You’re not pre…!?! Er, Sorry. Well, do you have a handgun on you that I can borrow to kill myself or should I slink away under cover of darkness?”
Or this conversation: “Did you guys find out Marshal had Down’s with prenatal testing or did you discover it at birth?” Um, my son doesn’t have Down’s syndrome. “Yikes! Look at the time…”
People that don’t put their belongings in the same place every time. “Now, where are my keys? Have you seen my shoes? I could have sworn I put my wallet in the toaster.” Come on, Columbo. If your memory sucks that bad why not try to keep your shit in one place instead of wasting everyone else’s time looking for your stinking sunglasses?
Those rubber bull ball sacks that some rednecks hang on the trailer hitch of their trucks. How is this socially acceptable? Why is it alright to hang a big scrotum on your vehicle, but people get all offended when you glue a big hairy vagina where you stick the fuel nozzle for the gas pump? I don’t understand.
When the DVD player skips in the middle of a movie. Of course it never happens in the first five minutes. It always happens right as the dental assistant with a chromosomal defect is about to pull the intestines out of the underwear model he has hanging in the barn. Frustrating.
Accidentally releasing the clutch too soon while shifting. I don’t know why, but this instantly pisses me off every time it happens. And I always blame it on the vehicle.
Train horns. Especially when they are continuously blasted at 2:00AM. Train engineers are seriously evil human beings. There have been many a sleepless night that I have wished a tortuously prolonged and painful death on the arsehole pulling the blast horn for ten minutes at a stretch to scare deer off of the tracks. Inhale fire and die, bastards.
Bad parenting. “I don’t know why he doesn’t listen to me. He’s just full of energy.” And you are an effing moron. I don’t want to listen to you either. You have to actually teach children how to behave in a functioning society or else they will turn out like Dick Cheney.
When I go to innocently scratch an itch on the back of my neck and inadvertently squash some goddamn hairy spider whose crawling was causing the itch. EEEEhewwwww!!! TJ coined the term “arachnolepsy” which perfectly describes my reaction every time.
Dog vomit. Before I owned a dog I would have never believed you if you told me that dogs puke green ink that smells like somebody is boiling Ghandi’s sandals. It is easily one of the vilest substances on Oden’s fair planet.
The smell of urine. Not only is the smell horrendous, but also it is difficult to bring up in conversation. “Hey, Bud, did you know your shirt smells like a colony of pregnant bats have been using it for a latrine?” Or “Excuse me, Miss, but your house smells like a retirement home the morning after a kegger.” See what I mean?
Junk shows. One second I’m blazing down a ski run at 60mph on 10 inches of fresh powder under clear blue skies, and the next thing I know a hidden tree branch grabs my ski and somehow manages to disrobe me, leaving a trail of debris that looks like a plane crash in the Andes. Not the best.
Stories about children’s names. “Tarrence was my great grand aunt’s name. She survived for three years in a sunken ship in the Arctic. It’s a ancient Norse na…” Hey, that’s great. Do you happen to have a length of rope and a balcony so I can hang myself? Thanks.
Activists. Honestly, since we have struggled out of the primordial ooze has anyone ever been swayed by someone else with a totally contrary opinion? What is the logic here? “Hmm. People don’t seem to appreciate my point of view during normal conversation, so maybe I can persuade them that I’m right by poorly stating my position on a crappy sign and repeating it to the point of exhaustion on the street corner. If that doesn’t work I’ll bet a shitty informational flier strategically placed under their doormat will definitely do the trick!”
People that can’t navigate a roundabout without killing someone. Once, just once, I’d like to see into the mind of someone that is confused by something so simple. It really isn’t complicated. Look left, turn right. If that seems difficult then maybe you shouldn’t be operating heavy machinery, imbecile.
Dropped calls. I don’t necessarily mind that my call gets dropped unless I’ve been on hold for 45 minutes. The part that gets right under my skin is when both parties immediately try to call each other back, and you both are sent directly to voice mail. So you hang up and try again. Then you see that you have missed a call or you have a call waiting, and you stomp your phone into 50,000 pieces. Pain in the proverbial arse.
Or when your connection is bad and people ask, “Is that your phone?” Hrmm, let me look at it. Nope, it still looks like the same phone to me. {Sniff, sniff} Yep, still smells like the same phone. {Lick, ptew!} A huh, still tastes like my phone. HOW THE FEK AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHOSE PHONE IS FEKKING UP, DOUCHE HOLE?!? The goddamn call is bounced into outer-friggin-space for Chrissake.
Mob chants. Right about when a group of people start to mindlessly chant “Hell no! We won’t go!” or “Kill the bill! Kill the bill!” or “insert nonsense here” is just about the same time I start cheering for the riot police to fire rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd.
Suicidal Insects. What could be so bad in the life of an insect that makes it want to Kamikaze dive into my mouth or eyeball? I mean they’re only alive for a couple of days anyway. Hateful bastards.
Audience participation. {Stomp stomp clap. Stomp stomp clap.} Listen, Jerky. I didn’t pay $6300 per ticket so that I could be your percussionist. Besides, I’m white, and I think we both know that in 20 seconds this is going to degrade into a bunch of random clapping and stomping.
In the wrong place at the wrong time. Really, if you are in the wrong place who gives a shit when you got there?
Annoyingly long urls. “Hey check out my website. Do you have a pen? It’s http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com/.” Come on, Jackass.
Personal hygiene. I’m not saying that I want to look like Jaoquin Phoenix or smell like hot trash. After all I am not French. It’s just such a chore to keep it up every day. I really need a slave to take care of this garbage for me.
Monkey butt. AKA: swass, swalls, swunt, swaint, etc. I can’t think of one positive thing to say about it. I think most would agree.
Political bumper stickers. Let me clue you in on something. We (I’m speaking for the whole world here) don’t give a rat’s ass that you voted for McGovern in 1972, and the fact that you have a sticker that says “Vote NO on 304!” makes me want to vote “YES” out of spite, even though I have no idea what 304 is.
That weird sound deaf people make when they are signing. Does snorting and moaning somehow give you more manual dexterity? Maybe nobody has told them that they are doing it. I’ve tried, but I don’t think they were listening.
The backhanded wave while looking in the rear view mirror. Basically this says to me, “Yeah, whatever, jack hole. I’m in front of you now.” Hey, pal, just forget the wave and move your arse. We wouldn’t have to worry about it if you learned how to friggin drive. MOVE IT!
And of course…me. I really can be a jaggoff.

Well, did you make the cut? Who did I miss? Let me know.

Playset Plans

2010-07-30T12:24:00.005-06:00

Hey, DanielPDansters. Sorry it’s been a while since my last article, but I have just been overloaded this summer with other projects, one of which I’m going to share with you here. As some of you know I have two great kids, and they are getting to the age where they don’t need constant supervision. Now I can turn them loose in the backyard without worrying that they are going to fall into the open tar pit or tease the plague-infested prairie dogs back there. Plus, they are at an age where they actually want to play together instead of the older one just rolling the younger one down two flights of splinter ridden deck stairs repeatedly.

So one day this spring She Who Must Be Obeyed mentioned, “They play so well together. We should buy them a swingset.” Now, as I’m sure most other men would agree, what I heard was: “Build my babies the best playset in Creation, or your daughter will hate you for the rest of your life and end up with a tattoo that says ‘HECTOR’ on her throat, and your son will become a Republican. You lazy bastard!” Right? Just me again?!? Ah…well anyway, I was initially against the idea for several reasons. First, we live three blocks from a park. Admittedly sending a two year old to the park alone is a dicey proposition fraught with peril. I’ve learned my lesson on that one the hard way with a little persuasion from a rolling pin and SWMBO. Second, the whole playground-in-the-backyard thing smacks of keeping up with the Joneses, and as you might have guessed by now I hate those fuckers. The Joneses are arseholes. Plus, I am cheap. Some of the huge wooden playsets that you see crammed into backyards throughout the suburbs nationwide sell for over $3500. Hrmm…should we build a swingset for the kids or pay for their college tuition? However, after mulling it over for a couple of days I began to realize that it’s probably not that bad of an idea. It might even make the backyard actually useful. Right now the only time I go back there is to dump used oil and bury bodies, so making the kids a structure to run around and fall off of seemed like a decent way to put the space to good use.

Since the new units were astronomically overpriced, I began the journey where I often do – on the interweb looking for freebies. I poked around for a while trying to dig up some free plans so I could make the playset myself. However, I soon realized that even with the plans that I did find I would be spending a mint on the hardware and lumber anyway. So naturally I started to mine Craigslist to see what was out there. After about a month of scouring the list I found something that wasn’t too dangerously rickety, four states away, hugely overpriced or old enough to be made from the deck boards of the Santa Maria. So I snatched it up and transplanted into our backyard with some modifications and additions, and, being the nerd that I am, I of course made a complete CAD model of the playset. Take a look at the pics below. Assembling and staining the set took probably a day. If you are starting from scratch you’d be looking at a solid weekend. The drawings took substantially less time than that. And after all of my hard work I brought the kids out back to see their new playset. What do you think my son’s first comment was? “Wow, Dad. That’s AWESOME!! Can we go to the park?” Great…

I’m posting the images so that anyone who was in the same boat that I was in will have a resource for free plans to a pretty simple, inexpensive, and customizable playset for their little chitlins. There is a complete cut list for the lumber needed, and some basic dimensions for the critical components. The construction process is about as basic as one can get with exterior construction. You can use the same wood, brackets and hardware as though you were building a deck. The 4 x 4 posts do not need to be sunk into the ground, but the whole structure should be anchored to the ground in some way just for a little added safety. You never know what the little maniacs are going to do on this thing. If anyone is interested, or if I missed some needed dimensions please leave a comment, and I can try to get you more info or even the entire CAD file if you’re so inclined. Just let me know.

ThanksKilling (2009)

2010-06-22T09:42:00.009-06:00

O.K. folks, The Missing Piece has been a little top heavy lately with a series of articles about proteins and how a bad decision by a single caveman destroyed our planet. As a result, it’s been a while since we’ve had a good old-fashioned horror movie review. So I figure it’s about time to break things up a bit with some delightfully schlocky, low-budget, B movie horror deliciousness. Don’t ya think?

The movie of the moment isn’t very apropos since it is about a foul-mouthed axe-wielding turkey. I’m not sure which is stranger: a movie based on a puppet turkey that lays waste to coeds or Thanksgiving themed horror movie. Am I the only one that finds it odd that in the whole of the horror movie genre Thanksgiving is remarkably underrepresented? That's a rhetorical question. Sure there are plenty of Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and even St. Patrick’s Day gore fests, but, somehow, I can only think of two other Thanksgiving based horror movies (Blood Freak (1972) and Home Sweet Home (1981))…until now. The latest addition to the paltry Thanksgiving horror movie cannon is the very definition of low-budget and has almost everything a gore hound such as yours truly could ask for in a horrible movie.

ThanksKilling was born in 2007 for under $3,500 in 11 days by then college students Kevin Stewart and Jordan Downey. Interestingly, Downey acted in Day of the Dead 2: Contagium two years earlier. According to the ThanksKilling website, the project started simply with two guys setting out to see how much they could do with so little. Casting was done in a garage, the turkey puppet fell apart by the end of the film, and distribution came and went many times. Sadly, they persevered, and in 2009 they unleashed their creation on the movie-going masses.

The movie starts out as all movies should with a topless Puritan woman with huge breasts running through the forest from an unseen menace. The villain of course is the scurrilous murdering turkey puppet unleashed by Native Americans who were apparently not happy with the Puritans because the baked stuffed sweet potatoes were undercooked. The demonically possessed gobbler is commanded to return forever in order to satisfy his blood lust by hacking anyone nearby to pieces. Never mind the fact that he doesn’t have any hands to hold an axe…or a shotgun…or a steering wheel…

Skipping ahead to the present the foul fowl (heh, heh…) is awoken by a dog pissing on his partially buried totem. Even though the dog’s owner said its name about 25 times throughout the movie I am still unsure what the dog’s name is. Could be Flashy. Could be Blasty. Maybe Lassie? Apparently the homeless Ted Nugent look-alike that the filmmakers recruited to play the redneck dog owner was either too drunk or missing the teeth required to enunciate properly. Either way, the bad-ass poultry is awoken from a long sleep, and an improbably hilarious killing spree is soon to follow.

Meanwhile a Jeepload of college kids on fall break find themselves stuck after their vehicle overheats, so they decide to wait it out by camping in the cursed woods overnight. I think we all know what happens next. Right. Our blood thirsty turkey puppet weeds his way through them like a serving spoon through a can of cranberries, having sex with one coed along the way and (in the movie's most hilarious scene) impersonating the father of another.

Despite ThanksKilling’s humble origins it is filled with hilarity and some great (if not predictable) one liners. The film quality and lighting are remarkably good for such a low-budget production, which makes me think that some of the bad edits and dialog gaffes were intentionally made by the filmmakers. The movie itself is very reminiscent of a Troma production, and I mean that in a good way. The acting isn’t the best, but, seriously, it’s a feature film starring a turkey hand puppet. Although the movie is brilliantly done, I think it could have definitely benefited with more gore and, of course, more topless coeds.

All in all ThanksKilling is certainly worth watching, and it is sure to secure its place in the top five Thanksgiving themed horror movies ever made…even though I’m pretty sure there are only two others. I would definitely recommend this turkey of a movie for any fan of the genre, especially since it is barely over an hour long. Gobble, gobble, mutherf*cker.

How Cattle Destroyed a Planet, Part II

2010-05-26T20:03:00.016-06:00

Alternatively titled: F*UCK COWS, PART II

Last time we covered a bit of history and religion regarding the cattle industry, so this time let's go over the current state of affairs. What does the picture look like now?

Well, once the wilderness was tamed we were left with a cattle industry that is pretty much the same (except in scale) as what we have today, with one notable exception. Now Americans are the worldwide beef eating champions rather than the British, even though Europe still has about 30 million more cattle than the U.S. Over 100,000 cows are slaughtered daily in the U.S. That’s about 300 per hour - one every 12 seconds 24-7-365. Every week 91% of U.S. households purchase beef in some form or another, and the average American eats 65lbs of beef in a year. We consume 23% of the beef produced in the world even though we only have less than 5% of the population. Today, thanks to British imperialism and American gluttony, cows are the basis of a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide. The international trade in beef for 2000 was over $30 billion and represented only 23 percent of world beef production. Dairy production is accountable for about another $30 billion. It is a massive worldwide industry that needs huge subsidies and incredible amounts of infrastructure and has social and environmental impacts that reach far into every corner of the globe.

One major logistical problem with maintaining a herd of 1.5 billion animals is of course figuring out how you are going to feed them. In the U.S. over 30,000 ranchers graze cattle on more than 300 million acres of public land - an area about equal to 20% of the land surface area of the lower 48. Anyone who lives in the west and has ever taken a hike in the wilderness has undoubtedly experienced first-hand the devastation that these animals leave in their wake. Each animal eats its way through 900lbs of vegetation in one month, and they stomp festering mud holes into the ground that collect flies and mosquitoes wherever they go. The Worldwatch Institute estimates that more plant and animal species in the U.S. are eliminated by cattle grazing than by any other factor. The ranchers do have to pay a fee for the privilege of using public lands to feed their pests. The federal grazing fee in 2009 was $1.35 per animal per month. The Reagan administration estimated the market value for pasturing cattle on the same federal lands to be between $6.40 and $9.50 per month. Bit of a discrepancy, no? In 1989 the BLM and Forest Service spent $35 million more on administrating the program than the program took in, not counting the destruction of habitat caused by these stupid animals.

The situation in Central and South America is worse. Most people think that the rain forest is being cleared for the lumber, but in actuality the destruction of this pristine environment is done to clear pastureland for cattle that we can then slather with special sauce and cram into our faces. In the past 50 years more than one quarter of the forests of Central America have been cleared for pastureland. In the same time span around a quarter million square miles of Amazon forest have been cleared for commercial cattle development. It is estimated that for every ¼ lb burger that comes from rain forest cleared cattle it is necessary to destroy ~165lbs of living matter including some 20 – 30 different plant species, perhaps 100 insect species and dozens of bird, mammal and reptile species not counting displaced native populations. Due to this forest clearing and grazing cycle cattle are responsible for much of the soil erosion that occurs worldwide. Grazing is the primary cause for desertification, which is occurring at an unprecedented rate never before seen in human history.

OK, so we have a bunch of cattle that are sinewy and lean from grazing on grasses and other plants that the animal can actually digest, but that’s no good because we want fatty beef. Off to the feedlots we go for an intense regimen of fat building, lack of exercise and corn eating. Kind of sounds like growing up in the Midwest. There are some 42,000 feedlots in the lower 48 alone that take these wiry cattle and beef them up {ahem} to 1100lbs of fat marbled meat. The problem is that cattle are not very good at converting grain protein to animal protein. It turns out that a cow has to consume 9lbs of grain to see 1lb of weight gain. So ~11% goes to make the fatty beef, and the rest shoots out the back end to the tune of about 50lbs of shit per day per cow. You knew we eventually had to talk about crap, didn’t ya? The average feedlot has 10,000 head of cattle which means that the waste generated at a standard feedlot every day is equivalent to a city of over 100,000 people. Anyway, if you remember the protein article humans have a conversion efficiency of ~90% for the same grain. What to do? No problem. Due to technological advances in fertilization, hybridization, pesticides, etc., since WWII agricultural yields have increased by almost 300%. Where does all of that surplus food go? To feed the billion or so undernourished people of the world? Nah. Screw those guys; we NEED more beef, bitches! Yep, it all goes to feed cattle inefficiently.

Here in the United States 106 million acres of farmland are used to grow 220 metric tons of grain for cattle annually. Globally 600 million metric tons of grain is fed to cattle. That means that fully 70% of all U.S. grain goes to feed livestock, or 1/3 of worldwide production. Of course all of these crops need to be irrigated which leads to the inevitable discussion about water. We use over 70% of our fresh water on agriculture. Breaking it down further, around half of the water consumed in the U.S. goes to feed cattle specifically. The water used to produce 10lbs of steak equals one average household’s consumption for an entire year. The water that goes into a 1000lb steer would be enough to float a destroyer, and producing 1lb of beef requires 15 times more water than producing the equivalent amount of plant protein. Adding insult to injury, cattle feedlots account for over half of the toxic organic pollutants found in fresh water. Here’s another one of my pet peeves. We use 70% of our water on agriculture and another 20% on industry, which leaves 10% for residential use. About 50-70% of residential water use goes to landscaping irrigation. In other words we use it to water our lawns. Why do we have lawns? Because Kentucky Bluegrass made excellent pasture for…drum roll please…cattle. Fugginell…

All of this tilling and irrigation of the soil for cattle feed inevitably leads to erosion. The Worldwatch Institute estimates that each pound of feedlot steak results in ~35lbs of eroded soil. Put another way, 85% of eroded soil in the U.S. is directly attributable to cattle and feed crop production. It is worse in developing countries where forests are cleared and cattle are grazed on marginal soil. Of course the machinery used to do all of this consumes massive amounts of energy and fuel. It is estimated that it takes 1 gal of gas to produce 1lb of beef. So, to sustain the yearly beef consumption of a family of four requires the use of over 260 gal of gasoline. This is equivalent to releasing 2.5 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere or the same as an average car over 6 months. While we are on the subject of emissions, a 400-page United Nations report (entitled Livestock's Long Shadow) from the Food and Agriculture Organization states that cattle farming is "responsible for 18% of greenhouse gases." In some countries cattle are the number one cause of global warming emissions. The production of cattle to feed and clothe humans stresses ecosystems around the world and is one of the top three environmental problems in the world on a global scale.

Who the Hell cares? I love me some cheeseburgers! Can’t live without them. Ahm nam nam nam…Well, if learning about all of the effed up mess that cattle leave in their wake doesn’t deter you from sucking down a couple of porterhouses every week, realize that I haven’t even touched on the health related issues that come from eating so much beef or how the animals themselves are treated in the process. Regarding the latter, I could almost not care less. We are raising these animals for food, and they are part of an industrial assembly line. We might as well just breed them without brains and hybridize them with jellyfish so we can just pour them into a blender at the end of the line. Screw those things. I’ll let PETA get their panties in a wad over how they are treated. As far as health concerns go, I won’t dig too deep into this since the web is literally loaded with resources telling you why slugging down twelve McRibs every week is bad for you. I will touch on a few of the big hitters, though. One of the reasons why our agricultural output has increased so dramatically over the last half century is due to advances in pesticide and herbicide production and formulation. Feed corn is bombarded with these chemicals in order to maximize output per acre, and then the chemical-laden corn is fed to cattle by the ton. Who cares if cattle get cancer? They are going to get shot in the head anyway, right? Well, as it turns out beef is the most dangerous food for herbicide contamination and third in pesticide contamination. One estimate by the CDC is that beef pesticide contamination accounts for ~11% of all cancer risk in the U.S. The high beef diet of Americans tracks directly with an increased rate of heart disease, colon cancer, diabetes, breast cancer, arthritis, fatt-arse and a host of other cancers. I think it’s important to mention that the beef Americans crave (because the British told us to) has a high fat content, and that high-fat diet also leads us to circle the drain healthwise. Additionally, the CDC says food poisoning causes over 2000 deaths and 500,000 hospitalizations costing $150 billion in healthcare per year …that’s right, billion. So, let’s sum this up abruptly. We raise an animal that eats our food, destroys our environment, and causes wars then we kill it and eat it and it gives us cancer and heart disease. Sound about right? Mmmm, deeeelish.

On top of everything else, the very word “cattle” kind of weirds me out. Here’s why: What’s a single elk called? An elk, right? What’s a single rabbit called? A rabbit. Right. Same for gorilla, elephant, turkey, lizard, sloth, and every other animal I can think of. But what’s a single cattle called? Cow? Bull? Critter? It’s unnecessarily confusing and annoying. Hey, it’s my blog, Mack.

On a more serious note, I think, generally, people can understand the negative impacts that the cattle industry has on the environment, and that cattle production is grossly inefficient. It should be obvious to anyone that is willing to take even a few minutes to look into it, but there is an underlying tone of entitlement, elitism and, frankly, racism regarding beef production and consumption that never gets spoken about. We make enough food to feed billions of people, but we feed it to cattle instead. Why? To what end? Can any one of my readers look at a steak and say that the resources put into one T-bone are actually worth displacing those resources for someone who literally is on the brink of starvation? I hope not. We read statistics like, “Over 60% of childhood deaths are directly attributed to under nutrition in developing countries”, and we know make enough food to feed them. Instead we still happily give it to cattle and bitch when the price of ground beef goes up by $.05. Oh, here’s another tidbit of information that many people don’t realize. Remember the famine in Ethiopia? In the early ‘80’s when thousands of people were starving every day, the country still exported livestock feed to Europe in order to meet market demand. Sound familiar? It was essentially the potato famine all over again, but nobody mentions that essentially cattle were to blame for another mass starvation. What does that say about humans in general? If an alien civilization happened across the Earth and watched this whole process could you explain to them why this is the current state of affairs? I’m asking because I can’t figure it out, but then I haven’t eaten beef for around ten years now.

When I tell people that I don’t eat beef and tell them why, I usually get a disconnected shoulder shrug and a statement along the lines of: “But I couldn’t live without steak!” What they really mean is that they won't live without it. I think what it boils down to is it is much easier for those of us in the developed world to tell those in the developing countries to have fewer babies than to face the fact that our effing cattle are eating food that could be theirs…for a price of course.

You tell me why that’s OK.

How Cattle Destroyed a Planet, Part I

2010-05-26T19:39:00.008-06:00

Alternatively titled: F*CK COWS, PART I

How did we get to a point in human civilization where cattle dominate so many aspects of the global economy yet we continually look to other places for blame regarding ecological and humanitarian crises? More importantly why doesn’t anybody care? There are around one and a half billion cattle alive today, at least for a little while. In Australia the number of cattle exceeds the number of people by 40%. South America is about even. Fully one quarter of the earth’s landmass is used for their pasture. Over half of the U.S. population lives within three minutes of a McDonald’s, and more people eat at McDonalds in a month than attend churches and synagogues throughout the country. It is clear that we still treat this animal as sacred even though it wreaks havoc on our health, social structure and environment. Why?

This next article is something that I have been working on for quite some time now. I have broken it in half so that hopefully readers aren't flooded with too much information. It follows a story that is seldom told and even less often actually understood by the audience for the importance and implications of its main plot. It is an epic tale of death and destruction - or conquest and glory, if you want to believe the shite history books - that has been a ubiquitous part of human existence for more than 20,000 years…perhaps even 100,000 years. We like to think that we, as humans, are the chosen species for this world. That we reside at the pinnacle of evolutionary selection or exist as the very image of any number of omnipotent deities depending upon your belief set. That we stand alone at the top of the food chain, head held high, chests inflated and pronounced. That somehow we are the only animals in this short corner of the universe that are of any import at all. Well, DanielPDansters, I am here to pull back the curtain and expose a very different view of that perceived reality, and the journey, if you are willing to follow, starts in a dark, mildewed cave in the southwest of France.
The image above is a panoramic view of one of the chambers of the famous cave found at Lascaux. The ceilings and walls here are covered in 17,000 year-old Paleolithic artwork much like dozens of other caves found the world over. Take a moment to look at the paintings. What do you see? A lot of animals? Sure. What type in particular? Look like cows to anyone? Well, they aren’t cows. They are the giant aurochs that used to roam the plains of Europe, Asia and Northern Africa at the time. Aurochs were huge beasts that stood six feet tall at the shoulder and weighed in excess of a ton – a fearsome creature, especially since we hadn’t invented high-powered rifles or running shoes yet. They originated in Asia and had migrated to Europe by about a quarter of a million years ago. To the hardy band of humans that wandered the pristine wilderness that was Europe in prehistoric times this animal must have been both a source of hope and intense fear. On one hand their tough hides could be used for clothing, their bones for weapons, and their flesh for food. However, on the other hand you had to be either brave or desperate enough to try to approach a 2500lb bull with 8ft horns and an attitude that makes modern bulls look like Tickle Me Elmo and then poke it with a sharp stick. The utility, status, and sense of awe seen in this animal in Paleolithic life can be seen in these paintings at Lascaux as well as other sites strewn about Eurasia. So why am I giving the history lesson about Barney Rubble’s big game choice, you ask? Well, somewhere around 10,000 years ago someone decided that instead of killing one of the young aurochs they would bring it home as a pet and thus set in motion a chain of events that has caused the death of more people and more worldwide environmental destruction than any other decision made by a human in history, and, boy have we made some doozies. Nice work Barney.

In reality the aurochs were first domesticated in Mesopotamia, not Europe, and were used primarily as a sacrificial animal in various religious rites. In fact the first Western religion was bull worship in Egypt. It’s easy to see why. These animals represented both physical power and natural resources. They were essentially the Swiss Army Knife of their time. They were used as food (meat and dairy), clothing, shelter, fertilizer, blood sacrifices, tools, weapons, currency, sporting attractions, religious idols and (eventually) as draft animals. The ox-driven plow is often considered to be the first power driven tool in Western history. Once we had the plow, we had the ability to grow more food than we could eat locally so trade routes opened. We needed to advance technology for aqueducts, harvesting, food storage, and transportation. Humans mingled with other societies where they never had before. Currency became necessary. Not surprisingly, in Latin money was called “pecunia” which came directly from “pecus” which meant cattle. Similarly, the Spanish word for cattle is “ganado” while the word for property is “ganaderia”. The animal is still a symbol of wealth today in some societies.

Cattle cults became all the rage, and other religions had to either compete or be assimilated. Ancient Hindus used to use the cow in sacrifices and eat its flesh, but in order to separate itself from the early bull-worshiping religions, Hinduism decided to make the cow sacred. It still is today. Christianity, too, competed directly with the cattle cults. Many of the sacred rites and tenets within Christianity come directly from those early religions – “borrowed” in order to make the transition from cow worship to Jesus worship an easy one for the god-fearing masses. Pretty good sales tactics, don’t you think? The blood of a bull was substituted with the blood of Christ. December 25th was the day chosen for Christmas in direct competition with the Mithraic holy day, which celebrated the birth of the sun from a cow. Take a close look at a Christmas nativity scene. What do you usually find lying next to the Son of God? A bull…that’s right. Christians even transformed the bull god into the Devil (although interestingly not in the Bible). Imagine the Devil for a moment. What does he look like? He has horns, right? Of course. And Hooves? Yes, hooves. A tail? Sure why not. Probably blackish skin, too. Smells a bit like sulfur. Hmmm…the guy sure sounds like a cow to me.

While the “modern” religions were duking it out with cattle cults, the trade routes made possible by the development of the land and standardization of currency became larger and larger over millennia until they stretched across continents. Wherever people went cattle followed (or vise versa). By the 1300’s (A.D.) the Ottoman Empire engulfed the Mediterranean Sea so they controlled the main trade route in the Western world at the time. All goods traveling from Asia to Europe passed through Ottoman-controlled lands. By now the aristocracy in Europe was obsessed with cattle meat, and they consumed it nearly daily. The problem was that in the 1300’s refrigeration did not exist so they were continually looking for ways to disguise the taste of rotten meat. Burning it to a crisp was certainly one way, but the most popular method was to cook it with spices that came exclusively from the East. The Ottoman Turks got wise and started to crank up the taxes for these goods flooding into Europe through their lands, but Europeans paid it because the Mediterranean was the only route in town, unless they wanted to sail all the way around Africa…or across the world.

Enter those intrepid explorers that are the heroes of our sixth-grade history books. The truth is they were not looking for adventure or treasure or new lands. They were on government-funded expeditions looking for a new spice route to Asia in order to avoid paying the 800% markup the Turks were charging. It probably would have made more sense to invent refrigeration, but, hey, I wasn’t there. Of course they never found the new route to the East. What they did find was a lush wilderness for grazing their cattle, and Columbus himself began seeding the islands of Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, and Puerto Rico with horses and cattle before heading home to Spain to announce his “discovery”. Soon those wild cattle began to destroy the pristine island environment and out-compete the natives that lived there…a sad omen of things to come.

In the 1500’s ships began delivering cattle by the hundreds to North and South America where they were they were allowed to run wild. The cattle were then used as a tool to force the native populations to work for the Empire on ranches which would eventually lead to their subjugation, assimilation and/or death. By the mid 1600’s the herds of wild cattle in the South American grasslands were so numerous that some resources say people in particularly overrun areas began to eat beef at every meal and wore only leather clothing. That had to smell real nice {hork}. As an example of how well these newly introduced cattle did in the American environment, in 1600 about 7000 cattle were introduced into what would later become Texas. One hundred years later there were over 100,000 head, and by the mid 1800’s the estimated cattle population of Texas was nearly 4 million.

Meanwhile, right about when the colonies in North America gave the British the biggest middle finger in history, the British appetite for beef was growing. Over 100,000 cattle were being slaughtered every year in London alone, and, famously, British seamen were fed over a half pound of beef daily. Soon there wasn’t enough room in England for the cattle they “needed” so the government started to force themselves into other countries for pasture. Scotland and Ireland were obvious choices since they were right next door, so the locals were pushed off of the best pasture land by the Brits and were forced to farm smaller plots on marginal land. What did they grow? Potatoes. You can see where I’m headed with this, right? In 1846 blight devastated the potato crop causing mass starvation and death despite thousands of cattle grazing on what was once their land. Somewhere around one million people died and a million more had to leave their ancestral lands, many going to the U.S. The servants of the crown then promptly took over the abandoned land for, of course, more cattle.

The next part of the story takes place back in North America where words of “expansion and subjugation” seemed to form the mantra for U.S. society in the 19th century. By then, the cattle industry was booming, consuming more and more land for grazing which spurred border wars and bloody battles between farmers, ranchers, and natives. Since cattle companies didn’t (still don’t) respect the rights of other property owners (and since cattle are too stupid to train) fences had to be put up to protect crops and public land from the devastating effects of cattle grazing. That is why to this day we are cursed with fences from sea to shining sea. The European desire for a fatty, marbled appearance to their beef led the U.S. ranchers to feed the excess corn grown by farmers in the lush Midwest to the cattle just before the trip to the slaughterhouses. The problem was that the cattle drives to the Midwest took their toll on the cattle, so rail lines needed to be constructed. However, there were two little roadblocks that had to be cleared up for the rail lines to be able to move safely across the “deserted” plains - Indians and buffalo.

The story of not only how but also why the west was won is not one that is ever told truthfully. The way we usually hear it is that Indians were savages and buffalo were wild and both had to be tamed by the cowboys who were civilized and replaced by their cattle, which were domesticated. However, essentially, British aristocracy decided that they needed a constant diet of fatty beef that lead to the settling of an entire continent and the subsequent subjugation and genocide of an entire native population… for cows. Over 4 million buffalo were killed in a handful of years as part of this campaign. After their food source was annihilated the surviving Indians were herded onto reservations. The ranchers then sold the cattle that they were now grazing on land once populated with buffalo and natives to the government, which then gave it to the Indians on the reservations to eat. Not the good stuff, of course. Eventually, even the marginal reservations were used illegally by ranchers as pastureland for cattle. The governments of South America were even less accommodating to native populations when it came to cattle ranching, and similar cleansing campaigns were the norm.

So, that's a bit of history that is seldom told - a tale of how we got here. But where is here? What does the picture look like today? We'll cover that next time.

The Mechanical Universe

2010-05-12T08:39:00.007-06:00

Throughout my entire life, it seems, I have had an insatiable curiosity about how the universe works. As long ago as I can remember (which admittedly may only reach as far back as last Tuesday on some occasions) I have always wondered how the tangled mess of forces and energy that permeate the universe conspire to hold the atoms in a baseball together or how a hot cloud of dust and hydrogen in space can form stars and planets. As such, I feel as though I am tied to the field of physics no matter what I my current pursuits are. I consider the science of physics to be the foundation of all other sciences. Physics describes the forces that hold atoms and molecules together which makes the study of chemistry and engineering possible, and biology is essentially just an extension of the field of chemistry. Everything is built upon the knowledge gained in the pursuit of physics, and I believe that there is something to be said for the rich traditions and history of the field.

In high school I used to visit Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory for Saturday morning physics lectures (and free donuts) given by the intellectual giants of the field…nerdy, I know. During one science fair I performed the Millikan oil drop experiment using a perfume atomizer and a neon sing transformer, dramatically underwhelming all onlookers. In my junior or senior year I placed first in the entire state in a physics testing competition. I believe it was a JETS competition...uber nerdy, I know. I also managed to sneak a photograph of Albert Einstein into my senior yearbook as a substitute for my senior picture in lieu of the gay pictures that my classmates took in their big hair and horrible cardigans. In college I was a physics major until my junior year when I had a falling out with the dean of the department. I maintained the highest average score on the first few tests with a whopping 24%. I “mentioned” to the dean that his teachers were horse crap, and his response was a shrug of the shoulders and (directly quoting here) “Physics is hard.” How’s that for a grotesque evasion of responsibility? I told him to cram it in his black hole and promptly moved on to another field of study. Anyway, I’m not writing this to amaze you with my mad nerd skills and my bad attitude…well, at least not today. I’m writing this article to introduce you to an old video lecture series that I recently stumbled across that I used to watch religiously.

The Mechanical Universe is a brilliantly done series of over 50 thirty-minute programs covering the fundamental principles of a freshman-level university physics course - from Aristotle to quantum theory. The series follows a California Institute of Technology physics course taught by David Goodstein and was originally aired on PBS in the late 1980’s. I used to watch it with a friend in his basement, and whenever we heard the intro to the show start to play we would drop whatever ill-fated, poorly-thought-out stunt we were about to perform and would scurry to the couch for the next half-hour…OK we’ve passed nerd status and moved into full-blown dork, I get it. The Mechanical Universe wasn’t just a camera set up in a crappy classroom following some monotone professor around. The production team included distinguished scientists, video industry professionals, and gifted educators all working in collaboration backed by funding from the Annenberg/CPB Project. Each episode includes philosophical, historical and often humorous insight into the subject at hand complete with historical reenactments, dynamic location footage, and computer animation segments to help explain the topics covered. While the video footage makes the complex subjects more accessible, the computer graphics give the viewer a unique look at abstract mathematical concepts that can be sometimes difficult to grasp creating an immersive experience that makes an introductory physics course engaging and interesting.

I have placed a list of the episodes and the topics they cover below. The complete episodes are available for viewing (in the US) here: http://www.learner.org/resources/series42.html?pop=yes&pid=622#

Give it a chance, take a look, and let me know what you think.

The Mechanical Universe Episode List:

Introduction: This preview introduces revolutionary ideas and heroes from Copernicus to Newton, and links the physics of the heavens and the earth.
The Law of Falling Bodies: Galileo's imaginative experiments proved that all bodies fall with the same constant acceleration.
Derivatives: The function of mathematics in physical science and the derivative as a practical tool.
Inertia: Galileo risks his favored status to answer the questions of the universe with his law of inertia.
Vectors: Physics must explain not only why and how much, but also where and which way.
Newton's Laws: Newton lays down the laws of force, mass, and acceleration.
Integration: Newton and Leibniz arrive at the conclusion that differentiation and integration are inverse processes.
The Apple and the Moon: The first real steps toward space travel are made as Newton discovers that gravity describes the force between any two particles in the universe.
Moving in Circles: A look at the Platonic theory of uniform circular motion.
Fundamental Forces: All physical phenomena of nature are explained by four forces: two nuclear forces, gravity, and electricity.
Gravity, Electricity, Magnetism: Shedding light on the mathematical form of the gravitational, electric, and magnetic forces.
The Millikan Experiment: A dramatic recreation of Millikan's classic oil-drop experiment to determine the charge of a single electron.
Conservation of Energy: According to one of the major laws of physics, energy is neither created nor destroyed.
Potential Energy: Potential energy provides a powerful model for understanding why the world has worked the same way since the beginning of time.
Conservation of Momentum: What keeps the universe ticking away until the end of time?
Harmonic Motion: The music and mathematics of periodic motion.
Resonance: Why a swaying bridge collapses with a high wind, and why a wine glass shatters with a higher octave.
Waves: With an analysis of simple harmonic motion and a stroke of genius, Newton extended mechanics to the propagation of sound.
Angular Momentum: An old momentum with a new twist.
Torques and Gyroscopes: From spinning tops to the precession of the equinoxes.
Kepler's Three Laws: The discovery of elliptical orbits helps describe the motion of heavenly bodies with unprecedented accuracy.
The Kepler Problem: The deduction of Kepler's laws from Newton's universal law of gravitation is one of the crowning achievements of Western thought.
Energy and Eccentricity: The precise orbit of a heavenly body — a planet, asteroid, or comet — is fixed by the laws of conservation of energy and angular momentum.
Navigating in Space: Voyages to other planets use the same laws that guide planets around the solar system.
Kepler to Einstein: From Kepler's laws and the theory of tides, to Einstein's general theory of relativity, into black holes, and beyond.
Harmony of the Spheres: A last lingering look back at mechanics to see new connections between old discoveries.
Beyond the Mechanical Universe: The world of electricity and magnetism, and 20th-century discoveries of relativity and quantum mechanics.
Static Electricity: Eighteenth-century electricians knew how to spark the interest of an audience with the principles of static electricity.
The Electric Field: Faraday's vision of lines of constant force in space laid the foundation for the modern force field theory.
Potential and Capacitance: Franklin proposes a successful theory of the Leyden jar and invents the parallel plate capacitor.
Voltage, Energy, and Force: When is electricity dangerous or benign, spectacular or useful?
The Electric Battery: Volta invents the electric battery using the internal properties of different metals.
Electric Circuits: The work of Wheatstone, Ohm, and Kirchhoff leads to the design and analysis of how current flows.
Magnetism: Gilbert discovered that the earth behaves like a giant magnet. Modern scientists have learned even more.
The Magnetic Field: The law of Biot and Sarvart, the force between electric currents, and Ampère's law.
Vector Fields and Hydrodynamics: Force fields have definite properties of their own suitable for scientific study.
Electromagnetic Induction: The discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1831 creates an important technological breakthrough in the generation of electric power.
Alternating Current: Electromagnetic induction makes it easy to generate alternating current while transformers make it practical to distribute it over long distances.
Maxwell's Equations: Maxwell discovers that displacement current produces electromagnetic waves or light.
Optics: Many properties of light are properties of waves, including reflection, refraction, and diffraction.
The Michelson-Morley Experiment: In 1887, an exquisitely designed measurement of the earth's motion through the ether results in the most brilliant failure in scientific history.
The Lorentz Transformation: If the speed of light is to be the same for all observers, then the length of a meter stick, or the rate of a ticking clock, depends on who measures it.
Velocity and Time: Einstein is motivated to perfect the central ideas of physics, resulting in a new understanding of the meaning of space and time.
Mass, Momentum, Energy: The new meaning of space and time make it necessary to formulate a new mechanics.
Temperature and Gas Laws: Hot discoveries about the behavior of gases make the connection between temperature and heat.
Engine of Nature: The Carnot engine, part one, beginning with simple steam engines.
Entropy: The Carnot engine, part two, with profound implications for the behavior of matter and the flow of time through the universe.
Low Temperatures: With the quest for low temperatures came the discovery that all elements can exist in each of the basic states of matter.
The Atom: A history of the atom, from the ancient Greeks to the early 20th century, and a new challenge for the world of physics.
Particles and Waves: Evidence that light can sometimes act like a particle leads to quantum mechanics, the new physics.
From Atoms to Quarks: Electron waves attracted to the nucleus of an atom help account for the periodic table of the elements and ultimately lead to the search for quarks.
The Quantum Mechanical Universe: A last look at where we've been and a peek into the future.

Full Episode Descriptions: http://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/muprevbk/

Complaint Letter

2010-04-17T17:38:00.008-06:00

I've been having a bit of a problem with my mortgage company lately. Seems they are incapable of sending my financial information to the correct address despite repeated calls to "customer service." It appears the concept of the current address escapes the brilliant minds that can calculate the amortized payment of a fixed rate loan over 30 years. Kinda makes me nervous. Anyway, I wrote them a formal letter of complaint, and I thought that I'd share. The full text is below. I have changed the names to protect the guilty, of course.

Dear Sir, Madam, or Otherwise:

I must admit that I have struggled a bit with writing this letter. I am conflicted about how useful it will actually be since I am sending it to the very people at the customer service department that have been the chief orchestrators of my mental torment over the last six months. In the end I’ve decided it was better for me to write this letter in order to record for posterity the monumental failure of your organization at performing a simple task. Surely future generations will find value in such an account even if your fellow employees cannot decipher all of these little black marks on the page. They are called “letters”, and they form “words” which are part of a “language” that is used to communicate abstract ideas to other sentient beings, and it appears that having a grasp on that concept is not one of your organization’s hiring requirements.

I have owned the house where I currently reside for nearly four years now, and Mega Mortgage Company has been the organization that has financed both of the mortgages for this property since the first day I crossed its threshold. I have never missed a payment on either loan (or any loan for that matter), and, in fact, every month I pay more than the minimum amortized payments. I have been a homeowner for nearly ten years, and this his been my personal policy for nearly that whole time span. This is the backdrop which frames the current situation.

Last December (2009) I noticed that I had not received a payment notification for my second mortgage for over a month. Interestingly my primary mortgage statements continued to arrive on time. I assumed that the notification had been lost by the post office, an organization with which your company seems to be competing for nearly-educated employees. So I gave the customer service department a call to enquire why the notification was tardy. Did you know that there are five stacked tiers for selection options in your hotline? I had to mash more keys than Herbie Hancock has in his extended career in order to navigate the rabbit warren of not-so-useful options. Quite impressive that none of them actually lead the concerned party (me) to a living person. After 30 minutes of exploring all of the combinations and permutations of your “help” line and possibly out of sheer finger fatigue I accidentally pressed zero (not given as an option) which led me an actual representative. Almost immediately I began to understand why your directory avoids mentioning this as a viable alternative.

I gave my identification information to the individual on the other end of the line and promptly asked why I had not seen my statement. Imagine my relief when the representative told me that there was no record of any such loan on your system. Great news on a holiday that a $30k debt had been forgiven; however, when I suggested perhaps then I should stop payments immediately the representative was hesitant to put her comments on the company letterhead. Lo and behold that after an actual search was done the missing loan was found. Swell; now let’s move on to the actual issue. It turns out that for reasons unknown to the customer service representative the statements were now being sent to another address. Fine. I can see how your database could randomly choose an address to send my personal financial information after three years. Well not really, but I am at least willing forgive a first offense. After some hand-holding on my part I was able to explain that this issue should probably be fixed, and it appeared to me that the person with which I was conversing had a marginal grasp of how addresses work. So I left the conversation feeling confident that the problem had been remedied, meaning the bills should be sent to address A (my current address) instead of address B (some other location). Let’s recap: address A = good; address B = bad.

I received one statement at the correct address; however, the following statement was MIA so red flags started going up in my head. I immediately called your support line again bypassing the data mining exercise by utilizing my new-found option of pressing zero. Although this member of your staff was able to locate my loan information, they did not have the necessary tools, such as a functioning cerebellum and a grasp on human language, to understand the problem. Below is a brief transcript of the conversation:

Me: Our statements should be sent to address A, just like all of the other correspondence that I receive from your organization.
CS Guy: OK. So we’ll just change all of your correspondence to address B.
Me: Wait…
CS Guy: I’ll just need to confirm some personal information first.
Me: Hold on a seco…
CS Guy: Please answer the following questions to the best of your knowledge…
Me: STOP. IMMEDIATELY. Or I swear by God and sonny Jesus that I will extrude myself through this receiver.
CS Guy: Is there a problem, sir?
Me: …..
CS Guy: Sir?
Me: …six…seven…eight…nine…ten. OK. I want you to listen carefully. ALL correspondence should be sent to my actual address, address A. NOT, and I repeat NOT, to address B.
CS Guy: Well, why are we sending this statement to address B?
Me: Are your mommy and daddy there? Please go get a grown up, son.

After about 30 minutes of further explanation and some remedial spelling and grammar lessons it appeared that we finally had the problem cleared up. When I received the next statement at address A it appeared to confirm that fact.

Unfortunately, about a week ago, I received a notification (at address A) that my payment was 20 days past due. Holy yosh ishmadia… Off to the customer service line again I go. The representative I contacted this round initially appeared to at least have a grasp on how to use your computer system. When I explained my problem they notified me that the address had been permanently changed from address A to address B in December - my first call. No record of the second call, which isn’t surprising since I am willing to bet that the person on the other end of that call was just delivering pizza to the office and wanted to screw with my brain. By this time all faith in the ability of the individuals in your department to actually provide a helpful service (which admittedly wasn’t very much to begin with) had diminished to zero. Since I can chew gum and walk at the same time I had a difficult time explaining such a simple issue to the person assigned to help. After partially strangling myself with the phone cord, I think I must have diminished my mental capacity to the level of the customer service representative because it seems that she finally was able to grasp my description of the problem. However, even after I thought the individual had a firm handle on my situation another issue came up.

Me: Address A…Good. Address B…Bad
CS Gal: Oh, I see. I wonder why that got changed?
Me: Doesn’t matter. {gasp} Change back {choke} to address A.
CS Gal: To address C?
Me: No. {gasp} Address A.
CS Gal: Right, address C.
Me: [Unwrapping phone cord from my neck]{Deep Breath} Let’s try an experiment, OK? Repeat after me: “Mouse”.
CS Gal: “Juice”?
Me: “Forehead”.
CS Gal: “Car”.
Me: Can I speak to the manager?
CS Gal: Do you want me to say all of that?
Me: [Taking a long drink from hip flask] Why not…

Speaking with the manager I was able to (hopefully) come to a solution to this perplexing problem, although only time will tell. Since my payment was already 20 days past due, I was concerned that my payment would not arrive on time in order to keep my credit clear. Although admittedly this is probably a moot point since your organization has repeatedly sent my privileged personal financial information to bumblef@#K for some unknown period of time, so I am probably unknowingly financing someone’s dream sexual tourist vacation to Thailand as I write this. Anyway, regarding my payment options the manager said he would be happy to accept my payment over the phone for a fee of $25. That’s a nice scam you’ve got going there. When I suggested how ludicrous the extortion of a fee for payment that was going to be late due to your repeated inadequacy of service which I had not previously considered possible, as well as ignorance and stupidity of monolithic proportions, the response I got was predictable. I’m directly quoting here: “My manager says there is nothing we can do.” Funny, I thought I was talking to the manager. I immediately hung up, kicked my dog, lost my religion, then redialed the customer service department again. After another futile attempt at explaining the issue to someone I can only assume was in fact human, I enquired about waiving the payment fee, and the being on the other end of the line had no problem waiving it. Good grief, people. I wish I could say that I was surprised, but at this point I’m not 100% certain that Ashton Kutcher isn’t going to pop over the cubicle wall next to me.

I won’t even get into the difficulty that I had getting the information about how to submit a formal letter of complaint. I can say that nearly three cell phones were destroyed in the effort. In the end I wanted to send this letter so that you can either pursue your professional prerogative and seek to rectify these difficulties within your department (or organization as a whole) - or more likely (I suspect) so that you can have some entertaining reading material as you aimlessly wander through the working day drinking bad coffee on the toilet in your office.

Sincerely:

Daniel P. Daniel

What do you think? I probably let them off too easy, I know. Any takers on whether or not they will get their crap in a pile? The good money is on "No."

The Protein Issue

2010-03-29T13:55:00.007-06:00

Over the course of the past six months or so my wife and I have been embarking on a culinary quest to remove all meat from our diets. Yes, that’s right we’ve been going vegetarian. Well pescetarian, actually, since we are still eating seafood and dairy sparingly. Admittedly, the wife has been much more religious about this than I have, but I tend to be wary about ordering vegetarian fare at typical American restaurants lest I be subjected to pay $11 for a shitty iceberg lettuce house salad every time we go out to eat. Anyway, whenever this topic is broached there is one question that tends to come up over and over again. No, it’s not “Where do you buy your patchouli, hippie?” The question that everyone asks (besides the obvious, “Why?”) is: “Well, where are you going to get your protein?” This very specific question about the nutritional content of food shows a lack of understanding of biology at the basic level that is propagated by marketing and one of the most ecologically harmful and powerful industries in the world, the cattle industry. Surely you can’t survive without beef. Can you? I can sum my response to that up in two words: fuck cows. I haven’t eaten beef (besides the odd burger or dog at the ballpark) for about 9 or 10 years now. I’ll address that in a later article. Sorry, I got off track there. Where were we? Oh, right. Where do hippies get their protein?

First, a little protein background education. Proteins are massively convoluted compounds that perform a host of different vital functions biologically. They are messengers, transporters, facilitators, and structural components. They are enzymes, antibodies, hormones, and literally thousands of other molecules that make life on the microscopic scale possible. At any one time there are more than 50,000 different proteins in our bodies. The DNA that every living organism on this planet possesses is essentially a construction manual for how to build these proteins. Each gene on our DNA codes for one specific protein. So when people say that someone has a gene for black, insect-like nipple hair, what they are actually saying is that they have a DNA sequence that codes for a protein (more likely a series of proteins) that causes the expression of their fly nipples through some very specific metabolic pathway (or convoluted series of pathways). Proteins are all made from complicated combinations of linked chains of 22 different amino acid building blocks. Titin, the largest known protein, consists of 34,350 amino acids linked together in an impossibly complicated mess. In contrast, the smallest known protein has only 20 linked amino acid chains. The amino acids themselves are relatively simple compounds containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and occasionally sulfur. I used to have all of their chemical structures memorized because some dipshyte professor thought that might some day be useful. I can safely say that I have never once in my career as a human ever recited to anyone for any reason the exact structure of a single amino acid chain. As such their memory has been erased by years of drinking and closed-head trauma, some of which I would love to inflict on that juice-bag professor. Our bodies can synthesize all but eight of these amino acids. The eight that we cannot make (leucine, isoleucine, valine, threonine, methionine, phenylalanine, tryptophan, and lysine) are called the essential amino acids, and we must get them from dietary sources.

When we eat anything that was once living (plant, animal, or otherwise) our digestive system breaks the proteins down into their prospective amino acid components. We are exceptionally good at this process of protein breakdown. The efficiency of this system ranges from 94% for the typical North American meaty diet to only as low as 88% for a North American dairy vegetarian (if you throw eggs into the dairy veg mix it goes up to 93%). Different types of foods contain different types of proteins, each with their own unique amino acid profile. This variation in amino acid profile means that there is a possibility that some amino acids may not be present in every food in the quantities necessary to construct the requisite proteins in the human body. Generally speaking, animal proteins tend to have more essential amino acids per gram of protein than plant protein. However, the body cannot distinguish the difference between the lysine that comes from pork and the lysine that comes from beans. They are chemically identical, and even slightly varying a vegetarian diet ensures that all of the essential amino acids are well represented. Anyone eating a well-balanced diet based on grains, seeds, nuts and vegetables will be consuming a mixture of proteins that complement one another naturally without requiring any planning. We wouldn’t be very good omnivores, evolutionarily speaking, if we couldn’t thrive by eating whatever happens to be available.

Eating replaces those proteins that we lose every day through feces, hair and nail growth, sweating, skin loss, etc. However, we recycle much more protein within our bodies than we loose externally. Every day the body reabsorbs and subsequently breaks down anywhere from 100 to 300 grams of protein internally. The resulting amino acids are used to make new proteins and keep the body’s amino acid pool (or blood reserves) topped off. The essential amino acids in this reserve have a lifetime of about six hours in the blood before they are burned, turned to fat or protein, or shat out. So this begs the question: how much protein do we actually need to eat to keep this amino acid reserve full?

Studies vary on the exact number for dietary protein replacement, but in the U.S. the average theoretical losses amount to about 0.34 g of protein per kg body weight per day. Safety margins are tacked on to this number to account for variations in the population and the digestibility and quality of protein consumed, so the final number ends up to be 0.8 g per kg of protein for an adult (RDA). For a 150 lb. person 54 g of protein need to be consumed daily according to U.S. standards; which is about three times more than what the body actually requires based on the theoretical losses above. Other countries vary in their requirement, but all are in the same ballpark. 54 g is about what a person would get if they ate nothing but three cups of rice and three cups of beans per day. The average non-vegetarian omnivore in North America consumes almost three times that amount (~130 g per day). The average ovolacto-vegetarian slugs down around 100 g per day, and the average vegan will get over 80 g. Yes, even vegans get much more protein than they actually need. The body doesn’t have a mechanism to store an excess of protein like it does for carbohydrates or fat. This is probably due to the fact that evolutionarily meat was an occasional score for humans in the wild, so we had to be very good at eating plants. In fact, the body can only process around 25 g of protein at any one time, and the rest is turned to fat and causes extra work for the kidneys. Just as a reference a single 12 ounce steak contains 70 g of protein. Moooo…

You may be saying to yourself, “Sure, that veggiesaurus BS may be OK for some pale, dope-smoking hippie, but I’m an oily Bo hunk and I need to eat meat and protein shakes to pack on muscle.” First of all, stop shaving your entire body. That’s just creepy. And second of all, even though I realize that your brain may not get worked out as much as your beefcake biceps, you should try to use it once in a while. I won’t go through an entire list of elite athletes that are vegans, like Carl Lewis and Stan Price (World Record bench press), but I will do a quick calculation. Suppose the fictitious muscle-headed reader wanted to pack on 2 lbs. of muscle in a month. That works out to be 226 g of protein after subtracting water weight. That’s about 7.5 g of “extra” protein which is required every day or 1 oz. of peanuts. It is much more important as an athlete to consume enough carbohydrates to keep your energy up and let the protein work itself out. In fact many athletes don’t get enough carbs because they stuff themselves full of protein, so the body inefficiently tries to burn the protein for energy instead of adding it as muscle because their glycogen reserves are low from not eating enough carbs. This isn’t generally a problem for vegetarians since a vegetarian diet is a good source of carbs. A vegetarian athlete will generally be able to pack as much muscle on as a non-vegetarian athlete assuming they consume enough calories. The same is true for pregnant women and children. Everybody knows this intuitively. During the largest growth period of our lives, infancy, we are strict vegetarians yet we have no problem packing on muscle. Also, think of all of the largest, most muscular land animals on the planet. Do they have any issues being vegetarian? Imagine a bull elk tearing into a T-bone steak to prepare for the rut. Gross.

More disease and death is caused in this world due to an excess of protein than due to a lack of protein. Consuming protein far in excess of what the body needs increases calcium excretion which increases osteoporosis risk and incidence of kidney stones. It is directly related to increases in kidney diseases, diseases of the digestive tract, cancer, heart disease, stroke, hypertension, gout, arthritis and laundry list of other diseases associated with the North American diet. What is considered excess? Some studies show that anything more than double the RDA is too much. So, while vegetarian diets are lower in protein than non-vegetarian diets this is in fact one of the benefits of such a diet. Whereas protein excess is a huge problem, protein deficiency is basically unheard of in the developed world. In the Third World horrible protein deficiencies do exist, but this is usually due to a lack of overall calories which eventually leads to starvation. Basically, the only way someone can end up with a protein deficiency in the U.S. is if they intentionally eat just grapes for a year or put themselves on some other weird ass restricted diet.

How did we get to a point where the word “protein” became synonymous with “meat”? The same way “Kleenex” came to mean “facial tissue” – marketing and the lobbying power of businesses. I am not going to get into food politics right now, but I will say that the folks in the animal protein industry are genius marketers and ruthless businessmen. They have essentially influenced an entire civilization into believing that they cannot survive without their products. This manifests itself in many ways, one of the most obvious being restaurant menus. Notice that there are entrees and there are sides. Often the word “entrée” is interchanged with “protein”. What are you going to have as your protein with that? Chicken? Beef? Pork? Tofu? Fish? Here’s a fun project to try next time you go out to eat: ask for your entrée on the side then watch the confusion begin. This not-so-subtle change in semantics has altered the whole psychology of how we eat. It has become so ingrained that people cannot imagine that not only is there ample protein in a strictly vegetarian diet, but that we must somehow supplement it with more. Just the other day I ordered a salad, and I asked if there was any meat on it. The answer I got was pretty typical and sadly predictable: “Oh, do you not want any protein on your salad?” Yeah, right. I would love to see you and the chef try to extract the protein from my salad. Can I have it on the side?

Avery Sour Beer Fest

2010-03-09T08:23:00.004-07:00

A week or so ago I was honored enough to be able to attend an event populated by an elite group of beer aficionados and 30 of the best breweries in the U.S. One of the first of its kind anywhere in North America and hosted by Avery Brewing Company in Boulder, the Inaugural Sour Beer Fest was a wonderful event even though all of the beers were spoiled. Sour beers, traditionally Belgian ales, use strains of bacteria such as pediococcus and lactobacillus and sometimes wild yeasts to intentionally sour the beer which adds a host of complex flavors and aromas that are sometimes a serious affront to one’s senses. I’ve been brewing beer at home on and off for many years now, and I’ve had my fair share of unintentionally soured disasters that end up smelling like someone kicked a hole in the side of a rotting pig carcass. To steal a quote from a brewmaster friend of mine: “If you fuck up a beer, call it a Belgian.” It’s easy to see where he’s coming from especially since some of the common descriptors used for the aromas and flavors for the sour ales are horsey, barnyard and baby poop. However, on that fine Saturday afternoon there were over 50 examples of sour ales from breweries across America, and a few of the have got the art of blending off flavors down to a science.

Even though all attendees were to receive 20, 2oz. sample pours, the opportunity to mingle with the brewers and creators of many of the beers on display and discussing their sometimes beautiful complexity with 100 or so of the strangest people around made slugging 20 tasters down in four hours nearly impossible. The pictures are scans of the ales that were present along with a checklist of the beers the guys that I went to the festival with tried. A “D” denotes those ales that were tried by yours-truly, “A” marks the ones that The Hippy tasted, and the checkmarks are for the selections downed by the incomparable Klaver…as far as we can remember. The taps were arranged alphabetically by brewery making it difficult to go in with a specific tasting strategy. So we just putzed around sort of randomly grabbing samples as we moseyed about the brewery.

There were some clear winners in the group, which implies that there were also some clear losers. Surprisingly, Deschuttes’ soured Black Butte Porter was on the latter list even though I would normally consider the non-soured version to be one of the best porters brewed today. Similarly, Victory’s Wild Devil wasn’t the best even though the Hop Devil IPA is beautiful otherwise. However, they both were at least bearable. I did try one Flanders Red that tasted and smelled like somebody had wrung-out Andy Dufresne’s clothes into a glass immediately after he escaped from Shawshank…and then puked in it. Not good…at all. The vast majority of other beers that I tried were quite interesting. All of the Berliner-Wiesses were well-balanced and refreshingly light. Avery’s Sui Generis was an incredible blend of 10 beers then aged in an oak barrel, and the Oude Tart from The Bruery was an excellent example of a Flemmish Red, delightfully tart and complex. But the clear reigning champ in the sour beer arena in the U.S. has to be The Russian River Brewery. Every one of their beers was perfectly balanced between sour and non-sour notes, and The Temptation is the only beer that I tried more than once. (My mouth is watering as I write this.) As a testament to how well they craft their beers, a friend of mine attended the festival with us without ever having tasted a sour beer before, and, despite having difficulty appreciating some of the other ales, those done by The Russian River were his choice for best-of-show. There is just something that they do right in this class that leaves all other American sour brewers trying to play catch-up.

All-in-all it was a nearly perfect day. I say nearly perfect because The Hippy and I decided, rather stupidly, to try to conquer the ghost-pepper-sauce hot wing challenge at Oskar Blues Brewery the night before. It was a dismal failure on so many levels that I don’t know where to begin. It didn’t help that The Hippy called the chef a pussy. Let’s just say that the bathroom at the BMW dealership next door to Avery “suffered” due to its proximity the next day. Other than having dissolved my guts with the hottest pepper on the planet and the whole burning anus thing, the Inaugural Sour Beer Fest was excellent. I’m certain everyone in attendance would agree.

Cheers and funky, sour beers!

The Origin of the DanielPDanielverse

2010-02-21T10:48:00.008-07:00

TJ is having another great discussion over on his blog, and I've managed to butt in again. Buzz over there and check it out.

The origin of the universe has been a favorite subject of mine since middle school when “A Brief History of Time” was released, and I was just starting to grasp the fundamental principles of Einstein’s relativity. String Theory was beginning to come into its own, and (dare I say) cosmology was sexy. More than that, I think that this quest to drill down deeper and deeper into our cosmological origins is the sole topic that actually forces even the most atheistic hard-liners among us to consider the possibility of Capital G – God.

The standard model for the origin of our universe is the Big Bang Theory. This theory posits that the entire universe at some point in the past was contained within a single point which then exploded, sending space flying in all directions of the infinite nothingness. Of course the opposite model to that is the Static Model, but I think there is enough evidence supporting the former to suppose that this is most likely how the universe began. When speaking of astrophysics and universal origins two fundamental tenets of mathematics cannot be avoided, and they are in fact central to the understanding of the theories that we are concerned with. These two concepts appear to be quite basic on the surface; however, even after reading dozens of books and being schooled in advanced mathematics and physics I have difficulty imagining both. The concepts of which I speak are, of course, singularities and infinity. There is just something within my human brain that tends to overload when I try to imagine both a single point and infinite space, and I have a pretty good imagination. So when we drill down into the moment of creation of our universe we necessarily approach a singularity which I find very hard to grasp - a single point containing all of the energy and mass of our infinite universe. Ouch! I think I sprained something.

Here’s the thing with this singularity that was the seed for our universe as we know it: since it is necessarily smaller than the Planck Length, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle governs its existence. At this quantum level, we (as outside observers) are incapable of gleaning information from the singularity, and, because our ability to observe that object is obstructed, we cannot know and cannot predict its properties. The implications of this simple statement are quite shocking. Since we cannot predict or observe the singularity due to the Uncertainty Principle, all possibilities are equally likely. Anything can happen at that point…all possibilities are in play. However, another consequence of this is that no information is stored within the singularity. If we imagine a cyclic universe that keeps banging and crunching an infinite amount of times, each time the universe collapses back to a singularity the information stored about our physical principles that form this iteration of the universe are lost. There is no universal DNA that codes for the next attempt after the next bang (if there is to be another).

Due to the reasons stated above, we will only be able to trace our origins back to immediately after the singularity exploded, a billionth of a trillionth of a second after creation of this universe as we know it. Before that, we can never know. When asked what came before the Big Bang, Stephen Hawking stated that the question itself was meaningless, and he compared it to asking "What lies north of the North Pole?...The actual point of creation lies outside the scope of presently known laws of physics." The very word “before” has no meaning in this context because there was no time at the point of the singularity. Yet we continue to pursue the question and likely will as long as we are in existence. This is the point where I (and many other scientists) tend to fall down a bit. Since we cannot answer the question of what happened before the singularity (or at the singularity) all possibilities are equally likely, no matter how remote. This includes the possibility of the existence of a creator.

Although there is no evidence of a creator now, we cannot exclude a creator from the origin of the universe. Similarly, we cannot ascribe properties to this creator. There will only ever be questions regarding this entity. For example, if the Big Bang Theory is true, then should we conclude that God is outside of the universe so that He could get the Bang going? Or was She in the singularity? Is It the universe itself? If He’s outside of the universe, then there’s no reason to expect that we are the only universe in existence, is there? Therefore, it’s safe to assume that we may not be that special to God after all. What does a model of an expanding and contracting universe tell us about Capital G? Does it support one religion over another? I think the cosmological question of the possibility of the existence of god is quite different than the discussion of religion, and since we can never know what these possibilities are it is really just a point to argue for no reason. Taking this god track a bit further - doesn’t god have a beginning? It seems like one could presuppose an infinite chain of gods creating each other with equal likelihood as this one god. I guess I just don’t understand why the universe needs a beginning and god does not, as some people suppose.

Some people point to the Anthropic Coincidences as proof positive that the universe has some sort of intelligent creator pulling handles and switching valves. I think that people tend to use these as a bit of a cart-before-the-horse argument. The fact that life currently exists in one known area of an infinite universe is not a prerequisite for all of the myriad properties of physics that make it possible. Life is a consequence of those properties, not the other way around. The very word “coincidence” really has no place in discussions involving infinity. If we assume that the universe has banged and crunched an infinite number of times, then there would be an equal number of failures (assuming this universe is a success, of course). There would be an equal number of times that very different physical principles are present. The very framework of space would be different. Infinity makes very large numbers from the examples above possible…an infinite number of times. Just keep adding zeros.

The question of the point of the origin of our universe still stands and will always stand. Our principles of physics demand it. So I suppose the real question is: why do we need to know? Or stated another way, why does it matter? Isn’t a billionth of a trillionth of a second close enough? The answers to these questions, of course, lie in the complexities of the human mind which is always driven by curiosity, and we will likely never stop supposing what happened one step further into the past.

The Wizard of Gore

2010-02-06T21:14:00.002-07:00

Well, I’ve done it. I have finally found the worst movie ever made. Now, on the surface this may seem like a pretty bold statement considering some of the other films that I have subjected my readers to in the past. After all I consider movies such as “Bad Girls go to Hell”, “Thankskilling”, and “The Killer Shrews” to be seminal achievements in filmmaking history. Well, not really, but at least I know what to expect going into them, and I truly appreciate that. Movies like “Town and Country”, “Baby Geniuses: Part 2”, and “The Postman” all hide behind the A-list actors on their DVD cases until you actually watch them, at which point you feel as though you’ve just done 1900 squat thrusts in a cucumber patch and the only way you’ll regain any sense of well-being is by kicking the closest pet or loved one square in the tunders. They are horrible movies that pretend to be worthwhile…absolutely no redeeming qualities at all. Still, it should come as no surprise that the movies I love are bad. But they know they are bad, and they embrace the fact. As such, I am on a constant quest to find that movie…that one movie…the movie that after sitting through all 95 minutes of schlocky hand puppets covered in gore and screaming teens awash in red corn syrup I can say to myself, “Hoooleee shit. THAT was the worst movie I have ever seen.” Hey, it keeps me out of trouble.

Well that long awaited moment came to me on a nondescript Saturday night a couple of weeks ago when I sat down to consume the movie that essentially launched the whole gore exploitation genre, “The Wizard of Gore.” Some may consider my assertion that this is the worst movie ever made sacrilege since it was in fact a seminal event in filmmaking history. It was THE movie that brought horror movies out of the Lon Cheney “Wolfman” era and stuffed them square into a bucket of pig intestines. However, there’s only so far a man can bow before he starts smelling his own arse.

“The Wizard” was directed by legend of the genre Herschell Gordon Lewis who started out in the industry churning out low-budget nudie exploitation films such as “B-O-I-N-G!” (1963) and “Goldilocks and the Three Bares” (1963), which is a nudist musical. I’ll give you a moment to wipe off your screen. Yes, that’s what I said…a nudist musical. First and foremost, Lewis was a smart businessman. Once he saw that his nudies weren’t faring so well he jumped ship and launched the gore genre with the brilliant “Blood Feast” (1963) immediately followed in rapid succession by “Two Thousand Maniacs” (1964) and “Color Me Blood Red” (1965). Needless to say, these movies aren’t…well, let’s just say they aren’t the best. After a handful of other gems branching out into other genres (including a couple of children’s films {gulp}) Lewis disappeared until his reappearance in 2002 with the sequel to “Blood Feast” aptly named “Blood Feast 2”. By the time “The Wizard of Gore” came about in 1970 Lewis was ready to push the envelope even further, which, admittedly he did.

This is going to be a difficult review to write since this movie doesn’t contain anything resembling normal items moviegoers seek such as a plot, acting, or editing. The show is literally just a string of gore-strewn scenes semi-loosely tied together by a storyline that is worse than that of the XXX remake of “Cheers.” The story is about a hypno-magician that entices young women onto his stage only to literally saw them in half, drive spikes through their heads, cram swords down their throats, etc. All of the above scenes are shot in glorious detail with ample use of animal innards and obvious mannequin parts. The women are released (seemingly) unharmed as the audience realizes that the trick is that they had just been mass hypnotized into believing they just saw a woman being crushed in an industrial press…or had they? All of the volunteers die a short time later of wounds similar to what they had experienced on stage. Then for some reason an investigative reporter chooses to broadcast a show live. Why not? That seems like something CBS would put over the airwaves at the time, right? Anyway, it’s a disaster, and anyone who witnessed the broadcast ends up with horrible wounds. Then, predictably, the reporter’s boyfriend tears off his face to reveal that he is the magician controlling reality…ugh. So he decides to cut her up for fun only to have her sit up and reveal that SHE is the one who is actually controlling reality. Oh, Christ. Confused? Well, this is only what I think the storyline is since it was very difficult to piece together with no acting or editing. I had to watch the movie twice just to make sure the DVD player wasn’t broken and skipping around at random. Now I wish that it were.

The budget for this “masterpiece of crap” couldn’t have been more than $60. Surely the actors couldn’t have been paid, and certainly they didn’t have a script to go off of. In fact the lead actor was originally just a technician who was pressed into service after the original choice for lead (smartly) was a no-show. None of the other “actors” ever appeared in another film, probably because they got lost on their way back to the studio lot. Now, my fellow fans of the genre are going to scream at their monitors calling me a heretic for daring to say that this genre-creating opus is the worst movie ever made. They’ll say that you can’t use the same measuring stick to review this film as you do for “Last Tango in Paris.” It is the content of this movie that truly matters, not the movie itself. Well, I’m calling bullshit. I literally could not sit through this one again as schlocky and wonderfully gore-ridden as it may be. Why? Because on top of being intentionally bad (which don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate), it appears that there was very little effort put into it besides smashing some sheep’s brains all over plastic replicas of people. I understand where the movie stands in the canon of exploitation films, but, my fellow gore hounds and genre fans, it’s still a stinker.

Hung Like a Horse

2010-01-18T19:04:00.018-07:00

So you’ve woken up on the floor on Sunday afternoon…well, at least you think it’s Sunday afternoon…and you’re pretty sure it’s the floor…fully dressed and your mouth tastes like you’ve just sucked the fur off of Big Foot’s Scroto Baggins, and the queasiness in your stomach seems to back up that theory. On top of that it feels as though you’ve been held underwater for 12 hours and beaten mercilessly about the head and neck with a pillow case full of gravel and oranges, and, despite all of the windows being open in the middle of winter, your room smells like a combination of a primate house in need of maintenance, the men’s room at Wrigley Field during the seventh inning stretch of the second game of a double-header {shudder}, and the set of a porno after the filming of But Bongo Fiesta XXII {hork}. What the Hell happened? My guess is either you have a hangover, or you live a very, very interesting life and you’re lactose intolerant. We’ve all had a hangover at some point in our lives. If you haven’t then you need to get out of here right now…you seriously creep me out. The question at hand is why do we get hung over after an innocent night slugging down Jager bombs and 14 shots of Cuervo? Why, dear Odin, why does my body treat me so badly?

The medical term for the hangover is Veisalgia. It essentially means pain following debauchery. Aptly named. Symptoms of a hangover vary from person to person but generally include: headache, poor sense of overall well-being, diarrhea, inability to put up with your shit, anorexia, tremulousness (yes, it’s a word), fatigue, strong attraction to couches and nausea. Hangover symptoms reach maximum at about the time that blood alcohol levels reach zero. Research on hangovers varies and is pretty sparse considering the percentage of the population that experiences them and the number of lost workdays incurred due to overindulgence. However, most research agrees that an ethanol dose of 1.5 - 1.75 gms/kg body weight will almost always produce hangover symptoms in those susceptible individuals. Note the last four words in that sentence – “in those susceptible individuals.” Some people (or, as I like to call them – douchebags) are not genetically prone to having hangovers. Must be nice. According to those numbers, I would need to consume about ten beers to ensure that I get a hangover. I think it’s safe to assume that number is correct.

Before I get too far into discussing hangovers I think it makes sense to talk a bit about the properties of ethanol. Ethanol is a stimulant in small doses and a depressant in large doses. It is a diuretic and an excellent solvent for organic chemical reactions. Quick quiz: other than ethanol, name one other flammable liquid that you would gladly drink if I handed a glass to you. I’ll give you a minute. None? Hrmm… That should probably tell you something. Here is some other info taken directly from the MSDS for ethanol:

Potential Health Effects - Eye: Causes severe eye irritation. May cause painful sensitization to light. May cause chemical conjunctivitis and corneal damage. Skin: Causes moderate skin irritation. May cause cyanosis of the extremities. Ingestion: May cause gastrointestinal irritation with nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. May cause systemic toxicity with acidosis. May cause central nervous system depression, characterized by excitement, followed by headache, dizziness, drowsiness, and nausea. Advanced stages may cause collapse, unconsciousness, coma and possible death due to respiratory failure. Inhalation: Inhalation of high concentrations may cause central nervous system effects characterized by nausea, headache, dizziness, unconsciousness and coma. Causes respiratory tract irritation. May cause narcotic effects in high concentration. Vapors may cause dizziness or suffocation. Chronic: May cause reproductive and fetal effects. Laboratory experiments have resulted in mutagenic effects. Animal studies have reported the development of tumors. Prolonged exposure may cause liver, kidney, and heart damage.

The LD50 (the point at which half of the test subjects die from exposure) is 10.3 g/kg. That’s about 10 times more than the quantity it takes to ensure a hangover. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I could even drink 100 beers in one sitting when I was in college…not that I’d remember it if I could.

Even though we know all of this we still gladly slug down drink after drink nightly. Why? Apparently it’s fun to slowly kill yourself…just ask Michael Hutchins. We truly are a stupid species. No other animal species on the planet (with the possible exception of one type of lemur) intentionally consumes large amounts of ethanol. Alas, such is our lot. Anyway, let’s say you’ve decided to rain Hell on yourself, and you pour a couple of mason jars of white lightening down your gullet at the office Christmas party. The next day you wake up in an alcohol-induced fog that you feel can only be relieved by self-trepanation and immediate death to your effing loud-arse roommates. What gives?

Now, if you know anything about biochemistry the reasons for expressing hangover symptoms are generally pretty straightforward. I’ll try to explain the processes as simply as possible just in case you’ve stumbled in here after a night of fierce imbibery. Drinking alcohol has a direct effect on the production and action of some of our body’s vital hormones, and the effects can literally range from grogginess to death. One of these process disruptions is immediately obvious to everyone. During normal operation the endocrine system produces a compound called anti-diuretic hormone (ADH) that makes the body retain water. Alcohol causes an immediate decrease in ADH production. So the body tries to void itself of as much water as possible sending our intrepid drinker on repeated trips to the bathroom. Once the body realizes that it’s losing too much water it starts over-producing ADH during the hangover causing us to be thirsty, bloated and bitchy.

Along with the purging of water, alcohol disrupts the production of several other hormones that regulate blood electrolyte levels and, consequently, blood pressure. Both aldosterone and cortisol production decrease while drinking which at first lowers blood pressure, but during the hangover phase the upswing in production of those hormones causes an increase in blood pressure and the muscle weakness, fatigue, vomiting, and loss of appetite that follow. The disruption in cortisol production also impairs the liver’s ability to make glucose and essentially starves the brain and body of that key sugar. This can result in fatigue, irritability, lack of attention and in conjunction with other hormonal imbalances may interfere with the body’s normal circadian rhythms which can throw off our internal clock by several hours. This is probably why you get that lovely I-just-stepped-off-of-the-slow-flight-from-New Zealand feeling the day after drinking heavily. Interestingly, cortisol also redistributes body fat from the arms and legs and uses it to create my beautifully sculpted beer gut for apparently no reason. Alcohol also causes an increase in production of two other compounds (rennin and thromboxane), both of which further exacerbate the increased blood pressure and result in an increased heart rate. This may be why there is an increase in mortality from heart attacks during a hangover. On top of blood pressure running all over the shop, alcohol increases the acidity of your blood by messing with your metabolism, and the higher your blood acidity the worse your hangover will be.

So, basically alcohol causes dehydration and disruption of critical endocrine functions that regulate some of your body’s key systems including blood pressure, heart rate, metabolism and elimination of toxins. Nice work. Hangovers are the body’s direct response to the disruption of those systems. You may notice that I didn’t mention whether or no you are more likely to get a hangover from certain types of alcoholic drinks. Some people swear that you are more likely to feel like cold poop in the morning if you drink whiskey or red wine instead of drinking vodka. The compounds that often get the (middle) finger pointed at them are called congeners, and they are the by-products of distillation. Dark drinks like whiskey and wine mentioned above have high concentrations, while light drinks like vodka and gin have less. Cheaper liquors have more congeners since more expensive brands can afford to filter out the suspect compounds. Having said that, there are two things that make me doubt the anecdotal evidence against congeners. The first is that the research is all over the place. One study will find a direct correlation while another finds no difference in hangover rate or severity between liquors. Also, (I’m sure I’m going to hear a bunch of gripes about this one, but) despite popular opinion, there is no research that shows mixing drinks makes you more drunk, or gives you a worse hangover. The second reason is that the majority of studies that deal with hangovers and drunkenness in general are done with pure ethanol. Some people may have allergies to specific congeners found in certain drinks which will tend to make their hangover worse, but it seems to me that the jury is still out on the poor, vilified congeners.

Now that you have a hangover what can you do to get rid of it as soon as possible? The short answer: nothing. Not exactly what you wanted to hear, I know. None of the cures that you’ve heard of will actually work, and many of them may actually exacerbate the problems. You just have to hold tight onto that chaise lounge so it doesn’t run away until your body can get its hormone levels back in check. How do you prevent yourself from getting a hangover? Easy - drink less. There are a bunch of things that contribute to the severity and likelihood of getting a hangover including: smoking, weight, age, mental health, allergies and rate at which you drink. So if you’re a skinny, old, mentally deranged smoker with hay fever that just decided to slam a bottle of Goldschlager through a funnel you’re in for some bad ones tomorrow. Suck it up. Besides, you really need to catch up on your daytime TV anyway.

Big thanks to the Hippy and Greg for suggestion.

Is it 4:20 yet?

2009-12-30T09:47:00.005-07:00

Sin. Degradation. Vice. Insanity. Debauchery! The smoke of hell! A vicious racket with its arms around your children!

Am I talking about Fox News? The Republican Party? Teletubbies? My first apartment? Although, I could be describing any of the above, what I am in the mood for today is a little of the diggidy dank. Colorado has seen a bit of a mini entrepreneurial boom in the midst of this nationwide recession with the decriminalization of marijuana and the opening of dozens of massively profitable herbal dispensaries throughout the state. This economic windfall has stirred up many of the same old questions and fears about pot that have been beaten into the American psyche over the past 70 years. Is it a gateway drug? Will it lead to increased crime? Is it the demon seed of Satan that will morally corrupt our youth? Can it get out grass stains? To be honest and up front I’ve never really bought the party line about Aunt Mary (it should be clear by now that I don’t buy any party lines), and I’ve always been a bit frustrated when I hear people regurgitating fear-based marketing ploys that were created in the 1930’s. Boooriiing… So I thought that I’d dig down deep into the corner of the bag to see if I can smoke out some of the truth about this wacky weed.

Marijuana has been cultivated as a crop for almost 5000 years. It is perhaps the oldest non-food crop known to man. In fact the first woven fabric ever discovered is believed to have been made from hemp. The seeds from the plant are an excellent source of oil and have been consumed as a food source for eons. It was considered one of the five sacred plants in ancient India and was often left as an offering on royal tombs throughout the world. Its use for medicinal purposes dates back thousands of years. When it was brought to the Americas it was deemed so useful that it was required to be grown by early settlers. It was used heavily in the industrial revolution as a source of fiber for textiles and was even turned into plastics and fuel. So why is it that now this seemingly miraculous plant is placed in the same realm of criminality as assault with a deadly weapon? The answer is simple when placed in the context of U.S. history, or, more appropriately, geography.

In the early 1900’s the Southwestern states were still fighting for their identities and were just beginning to emerge from the dusty, trail-riding days of the Wild West. As part of that struggle for identity the indigenous people of the area, namely Mexicans, had to either be assimilated or vilified, much the same as the Indian population throughout the rest of the U.S. was treated. In order to control the public perception of Mexicans stereotypes were created and attacked viciously. They were portrayed and seen as lazy criminals that lay around poisoned by the loco weed which gave them superhuman strength and a voracious appetite for white women. So, as a way of controlling the native population, part of their culture, (smoking marijuana) was first banned and marked with a scarlet letter forever more in the Southwest. California, Texas, and Louisiana all passed fear-based laws in the early 1920’s strictly to control and incarcerate the Mexican population. Soon, state-by-state, similar laws began to spring up. After the Great Depression in the 30’s in order to protect scarce white jobs from brown people shwag was officially criminalized by the federal government. The propaganda war was so well executed that many of the stereotypes surrounding whacky tabacky still linger today, and constantly fall at orthogonal angles to common sense.

Today marijuana laws and the “war” on drugs are truly insane and wholly outrageous. Through the Office of National Drug Control Policy, federal and state governments spend $50 billion per year on this “war”, which is equal to the combined budgets for all of our country's agriculture, energy, and veteran's programs – three times more than is spent on Food Stamps and the Space and Technology budget. Meanwhile, it is estimated that the market for illegal drugs is about $322 billion. Seem a little lopsided to anyone? This war on drugs is more like a war on logic itself. Drug kingpins obviously factor the losses into their costs just like any other business. They could conceivably pay double what the government spends to buy security and develop technology for their illegal operations and still walk away with $222 billion annually. Futile, pointless, and stupid if you ask me.

Current estimates are that over 25% of all of the pot consumed in the U.S. is grown within its borders; the street value of which is anywhere from $10 to $25 billion. How does that relate to the annual harvest of corn, our #1 cash crop? Last year the value of our entire corn harvest was $19 billion. Hmmm… So that makes dope our top cash crop in the U.S. even though only a quarter of our supply is grown here. The DEA estimates that somewhere between 1 and 3 million Americans grow pot…yes, million. Of those around 100,000 to 200,000 are considered “commercial” operations, or around 2000 to 4000 commercial farms per state. All of them illegal and punishable by life in prison without parole.

Seem like our $50 billion is going to good use now? Yeah? How about this then? About 100 million people in the U.S. readily admit that they have used dope more than once. Although statistics for illegal substances tend to vary, there are anywhere from 25 to 60 million current consumers of the chronic. That’s up to one sixth of the total population. Partay! How much money changes hands from this single herb? Let’s say that a joint costs $5. If all of the stoners in the states (40 million) smoke three blunts per week, we’re looking at least $31 billion every year. It could be as much as four times that. Possible tax revenues are nothing to thumb your nose at. I found this excellent article about the economics of legalization written by a Harvard economist that does a much netter job explaining the situation than I can.

If the war on drugs is a complete waste, then the criminal laws surrounding giggle twig offenses border on the diabolical. As I write this there are around 200,000 inmates in federal prisons for marijuana-related offenses, mostly simple possession cases. Add another 30,000 for state pens. Currently ganja is classified as a Schedule 1 Controlled Substance along with GHB, heroine and LSD. These substances are considered to have a high potential for abuse, no accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and no accepted safety for use of the drug even under medical supervision. What the?!? Less-harmful Schedule 2 substances include morphine, cocaine, and PCP. Uhh… I’m sure that makes sense to someone… Since it is a Schedule 1 Controlled Substance crimes involving pot hold hefty fines and punishments, including potential revocation of over 400 federal benefits (student loans, subsidies, business licenses, etc.) that are not denied to convicted murderers, pedophiles and rapists. Possessing the equivalent amount of pot as pack of cigarettes is felony offense in many states, and is definitely a trip to the big house if you take it across state lines because then a local offense becomes federal. Even something as benign as selling bongs in Idaho carries a possible sentence of 9 years without the possibility of parole. Any idea what the average sentence for murder in the United States is? Turn your screen upside down for the answer. It’s about fifteen years. Smell what I’m stepping in yet?

There has never been a recorded instance of someone dying or even overdosing on grass…ever. There is no known lethal dose. 435,000 people per year die from smoking tobacco. 85,000 people die from alcohol related issues, not counting drunk-driving deaths - tack on 17,000 more for those. Want to know something else? 60% of all homicides are attributed to alcohol use. Throw on ~ another 12,000 there. We lose another 32,000 folks to adverse reactions to legal prescription drugs annually. The total number of deaths attributed to illicit drug use comes out to 17,000 per year of which exactly zero are attributed to marijuana use. That’s right, zero. Now, even I find the zero number a little hard to swallow, but I’m not the guy writing toe tags. The DEA itself has concluded: "In strict medical terms marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume. For example, eating 10 raw potatoes can result in a toxic response. By comparison, it is physically impossible to eat enough marijuana to induce death. Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within the supervised routine of medical care.” Yet it still remains taboo federally.

Fine. It has hundreds of uses, is a great revenue stream, and you can’t die from using it, but won’t it make kids want to start huffing glue and lay on my couch all day listening to Bob Marley? I don’t want my kids living with me forever, you know. It’s a gateway drug, right? The Institute of Medicine's 1999 report on marijuana explained that marijuana has been mistaken for a gateway drug in the past: "Because it is the most widely used illicit drug, marijuana is predictably the first illicit drug most people encounter. Not surprisingly, most users of other illicit drugs have used marijuana. In fact, most drug users begin with alcohol and nicotine before marijuana, usually before they are of legal age." Alcohol and tobacco, which are legal and thousands of times more lethal, are the true gateway drugs. As far as the psychological and physiological effects of smoking or ingesting pretendica goes, study after study shows that the effects of use, even in heavy users (you know who you are), disappear after one stops using MJ on a daily basis. No long-term health effects, it’s non-addictive, and the body can’t build up a tolerance or a dependence. The one true negative side effect comes from smoking it, since inhaling superheated smoke is never a good idea and tar levels in cannabis are higher than in tobacco. Having said that, even my stoner neighbor with his six-foot bamboo steamroller and four-foot bong can’t smoke two ounces of pot every day, which is the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes.

Medical marijuana advocates estimate that the aggregate annual sales tax revenue that's paid by the approximately 400 legal dope dispensaries in California is $100 million. As of right now, Colorado has around 100 doobie dispensaries in operation or planning operation. The largest is in Colorado Springs and serves 1400 patients to the tune of $30,000 monthly sales tax revenue. Many dispensaries get their weed from private growers, many of which have been growing dope illegally for years. Now the illegal operations must become legit and have to claim their sales on their annual income taxes. This will have two major effects. First, obviously income tax revenues will be reaped from what was previously black-market sale. And second, these growers who by default have been selling to illegal dealers will now cater to the legal enterprises, which will mean a decrease in supply for non-dispensary sellers. Finding weed will be harder and harder for the guys that sell out of their apartments as the farmers begin to offer their high-quality harvest preferentially to boutiques. So, either there will be fewer dudes hawking pot or they will be selling ditch weed, which will drive their customers to herbal shops anyway. Win-win.

The stigma that has followed pot around for the past century has been nothing short of amazing. It is one of those propaganda wars that was waged so effectively at the time we now have great difficulty separating truth from fear-based marketing. The vilification of this plant to control minorities is a shame, and I believe this underlying racism in the U.S. is what keeps it illegal today. Untold numbers of cancer patients, college students, chronic pain sufferers, people with autoimmune disorders, vision problems, depression, paralysis, etc. are made de facto criminals or denied treatment for their maladies and billions of dollars are wasted on prosecution of a futile “war” and lost to the black market because some cowboy lost his girlfriend to a Mexican over 100 years ago. Silly and shameful. Do small towns need 20 dispensaries? No. However, as with any new business, we should let the market decide who and how many survive. Should we sell it to kids? No. Should people drive after they do ten b-rips and slug down eight brownies. No. Simple common sense regulations on marijuana usage will be infinitely better for the country than cramming the prisons full of non-violent people that are only there because of mandatory minimum sentencing and ignorance. So I say pass the Dutchie from the left hand side and lay down your swords. It’s time to end this war.

Here are a couple of useful links for more info: Reefer Madness video, Early Propaganda, War on Drugs, and CO marijuana law.

Movember

2009-11-29T09:09:00.003-07:00

Somebody is diagnosed with prostate cancer every 8 minutes. Every 18 minutes somebody dies from the disease. This year (2009) there have been 192,280 new cases of prostate cancer in US males alone and 27,360 deaths. It is the second-leading cause of cancer death in the US behind only lung cancer, which killed 88,900 bro’s this year. Everyone is aware of women’s health issues relating to breast cancer, and every-other car that passes has a pink ribbon proudly displayed to confirm the fact that nearly the entire population of the world cares deeply about boobs. However, nobody seems to care about prostate cancer awareness because, frankly, it’s not sexy. Quite the opposite, actually. So this year I decided to join an elite organization of men (and a few hirsute women) who’s only goal is to change the face of men’s health.

Since 2003 the Movember movement has been raising awareness about men's health issues, and the donations that the foundation brings in each year directly help over 22,000 dudes with prostate and testicular cancer through research and development into cures, prevention and education. All the organization asks in return is that members start off the month clean-shaven and grow a moustache for the entire month formerly known as November. The style of your Mo is up to artistic discretion. This seemingly simple task is not without it’s perils, however. In 2006 five men died from complications which all started from ingrown mustache hairs. And I’m sure I can speak for many of my other Mo Bro’s when I say that the backlash from the opposite sex is…substantial. But the cause is just, and The Hippy talked me into it, so you can blame him.

Anyway, I have dutifully rocked the Mo for the entire month.of Movember. I think I’ve probably raised more eyebrows than awareness, but whenever people ask what the Hell is wrong with my face I take it as an opportunity to curse The Hippy and preach the prostate cancer gospel. My manscaping effort is shown in the pic above. It turns out that without trimming the beast for 30 days my Mo will grow ~3/4 inch. That ends up being around .00000231 miles per hour, not exactly a blistering pace, but respectable enough to warrant looks of disdain all month. For your education, the longest mo on record belonged to an Indian gent and was 12.5 feet long in 2004. He hadn’t shaved in 22 years. Ew.

Let’s just say that if I were to let mine grow out for another month I would be looking for other accommodations…It was a fun ride for a worthy cause, and if anyone wants a ride of their own you’ve got one day to speak up.

Gett This

2009-11-12T08:19:00.003-07:00

Seven score and six years ago the central mythological figure of American politics gave a speech to 15,000 onlookers at the dedication of a cemetery on the site of the battle that resulted in the largest number of casualties in the entire civil war. The figure was, of course, Abraham Lincoln, and the site was Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. This week marks the 146th anniversary of that speech which has become one of the most-quoted, most-mimicked, and most-influential political addresses in American history, and we’ve had some doozies.

The speech was delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, during the American Civil War, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg. The Battle of Gettysburg took place from July 1-3 and resulted in around 46,000 to 51,000 casualties in that short time span. At the end of the last day of fighting there the battlefield contained the bodies of more than 7,500 dead soldiers and several thousand horses of the Army of the Potomac and the Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia. All that carnage strewn about a wheat field in the middle of summer in Pennsylvania had to smell real nice…{wretch}. Gettysburg is often noted as a turning point in the war for many reasons, but I think it is telling that after the loss at Gettysburg Lee's Confederate army conducted no more strategic offensives and merely reacted to the initiative of Ulysses S. Grant for the remaining two years of the war. SOunds like they had their tails tucked firmly you-know-where.

So, around four months after the battle, when the burial of the American soldiers that were lost was about halfway done (remember there were no backhoes back then…{hork}), a formal dedication ceremony to remember the fallen and consecrate the site was put together. The official program organized for that day included:

Music, by Birgfield's Band
Prayer, by Reverend T.H. Stockton, D.D.
Music, by the Marine Band
Oration, by Hon. Edward Everett
Music, Hymn composed by B.B. French, Esq.
Dedicatory Remarks, by the President of the United States
Dirge, sung by Choir selected for the occasion
Benediction, by Reverend H.L. Baugher, D.D.

The intended main event on the program that day was not the President’s remarks, rather it was the oration given by Edward Everett. Everett's almost 14,000-word speech was two hours long and, although it wasn’t poorly written or received, was greatly overshadowed by Lincoln’s simple address that followed. The political import of his words cannot be understated. Here was a president that was forced into a civil war that he didn’t want, and was constantly fighting against his mishandling of it. American casualties and damages were higher than any war before or since, and he had just instituted a draft. In short, he was on the fast track to sawing logs for a living. back in Illinois. However, the President seized this opportunity to use the battle to galvanize the nation and pull his arse out of the fire. So, after the two hour discourse given by the previous speaker (and the people in the crown had the chance to wake up), the President took the stage and said the following words:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate---we can not consecrate---we can not hallow---this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us---that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion---that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain---that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom---and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

That’s it. In two minutes and roughly ten sentences Abraham Lincoln had captured, penned and delivered one of the most-important speeches in all of American history. It was over so quickly that the photographers didn’t even have time to get set up, so there are no known pictures taken of the speech. The speech was powerful enough to keep him in office, which, as we all know, led to his eventual assassination. At the time, newspapers either panned or praised it depending upon what side of the aisle they were on, but the simplicity and direct nature of this speech have allowed it to live on through almost 150 years and continue to be an example for many speeches and addresses today.

I think all political speeches should be limited to ten sentences, don’t you?

Chew on This

2009-10-30T08:39:00.005-06:00

We’ve had a pretty heady month by Daniel P. Daniel standards with our excellent discussion on the origins of human morality (big round of applause to TJ and Bill, everyone), so I thought that it would be nice to take it down a couple of notches and revert back to old form. Get back to the basics so to speak. What’s on the table for this week, you ask? I’m not going to talk about what’s on the table; rather I think a discussion about what’s going on under the table is in order. How’s a frank conversation about blow jobs sound? Good? I thought you might like that. Actually I’m not going to be discussing blow jobs directly. {Boo…Hisss…} Yeah, I know I get you all excited about it then I snatch it out of your hands. If you’re married you’re probably used to it. No, the topic of discussion for this round is something very closely related to hogan smoking. In fact, many of you are slobbering all over it right now. It’s something so pervasive and seemingly miniscule that you don’t really notice it until you start looking, then you realize that it can be found everywhere. It’s one of those things that we somehow manage to ignore even thought it is everywhere, and once you notice it, it drives you nuts. So let’s talk about gum. Yes, chewing gum. Hey, wait a minute…get back here…

Humans have been chewing gum for thousands of years to quench thirst, freshen breath, clean our teeth, annoy teachers and help suppress our ravenous oral fixation. The first known types of gum were made from tree sap. Mmm, tree sap. Then we moved on to wax and chicle, a type of sap from the sapodilla tree of Mexico and Central America. Here’s an interesting tidbit: about 150 years ago chicle was introduced to an American candy maker who then launched us into the modern gum era. Who was this intrepid soul that introduced the Mexican chaw to the Americas? None other than General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Remember the Alamo! {POP!} Nowadays modern gums are made from industrial plastic resins or rubber so they last longer without breaking down in the harsh environment of the human mouth.

The desire for the everlasting piece of gum has led us into the era of the super gum that never breaks down because it is made from synthetic chemicals. Now we can chew and chew and chew until eventually we suck all of the flavor out of the gum, but the gum base will essentially remain unchanged forever. I think we all knew that weird ass girl in high school who chewed the same piece of gum for nine months, right? She probably still has it in her curio cabinet next to her collection of toenail clippings. Even our digestive system can’t break the gum base down. Seriously, this guy can eat a Cessna 150, and we can’t digest a single stick of Double Mint? This brings me to the point of the old wives’ tale about a swallowed piece of gum sticking around in your guts for seven years. It’s just not true. To prove it, here’s a little experiment for you to try out at home, or the office depending upon how weird you actually are. It’s simple: just slug down a huge wad of Big League Chew mixed up with some corn and sift through your deposits until you find the undigested gum. The corn will act as an indicator as to when you should start looking. Once you find it, give it a good rinse and pop it back in your mouth. Be sure to report your findings back to me (so I can capture your I.P. address and ban your sick ass from the site). Not that curious now, are you? In fairness to all of the old wives out there I did manage to find one case on the books of a four-year old that swallowed 5-7 pieces of gum every day since he grew teeth until he had a "'taffy-like' trail of fecal material" leaking from his nether regions which eventually had to be suctioned out of his rectum. {Hork…} Nice parental guidance on that one, guys.

Who cares if you can’t digest gum, anyway? It stands to reason that since we cannot break the gum base down in the acid-filled, bubbling Hell that is our digestive system then the natural environment has no chance. Modern gums are not biodegradable. Take a look down next time you are outside. All of the little black splotches covering the sidewalk are the remnants of someone’s once intimate relationship with a piece of flavored rubber. They are everywhere. If you’re feeling adventuresome run your hand under the table at a restaurant, park bench, or your seat on the bus and hope that you only find the dried up old stalactites of Hubba Bubba not a warm hunk that some hobo just finished slobbering on. Next to cigarette butts chewing gum is the second largest littering item in the world, and we’ve already gone over the cigarette butt filth here. This discarded gum is the bane of city managers and maintenance personnel worldwide. Specialists must be called in to steam, blast, etch or scrape that gooey mess off of pathways, sidewalks, buildings, landmarks, etc. at a huge cost to taxpayers. Because of this, chewing gum is the one thing that we eat that actually increases in value after we are done with it.

To illustrate that fact, let’s say that a pack of gum costs $1.50. With 15 pieces of gum per pack, each piece costs around $0.10 before it is chewed. After it is chewed and strategically placed in the ear of the bust of Ronald Reagan downtown, each piece costs about $1.50 to clean up. That’s a 15 times increase in value, making the cost to clean up one pack of gum somewhere in the vicinity of $22.50. The costs of cleaning up seemingly innocuous wads of chewing gum is so high, in fact, that the country of Singapore until recently had a ban on all recreational gum sales.

How do these costs add up across the U.S. and worldwide? According to the National Confectioners Association gum sales in 2008 reached retail sales of $2.7 billion which translates into 0.4 billion pounds of gum. Taking some quick measurements from the pack of gum sitting next to me here, that translates into around 1.31 lbs. of gum purchased for every U.S. citizen from 0 to 120 years old. That’s something on the order of 314 pieces per resident per year. If you factor out the people that don’t have teeth that brings us close to one piece per day for the folks in the U.S. alone. If even 1/8 of all of that slobbery plastic has to be cleaned up professionally, the costs of cleanup nearly equal the retail sales numbers. Obviously there are economies of scale to be factored into the cleanup, but I think you get an idea of how high the costs are.

Worldwide, the chewing gum industry in 2006 was estimated to be worth $19 billion in retail sales which translates into 1.3 million metric tons of gum. Based on the numbers taken from my pack (which may or may not be representative), that turns out to be at least 100 billion sticks of gum sold per year. That amount of gum smeared 1/16” think would cover 300 square miles. If you were to stack the sticks of gum up they would reach to the moon and back 3 times. Volumetrically speaking, this would be singe cube of gum that is over 350 feet per side, covered in gravel, hair and ants of course. How many gallons of human saliva does it take to chew a piece that big? {Shudder} You’re on your own for that one.

With that much gum and spit flying around it’s easy to see how the cleanup costs are out of line with the value of the product itself. So what can be done about it? Some officials propose that a cleanup tax should be added to each pack of gum at the point of purchase. The taxes collected would be used to offset costs incurred scraping ant-ridden messes from the stairs at the ballpark. Some major gum manufacturers spend millions of dollars every year trying to come up biodegradable gum that doesn’t stick to everything. They spend millions more in outreach programs encouraging people to chuck their spent gum in the trash. But I say these solutions don’t address the real issue which is the obvious oral fixation that humans have due to societal suppression of our sexual instincts. So, again, a simple, more beneficial solution is overlooked by gum manufacturers and the government: we need to be handing out more blow jobs. This is a win-win solution across the board. It will satisfy our genetically ingrained oral fixation. It will decrease the environmental costs of the manufacture and disposal of a non-biodegradable product. It will promote social interaction and well-being. It will give us an outlet to our frustrations and decrease stress levels which will in turn decrease health care costs. It’s a great form of exercise. It’s also good for team-building and fostering a good work ethic (they are called blow “jobs” after all). So I say instead of reaching for that stick of gum at the end of the day, slobber on a pole or some chuff instead.

Please join me in the “Blow Jobs for the Environment Campaign” and make all checks and charitable donations payable to Daniel P. Daniel.

The Source of Morality: Part IV

2009-09-25T07:42:00.007-06:00

This is the final essay on the discourse about the origins of morality as originally posted on TJ's blog.

Dan's Reply:

First of all I want to say, “Thank you,” for posing the question and sharing your views. It’s not very often that you find honesty and truth on the internet. Except maybe on YouTube…it’s usually a sad, sad version of truth, but you get what you pay for. It is easy in discussions such as this to break down into personal attacks and arguments to gain emotional ground with the audience. I’m glad to see that you guys are able to keep it on a level that is educated and informative. I’m also glad to see that such foul language as “moral relativism, anti-realism, emotivism, absolutism, and divine command theory” haven’t been thrown into the mix yet. Not only is jargon like that elitist, it is boring as well. If you’ll permit, I’d like to hijack your thread momentarily. Hopefully my comments will serve to further this interesting discussion.

In the interest of full disclosure, I suppose that I can be considered an agnostic regarding my religious point-of-view (which TJ aptly calls “Atheist Lite”). I tend to look at the issue of morality from a humanist/scientific point-of-view. So, to me, statements such as “The bible teaches…” immediately make me think, “The bible is an inanimate object and cannot teach anything. It must be read (not to mention written) and interpreted by people who (presumably) have moral values of their own.” So, in discussions about morality, I believe that although the beliefs of the people that wrote the bible have merit they must have gained those beliefs before writing the tome. It’s a bit of a cart-before-the-horse argument in my mind.

I can’t engage in a discussion about the origins of morality without first stating what I believe morality is. So, what exactly is “morality”? In my mind morality refers to the concept of human ethics, which pertains to matters of right and wrong -- also referred to as good and evil. The are miles of people lined up in front of me who have had way more time on their hands to devote to the study of morality. Marx, Nietzsche, Jung, Plato, Bill & Ted (be excellent to everyone) are just a few of those hopeless layabouts. The way I see it the ideas of what actions are good and what actions are evil are hopelessly entangled in the nature versus nurture argument.

It seems to me that we cannot separate the moral compass instilled upon us by society and the biological traits that we have accumulated over time (or the traits that were stuffed into us when we were created out of a pile of dirt, depending on your belief set). If I were a feral human that managed to survive in the wilderness from infancy without any human or pack-animal contact would I believe that tax evasion, cutting in line, or watching Jerry Springer while I’m at work was morally wrong? For that matter would I even have morals? Some people might ask if I have them now, but that’s another story entirely. Societal influence on morality is undoubtedly heavily weighted. The idea of what is right and what is wrong can only be argued from the perspective of the cultural and geographical location of any individual at any specific point in time. It’s easy to say that human sacrifice, infanticide, spousal abuse, racism, mass marketing, and women’s basketball are morally wrong from the our perspective at this point in time and this spot on the globe. However, we cannot impose our personal mores onto societies in other places and times. Is it wrong for me to slap my wife? The answer is obviously yes. Or it’s mostly yes. Well, it depends on my mood, really, but that’s getting a bit off track. Would it be wrong to deny her the right to vote, show her face in public, and walk beside me on the street? Again, it depends on my mood. Only joking of course, but you can see where I’m going with this. I look at my son, who is a toddler at the moment, as about a half-clean slate in regards to societal mores. His beliefs about what is right or wrong (although they will follow a distinct pattern of development) will be created in situ. At any rate it will be interesting to see how my son’s ideas will be influenced since the world is getting smaller and foreign traditions and values are immediately available to him through the media and worldwide connectivity. His generation will undoubtedly be screwed up, especially since they have us as parents.

Just like my son, we all follow certain stages of moral development in our lives. Kohlberg tests this with his Heinz dilemma. The Heinz dilemma is stated as follows:

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a pharmacist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the pharmacist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000, which is half of what it cost. He told the pharmacist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the pharmacist said, "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

I first heard about the Heinz dilemma from an eighth-grade girl who’s science experiment I was judging…precocious bitch. It turns out that there are six categories of moral development that answers will fall into. I don’t want to get too deep into that (unless invited), but I’m curious what you guys think of this.

Since we’re on the subject of progeny it seems like a good point to look the genetic origins of morality or the nature side of this conundrum. Simply-stated - humans are animals. We have the same zoological traits and biological drives as any other animal in the world: procreation, self-preservation, fashion, and hunger. We are top predators, and, as such, we are lethal adversaries and have the potential to cause great physical harm, even death, to ourselves and to each other. It would not do to have us (or any other top predator) going around maiming and killing one another as adults. It can be said that sometimes in nature infanticide (lions killing the young or the above-mentioned Suruwahá Indians) occurs, but this is usually for lack of resources or preservation of a specific line of genes. Also, often, young animals kill one another in the battle for resources (birds eject their siblings from the nest). However, it is rare that adults kill one another, with the exception of humans, dolphins (of all creatures), and animals in captivity. In skirmishes over territory, mates, the TV remote or food large predators rarely kill one another, especially in socialized animals such as wolves, lions, primates, etc. It wouldn’t make sense to remove a healthy adult that can aid in protecting, hunting, gathering, tending to the young, etc., especially since so many resources have been spent on growing that individual into an adult. So a paradox occurs in dangerous animals. We have the tools to trap, kill and consume our prey, but we have a strong genetic aversion to expending the energy to kill one another. We socialized animals must necessarily have aversions to theft, deceit, and murder; since without these aversions we would not get very far, raping and murdering each other constantly and continually living in fear of being raped and murdered. Since humans are so potentially dangerous we have even extended our vulnerability by remaining nude (hairless) throughout or lives. It is an outward symbol that we need each other to survive. I guess to sum up I believe that the origins of morality along with the definition of what is right or wrong are rooted not only in our environment and upbringing, but at the same time they are bolstered by an innate genetic component.

This line of thinking is very close to the Anthropic Principle of physics. We observe the universe that way that it is because we exist. Meaning that everything in the universe has to be how it is in order for us to exist in it. A little one way or another and POOF no Judge Judy on weekdays, no Laffy Taffy, and no morality.

Although I am an agnostic let me just throw it out there that I understand that religion has formative aspects when speaking about morality. It is unavoidable for something that is as ingrained into society to as religion to have huge influence on daily life and human interaction. However, when it comes to morality I believe that religion and religious beliefs are factors in what can be termed cultural evolution and are not (or are probably not) innate. I will get back to that in a moment.

While we are on the topic of religion, I want to take a brief look at the Ten Commandments since they have come up several times in the discussion. On inspection, it seems that they essentially fall into two categories. I’ll call them religious commandments and non-religious commandments. The first four commandments are the religious commandments (no other gods, no idolatry, don’t take the lords name in vain, and rest on the Sabbath). The last six can be considered essentially non-religious (honor mom and pop, don’t kill, steal, cheat, lie or covet). It seems like the first group of laws are there to present an authority figure and compete for ground with other religions – essentially marketing and indoctrination. They basically say, “I’m the Man, and if you don’t follow My rules I’ll put a pox on your family for four generations. Oh, by the way, you get Sundays off.” It’s interesting that these are the first of the commandments. I would think that killing and stealing would top the list, but I’m not big on authority figures. The last six of the commandments are what I would consider the meat of the list. These are the behaviors that affect our lives and interactions. I believe that these items are statements of boundaries that are deeply ingrained into any social animal’s psyche. Don’t kill, steal, cheat, lie, or covet because it will upset the delicate balance that we have worked so hard for over the last 1000 generations just as I discussed above. And honor Mom and Pop because you need them to watch the kids on date night.

Bill, you said that you have a hard time with believing that science can explain why we have this strong feeling of what we ought to do. Evolutionarily speaking human emotions (or, more generally if you like, the human brain) came about more easily than the adaptations that are required for walking upright, but they are no less necessary for human societies to function properly than having erect posture. So why do we have these feelings? My belief is that they are tied to what is called “altruism.”

Biological altruism is a bit of a strange beast. It can be seen in many animals besides humans. Prairie dogs, woodpeckers, primates, and bees as well as many, many others will call an alarm in the presence of a predator. Why would an animal put itself in harm’s way for the benefit of another, especially one that is not related? This is just one of a multitude of ways that species act to benefit a social group. It turns out that altruists who sacrifice themselves for the benefit of those with shared traits may have low selective value as individuals (check out www.darwinawards.com), but a population bearing such altruistic individuals will have higher reproductive values than one without them. This is essentially what TJ is getting at with the “hut-thatcher analogy” earlier. Conversely, social parasites that increase their frequency at the expense of others in a population may have high individual selective value, but they will depress the reproductive fitness of the population as a whole. Stated another way, natural selection will increase altruistic genes if individuals that benefit from the unselfish acts are themselves also carrying those genes for altruism.

I often hear natural selection described as the survival of the fittest: however, this implies and in my mind would better be called the destruction of the weak. If nature itself progresses through the destruction of the weak, then societies and social animals progress through the protection of the weak (altruism). These emotions and feelings that we are talking about are set in us in the same way that opposeable thumbs and our circulatory system are – they help us survive.

Now, back to cultural evolution for a bit. The information humans gather from ancestors and contemporaries can be purposefully changed to provide improved utility for themselves, their offspring, and others. The speed with which these purposeful modifications take place and the consequent speed of cultural change are limited primarily by human inventiveness. A cultural or technological improvement can now be proposed in one part of the world and implemented in another part almost immediately. Genetic evolution on the other hand is slow since it must await fortuitous accidental genetic changes in DNA before it can proceed, and each change may take a considerable number of generations before it can be incorporated into the population. It seems obvious that many profound social and cultural changes, such as those involved in the transition from slavery to feudalism, or from feudalism to capitalism, or from low tech to hi tech, are far too rapid to be caused by genetic changes. This disparity in speed between cultural and biological evolution indicates that they evolve on separate methodological tracks, yet the biological equipment needed to transmit and utilize cultural information (memory, perception, language, etc.) still connects them both.

It is clear that, since they can be consciously selected, social goals can be directed towards almost any objective that humans choose for themselves, such as wealth, poverty, chastity, obedience, revolution, and so on. So when we talk about the origins of morality it seems, to me at least, that our biology sets the framework, and we use our intellect make conscious decisions that affect the direction of societal beliefs. I guess that’s the crux of what I believe about morality summed up in one sentence. Could have saved us all a lot of time if I just said that in the beginning…

Thanks again for letting me join in. I hope I’ve shed a little light on the subject anyway. Anyway, thanks for the interesting, informative and frank discussion, and thanks for letting me chime in. I appreciate the generosity of letting me repost the conversation here, as well. I hope that my comments will spur more thought not just hate mail. Anyone else care to have their voice heard on this topic?

The Source of Morality: Part III

2009-09-25T07:33:00.006-06:00

Here is the third edition to our saga on the origins of morality. Enjoy.

Bill’s Reply: In the first part of your reply you asked the (not so simple) question “Is it wrong to kill?” This is indeed a difficult question because the word “kill” has so many uses in English language. So, you are correct when you say the definition is not so easy to come by. But let me ask this question instead, “Is it wrong to murder?” This question is less complex in that the overwhelming majority of people would say yes. In the same way it would be wrong to practice animal cruelty as well (i.e., killing or maiming for no reason). Is it wrong to kill someone or something in self defense? I would say not. Is it wrong to kill an animal for the purpose of survival?

Most people would say that the Inuit woman you mentioned would not be violating any moral code of ethics because she was acting on the instinct of motherly love. The point I’m trying to make here is that there is a difference between morals and instincts. Murdering and animal cruelty have no instinctual basis where as things such as killing in self defense or killing for food are quite rooted in it. As far as “right and wrong as it applies to humans”, I would say that it ONLY applies to humans. There has never been a case that I have seen or heard of where an animal demonstrated moral ethics. The actions of an animal are based purely on instinct while human actions are based on instinct as well as moral principles.

In your reply you made the statement that: “Everyone learned that they had their own part to play. Every person was important to the survival of the whole after a while, because everyone started to develop their own skills.” Well, what about the people who didn’t learn a skill that was beneficial to the tribe? What about the elderly people in the tribe who couldn’t contribute, or the maimed, or the mentally inferior? Preserving the lives of these individuals causes a drain on the resources of society and in no way enhances the survivability of the human race. Were these people simply killed in the name of social advancement? If it happened before recorded history we surely would not know it. There is no evidence to support such a premise. All I’m trying to do is look at the evidence as it presents itself. The evidence at hand would seem to suggest that there are things like compassion and kindness that often times tell us we ought to love and help these people, whether we want to or not. I don’t believe that it has anything to do with self preservation or the idea that we can’t live alone.

It seems to me that “what’s good for the tribe” or “social evolution” is unable to adequately justify giving “kindness” priority over personal well being. Or look at it another way; in our daily lives, cheating would often be more beneficial than truthfulness. On those occasions when we know we won't be caught, do we really refrain from cheating because we know, in the long run, society will be a better place because of our decision? The person who does this is an unusual person to say the least.

OK. I think we both agree that Moral Law exists. The question now seems to be: is Moral Law a social behavior we have learned and developed through necessity, or is it something altogether different – a real concrete truth that has always existed? Some of the things we have learned are mere conventions which might have been different. For example, we learn to drive on the right side of the road, but it might just as well have been the rule to drive on the left. Other things, like mathematics, are real truths that we have been taught but did not make up. Mathematics is what it is and we could not have made it different if we liked. So, which class does Moral Law belong to? I believe it belongs to the same class as mathematics. One of the reasons I believe this is because, as I said before, even though there are differences between the moral ideas of one culture and another (one time and another), the differences are not really that great. Not nearly as great as most people imagine.

You can recognize the same theme running through them all. On the other hand, mere conventions, like the rules of the road or the clothes people wear, may differ to any extent. Another reason is this. When you think about these differences between the morality of one culture and another, do you think that the morality of one culture is ever better or truer than that of another? If no set of moral ideas were better or truer than another, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality and there would be no moral progress. Progress doesn’t just mean to change; it means to change for the better. In fact, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others. Well, ok then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is altogether different than either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality. You are admitting that there is such a thing as a Real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that Real Right than others. Think of it this way; if your moral ideas can be better or truer then those of the ancient Romans, then there must be something – some Real Morality – for them to be true about. To put it another way; the reason your idea of the United States can be more or less true then mine is because the United States is a real place. The USA exists, apart from what either of us thinks. In the same way - our perceptions of morality may differ, but it is a real thing none the less.

One quick note about the Roman civilization. You mentioned that many of the privileged people felt little or no guilt about doing whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted. I agree with you that many people in that civilization did terrible things to one another. But the moral theme is still intact here. That moral theme is you can’t just do anything to anybody or be selfish in any circumstance you please. Although the Roman culture and others like them were corrupt, they still had the moral basics. To illustrate my point all we need to do is think of what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a culture where we were admired for cheating or running away in battle, or where people were proud of a man for double crossing all of his friends and family. We might as well try to imagine a culture where two plus two equals five.

At this point I would like to address the part of your reply in which you said that some Christians have approached you in the past, saying that you can’t be a law-abiding, decent person without the fear of going to Hell. Tim, my first response to this is “I’m sorry!” I’m sorry that you have been told this and that it made you angry. As a Christian myself, please accept my apologies for those who have approached you, or anybody else, with hatred or a self serving agenda. Secondly, I want to point out to you that this is not what the bible teaches. It would seem to me that the people who said these things to you have not researched the matter. If I heard fellow Christians saying these things, I would refer them to this verse in the bible:

“Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.” (Romans 2:14-15) Here, the apostle Paul is making reference to the fact that even though the Gentiles (non-Jews) didn’t have the laws of Moses to guide them, they still had laws written on their hearts. They had an internal guide so to speak. And this internal guide, I believe, is the Moral Law.

Toward the end of your reply you talked a good bit about the bible and Christianity. You said things like “The bible says this” and “Christians believe that”, and that the bible is read by many rather selectively. I agree with you that many people read only the bits of the bible that appeal to them and leave out the rest. That is why we don’t get much further: and that is why people who are fighting for different things can both say they are fighting for Christianity. So, I would say this – don’t judge the bible by what Christians do because people make mistakes, some big and some even bigger. Rather, judge the bible by what it says to do. Look at what the bible says and the context in which it says it. If you do this you will find the bible very solid. As far as critics are concerned, the bible is like an anvil that has worn out many hammers. It has taken a pounding and stood the test of time.

In regards to morality and the bible, the thing to understand is that the bible does not profess to teach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, has always known to be right. Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities – it’s quacks and crazy people who do that. In other words, people need to be reminded more than they need to be instructed. The real job of moral teaching is to keep bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles that we know to be right. You said it yourself when you said “I am a good person because it’s the right thing to do”. Well, why is it the right thing to do? There is something more than instinct at work here. Or at least it seems that way to me.

Now, for some final thoughts: As far as “what Christians believe” and the doctrine of Christian theology are concerned, I have not yet gotten within a hundred miles of that. All I have gotten to so far is that there seems to be a Power behind Moral Law and it is inside each of us, urging us to do the right thing and making us feel responsible and uncomfortable when we do wrong. At this point I don’t want to go completely into Christian beliefs. That is another subject altogether and I really hope we cover it and the Atheistic viewpoint in our up coming discussions. But for now I will say this: In the end, Christianity is quite comforting but it does not begin there. If there is a Power behind the Moral Law then, as far as I know, Christianity is the only thing that offers us any kind of explanation about it. It explains how the demands of Moral Law, which we all seem unable to meet, have been met on our behalf. Christianity does not really begin to make sense until we realize that there is a Moral Law and that we have broken it and put ourselves at odds with the Power behind it.

Tim’s Reply: You bring up some good points and, of course, there is a difference between murder and killing. There is a difference between self-defense and cruelty; there is a difference between sport and survival. I was pointing out with this example the nature of absolutes. The bees were another example. For most there is an enormous gray area, as there should be, and to make a commandment like “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is something that is all at once so absolute yet still so vague, it is absolutely impossible for ANY creature to follow.

I deliberately left my question open-ended like that when I asked: “is it wrong to kill?” because this is the one of the biggest moral issues that affects the Human species. This is one of the biggest issues in court, in religion, in the heart, in society. I didn’t bring up animal cruelty or maiming, nor did I bring up murder, since those were outside of the scope of the absolute. I don’t know anyone who would say that murder is OK (unless it’s related to war, in which case it’s justified differently – different conversation), nor do I know anyone who would torture another creature for his or her own pleasure. These people are called sociopaths in our culture.

I completely I agree with you that killing for survival or self-defense is not necessarily wrong, but even this has an enormous case-by-case gray area. Anyway, let’s call that horse dead and move on, shall we?

To your next point: “Well, what about the people who didn’t learn a skill that was beneficial to the tribe? What about the elderly people in the tribe who couldn’t contribute, or the maimed, or the mentally inferior? Preserving the lives of these individuals causes a drain on the resources of society and in no way enhances the survivability of the human race. Were these people simply killed in the name of social advancement?” In some cases, yes. The Suruwahá Indians in the Amazon Basin of Brazil kill infants that have birth defects, if they are of multiple births, or even if they are of an undesired gender. The cursed babies are said to have no souls and are put to death. This tribe doesn’t preserve the lives of those that would be a drain on the tribe, they kill the infants; it’s part of their culture. It still goes on today with this particular tribe, although many in the tribe feel that it’s wrong. But it’s happening, right now, and there is evidence to support such a premise. “OK. I think we both agree that Moral Law exists.” Well, I agree that morality exists, but I’m not really comfortable calling it Moral Law. I know it might just be semantics, but this definition seems just a bit too…I don’t know…formal for me.

Moving on: “The question now seems to be: is Moral Law a social behavior we have learned and developed through necessity, or is it something altogether different – a real concrete truth that has always existed?” Does it have to be one or the other? Setting it up like this seems to imply that it is either social or divine. What if it’s neither? What if it’s an artifact of nature or some genetic construct that prevents or causes changes in human behavior? What if it’s part of Earth’s gaiaology? Now I’ve never really given much credence to the Gaia Hypothesis, but saying for the sake of argument that it exists, could morality be a physical manifestation of that gaiaology forcing us to act out kindness or cruelty for the sake of the planet’s overall health? Something to ponder.
“The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is altogether different than either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality.” The moment that you say one set of morals are better than another, you are generally guilty of ethnocentrism, which is a cultural bias that pretty much everyone on the planet is, has been, or will be guilty of. I’m not sure that I could ever presume to know what Real Morality is, because my definition of it would be my definition, just as yours would be yours. I can’t really say that I know what Real Morality is. Who the hell am I? I’m just some schlub who has a couple of brain cells he can rub together and hope for a synapse. Measuring them both by a standard even is far too presumptuous, in my opinion, because there is no standard. Just because I think something is right or good or just, doesn’t mean that it is.
Let’s say for instance I see someone being mistreated. Not really beaten but maybe just shaken around a bit or yelled at. My first thought, my first visceral instinct might be a strong desire to get in the person’s face and say “Hey asshole, what’s your problem? Why do you have to treat this person that way? How do you like it?” Then start throwing down. Would this be the right thing to do?

You compared morality to mathematics, Bill, but I know how to figure out the area of a square. What’s the area of a theft?

“You are admitting that there is such a thing as a Real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that Real Right than others.” Well yes and no. What I said was I believe in morality and we should be good to each other because it’s the right thing to do. “Think of it this way; if your moral ideas can be better or truer then those of the ancient Romans, then there must be something – some Real Morality – for them to be true about. In the same way - our perceptions of morality may differ, but it is a real thing none the less.” I see what you’re saying here, Bill, I do, but what I can’t agree with is that my moral sense is somehow inherently better than the Romans was just because it’s different. Different doesn’t make it better just because it’s different. That’s the kind of thinking that keeps people divided. I know that’s not what you’re trying to say – probably wasn’t even a subconscious mental implication – but I think a lot of people take the moral high ground when they look at the world. Who can say that anyone’s moral ideas are ‘better’ or ‘truer’ than theirs were? I guess I’m just having a hard time with the Real Morality being concretized; I’m just not ready to do that. I only know what’s right and wrong to me, and what my own moral ‘code’ is. I can’t really throw it up and judge anyone else’s against mine; I’m not nearly so venerable as all that.

I appreciate your apology for the wackos that have thrown hellfire and damnation in my face, Bill, but you don’t have to. You’re not responsible for their insecurity in their own faith and moral fiber. I could just as easily apologize for all of the people that have said mean things to you as a religious person, but zeal works in both directions.

I think fear and intolerance are just part of the human condition, unfortunately. Some people try so very hard to be nothing more than what they already are. Some, on the other hand, try to be a little bit more.

Thanks for bringing up the golden rule. I think it’s one of the best things that’s ever been invented by the thinking, moral mankind, and it’s shown up in nearly the same form in every religion or philosophy that we have a record of (Wait – did I just make your case?) the oldest of which (that I could find) from 3200 BC was from the Hindu Hitopadesa who said "One should always treat others as they themselves wish to be treated." Apparently this guy was a fountain of morality and was quoted all of the time.

Bill’s Reply:

Some final thoughts: As far as the bible and it’s teaching of “Thou shalt not kill” is concerned, the word used for ‘kill’ in this instance is the Hebrew word ratsach which nearly always refers to intentional killing without a cause, or murder as we call it. The Hebrew language has many different words for ‘kill’. Some of the Hebrew words refer to accidental killing (nakah) and the killing of animals for food or sacrifice (shâchat). So, when the bible says Thou shalt not kill, it is saying you should not murder. It is not talking about accidentally taking a life or killing an animal for food.

The Suruwahá Indians that you mentioned are an interesting case. You said that the babies in this culture are killed because they have deformities or because they are of the wrong gender. You said “The cursed babies are said to have no souls and are put to death.” I think there is a misunderstanding here about the difference between morality and a belief of what some people think are the facts. Let me explain: A few hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Now, the reason we don’t execute people who claim to be witches today is because we don’t believe in such things. If we did – if we really thought that people had sold their souls to the devil and in return received supernatural powers and were using these powers to kill, then surely most people would agree that if anybody deserved the death penalty, it would be these individuals. There is no difference in moral principle here. The difference is simply about what is believed to be the facts. The people in old England believed that witches were real. Today, we don’t believe it. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches but there is no moral advance in not executing them when we don’t believe they actually exist. In the same way, if the Suruwahá Indians execute babies because they believe they are cursed, it would not be a moral advancement if they stopped doing it because they learned that these babies were not cursed. It would be an advance in knowledge but not an advance in morality.

As far as “ethnocentrism” is concerned, I agree that we have a tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of our own culture. And when we look closely we see moral differences that don’t sit well with us. But it seems to me that the moral theme of “Do as you would be done by” runs through all cultures, or at least to some degree it does. What we don’t see is “Do anything you want to do”.

You said “but what I can’t agree with is that my moral sense is somehow inherently better than the Romans was just because it’s different”. Well Tim, if your moral code gets closer to the theme of “Do unto others”, then I believe it is better then the Romans’ code.

Finally, in my opinion, there seems to be something above and beyond the ordinary facts of human behavior and it is quite real. It is a real law that none of us made but which we find pressing on us. And somehow we have the notion that we ought to obey it. Man ought to be unselfish and ought to be fair because, in the end, that is what moral law is all about.

Ooh, this is excellent, guys.

The Source of Morality: Part II

2009-09-25T07:28:00.005-06:00

Here is the second part to our continuing discussion of the origins of human morality.

Tim’s Reply:

Well Bill, it’s true that the source of morality is a sticky (but interesting) situation to discuss. As you wrote, it has to do with the concepts of right and wrong. Sometimes this is a very broad, very ambiguous concept, and sometimes it is very specific and absolute. Or at least, it is used so for the sake of argument or persuasion.

I ask a simple (not so simple) question: who defines what is right and what is wrong? Is it wrong to kill? Some would say yes without any clarification to the statement. Let me then ask again: Is it wrong to kill a wolf so that an Inuit woman can have a fur to keep her baby warm? It’s a different question now, isn’t it? Who determined that it was right for ancient humans to kill animals so that they could skin them and thereby ensure their own survival? The definition is not so easy to come by. I would say that right and wrong AS IT APPLIES TO HUMANS* is something that has evolved with us as we have learned what is best for our own survival as a species. You mentioned above that “Some people believe that all of the laws and codes of conduct are a mere product of thousands of years of social evolution and it is passed down by education for the benefit of all. They believe that it’s just a human invention.”

I think that this is close to the mark, but not so much that it’s an invention. As humans were evolving and learned to live in groups, extended families, tribes, etc. Everyone learned that they had their own part to play. Every person was important to the survival of the whole after a while, because everyone started to develop their own skills. They learned how to skin animals, how to treat leather, how to treat wounds, make weapons, make bread, fire, store food, communicate, cultivate crops, build homes, etc. Eventually even make things out of metal. But not everyone knew how to do everything else.

At this point, there was really no reason for one tribesman to kill another within the tribe, and I think this was understood because if one of them were killed, say the guy who knew how to thatch the huts, that’s something that could threaten the survival of all of them. Now I’m sure there were neighboring tribes who knew this too, and would try to kill the more important members of the tribe or whatever.

The point is, in a small community, when one person is removed, it affects everyone, and I don’t think that’s something that ever really went away from us. I think it predates any religion, because I think it predates any form of language. It’s a simple matter of survival. We cannot survive alone. Yes there were squabbles, yes this guy wanted that girl, etc, and this is also where the biologics came in; where the alpha males established the pecking order and the stronger genes flourished. Don’t think I was going to argue this sociologically only. It’s just that since morality is more of an esoteric topic, it lends itself to more of a behavioral rather than genetic discussion for the most part. I’m not saying that there isn’t a genetic motivator; I’m just not going to discuss it right now. End of disclaimer.

I think there is something to the herd behavior that would be relevant to mention at this point also when it came to the moral upbringing of the tribe. When everyone was doing their part; when everyone was contributing, when there was a healthy growth of the population, children learned by following the examples of their elders and the other villagers. Furthermore, since they were ostensibly raised by the village, there were not the egregious mistakes and prejudices that are passed down from generation to generation like we see today.

(* I say as it applies to humans because we have a double standard when it comes to morals and ethics. We always have, we always will, it’s just an accepted part of the Human condition. We’re more important than anything else on the planet. Don’t believe me? Here’s an example: It’s OK for us to go fishing, catch a shark and kill it. If a shark attacks a swimmer at a beach though, we will hunt it down and kill it. Fact.)

With civilization came a breakdown of morality from the “natural” morality that existed previously. I have to disagree with you that older civilizations had the same moralities that we share today. The Roman rulers believed that they had the gods on their sides. Hell, many believed that they were gods, and did not, at least overtly, feel any guilt at doing whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Some cared about their country and people, it’s true, but they were the divine and the noble, and through the luck of birthright, were privileged not poor. The poor have been lesser creatures since the advent of civilization. Now to your point earlier about selfishness, I’ll agree that there were some in these societies, (read here as the poor and a very, very small number of politicians) who were selfless in nature and cared more for others than for themselves. The rest believed that the world was made to serve and entertain them, be conquered, and by being conquered, serve and entertain their needs. Who would throw someone in an arena with lions today? We have boxing, not Gladiators.

I think it was probably little different in Egypt where the Jews were kept as slaves and worked building temples to other gods, don’t you think? I know you remember all of those stories about Moses. This does not demonstrate to me an abiding moral fiber, even in the deeply religious society that Egypt was.

For the remainder of my reply, I’m going to stick with what I consider the main ‘heavy hitting’ moral issues. I noticed you mentioned fairness, cutting in line, etc, and I don’t want to you to think that I’m ignoring that. I’m not really going to talk about these because I don’t believe that consideration and morality are on the same level. Assholes are assholes. They are as ubiquitous as biting insects and often just as hard to ignore, but being considerate or inconsiderate can wax or wane with a person’s mood. Whereas I don’t believe that a moral person will suddenly become amoral or vice versa. Ebenezer Scrooge being the exception, of course.

I’m going to shift my topic a bit because one of the most important arguments I’ve heard for morality is that it comes from the bible. Now Bill, I’m not saying that this is your argument, it’s just the one that I’ve heard the most. Many Christians who believe that morality comes from the bible, believe roughly that if they are not good people, if they do not follow the ways of the Lord, go to church on Sunday, confess, tithe, go on missions, or do whatever their particular sect of Christianity is supposed to do, that they will go to Hell and burn there for all eternity with Satan and his demons poking them with pitchforks.

Now these same people approach me, an atheist, and absolutely refuse to believe that I can be a good person without the fear of Hell hanging over me. They believe that there is nothing to keep me from flat out raping, pillaging, murder, and lawlessness because I have no fear of Hell. My first aghast response is: Are you fucking serious? My second is: The only thing that keeps YOU a good person is living in fear of eternal retribution? And finally, I answer: I am a good person because it’s the right thing to do. Sure I could walk up and shoot someone in the face; anyone could. Why don’t I? Well, because it’s wrong. Am I afraid of Hellfire and damnation? No. But it’s wrong. It was wrong before the bible said so.

I have a really hard time with people who use the bible as the gold standard for morality. Most Christians, most religious people in general, really, use their gospels selectively to make it say whatever they want it to say to achieve their ends. I’m sure I needn’t remind you of the atrocities carried out in the name of God over the ages, but even those that were not vicious, hateful warmongers might not have been the most moral people by today’s standards.

What would you say about our founding fathers like Washington, Jefferson and the rest of their ilk? Granted, not all of them were religious, but many of them were. Good staunch Christians. Now most Christians would agree that slavery is wrong. Why? Because Humans are not property, they are people. But slavery is very much accepted in the bible. OK, it was a long time ago, we’ve realized that it’s wrong now, we don’t do that anymore. Of course, it’s only 150 years gone from this country. That’s not very long.

Wait, did I just say the bible is…wrong? Well, of course it is. It’s wrong about a lot of things, which is part of the reason it is read so selectively. It’s a good historical tale that has an incredible amount of wisdom for those who choose to listen and read it for what it is.

But there’s an interesting paradox in the biblical commandments isn’t there? The commandments are absolute, but people are very liberal with their interpretation.
Is it wrong to steal? The bible says it is. We steal honey from bees don’t we? What, you think they make that stuff for us out of the goodness of their stingers? No. The commandment is very clear on this, isn’t it? Thou Shalt Not Steal. Let’s not even talk about Kill.

So back to the question, where did moral law originate? Why are we more inclined to treat people better than worse? Well, I believe self-preservation is at the heart of every person. It drives us to eat, it drives us to procreate; drives us to seek shelter in a storm; drives us to run from a large beast; fight to protect what we need. These are very powerful instincts that are deep inside any animal, and we are animals, regardless of the promises of Heaven and Hell.

But what makes the moral drive so strong is the deep and primal knowledge that we cannot survive alone. We cannot procreate without mixing out genetic material with others; we cannot thrive without a large enough population to have genetic diversity, and part of us knows this. This is part of what makes other people attractive or unattractive to us. We are social creatures that NEED other people. Yes, there are those among us that are deviants, yes there are those among us that have killed, stolen, been megalomaniacal, evil, twisted, everything you can think of. But every population has its exceptions.

The bottom line is, we should be good to each other because it’s the right thing to do not because we are told to be or scared of consequences if we are not. Can science prove it? Maybe, with the proper experiment, I don’t know. Did it come from God? Well, I don’t know since I’ve never seen God. I guess it’s just something we’ll just have to decide for ourselves. Peacefully.
Another brilliant essay, TJ.

The Source of Morality: Part I

2009-09-25T07:23:00.005-06:00

Over the next several weeks I’d like to introduce you to a discussion about the source of morality that I was part of a couple of years ago. This is a brilliant debate that TJ started on his blog with a dear friend of his, Bill. This discussion is a series of essays, the first written by Bill and serves brilliantly as the introduction to the topic, the second written by TJ, and the last is essentially a follow-up chime-in by yours truly in which I effectively barge in on their discourse. I wanted to bump it up to the front of the blogosphere again for a couple of reasons: first, because it is not every day that you get to read a brilliant discussion about the possible origins of human morality posed by a Christian, an atheist, and an agnostic in which all parties are frank and honest about their beliefs; and, second, I thought that it would be interesting to see if it might generate a similar type of discussion here about some other topic. So, if anyone would like to engage in this type of conversation on any topic please let me know.

I have tried my best to do very little editing to the original posts. However, I did have to do some clipping in order for the discussion to flow a little better here since blogs are essentially living forums, and it wouldn’t work to simply do a drag and drop. I encourage the reader to visit the original posts on TJ’s blog. I further challenge the readers of The Missing Piece to think about what each of the authors have written and join in the discussion. So, without further adieu, here are the essays. In the interest of giving the readers time to digest the material I will split the exchange up into four parts: Bill’s essay, TJ’s Essay, their follow-up arguments, and my essay. So here we go. Are you ready for a month-long banter about the source of morality? I hope so. Enjoy, and thank you TJ and Bill for letting me be a part of your brilliant conversation.

Bill’s Essay:

I guess the place to start in regards to the subject of “The Source of Morality” would be the very definition of the word itself. The word “morality” is defined by Wikipedia as “The concept of human behavior which pertains to matters of right and wrong.” The definition seems to be straight forward but what it is and where it comes from has been the subject of much debate. The word “concept” is just that, a concept, and it basically means that there is no empirical or scientific proof of its origin; meaning that you can’t put a drop of this and a drop of that in a test tube, mix it all together and come up with morality. But I do believe there is some evidence that exists that may help shed some light on what morality is at its core and where it comes from. This evidence presents itself on a daily basis and I think that if we look a little deeper into our own actions and expectations of others we will discover some interesting facts about morality and its source.

Often times we hear people arguing with each other and saying things such as “How would you like it if I did that to you?” or “Hey! I was next in line. Wait your turn.” Everyone has said these sorts of things, adults as well as children. The interesting thing about these types of statements is the reason for saying them in the first place. Is the person who says such things saying them because he happens not to prefer the other person’s behavior? Or is he appealing to some standard of decent behavior that he expects the other person to know about. Most of the time when someone says these things to us we are quick to make an excuse as to why we did the thing we are accused of or why we butted in line. It would seem that both parties to the argument are thinking about some kind of law or rule of fair play that has been broken. Call it Rule of Fair Play, Morality, The Law of Right and Wrong or whatever you wish. It would seem in these cases there is a definite agreement between the people involved as to what fair play (or right and wrong) really is. In fact, quarreling means trying to show the other person is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in doing that unless both parties had already agreed on it; just as it would make no sense calling a foul on a football player unless there was an agreement on the rules of football.

Now, this Law of Right and Wrong is also referred to as The Law of Human Nature because it is assumed that everyone knows it by nature and does not need to be taught it. Of course you may find some odd people who don’t seem to know it but if you take the human race as a whole it appears that decent behavior is known, in some degree, by all people. If this wasn’t true then there would be no sense in condemning the actions of someone like Adolph Hitler or even the Rwandan Hutus when they slaughtered 800,000 Tutsi civilians. In other words, what right do we have to say that the Nazis or the Hutus were in the wrong unless Right and Wrong are real things that the Nazis and Hutus ought to know as well as most of the human race? If there was no standard of Right and Wrong, then how can we blame them for their actions?

I am aware some people say that The Law of Right and Wrong is unsound because different civilizations have different moralities. I don’t believe this is true. There have been differences in their moralities but nothing that would amount to a total difference. If you look at the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Romans, Hindus or any of the others you will see just how alike their moralities really are to each other and our own. Take Selfishness for example. Civilizations throughout history have differed on who you should be unselfish to – whether it was only your own family, or your countrymen or so on. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired in any group of people. Men have differed as to whether you can have one wife or five. But they have always agreed that you shouldn’t simply have any woman you liked. See, there are levels of selfishness and greed that are unacceptable in all civilizations. No matter where you go, things like selfishness and greed are not something to be proud of.

Once I realized that there is a Law of Right and Wrong I noticed one problem; the problem is that sometime this year, or this month or, more likely, this very day, I and every person I know will fail to practice the very behavior that we expect to receive from others. If there is someone out there who thinks they always conform to this code of conduct then please forgive me. They really should stop reading this. And now, I turn my attention to the ordinary people who are left.

The points I wanted to make so far are: First; that people all over the earth have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way and can’t really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not actually behave that way in many situations. They know the moral law and they break it. It’s as simple as that.

There are a few different ideas about the source of Moral Law. Some of these ideas seem to have merit at first glance but they start to fall apart when examined in depth:

The first of these is the idea that Moral Law is really what we call “The Heard Instinct” and that it gets developed just like all the rest of our instincts. It’s my belief that Moral Law is something altogether different than instinct. Now, we all know what it feels like to be driven by instinct whether it be motherly love, sexual instinct, instinct for food or the instinct to help someone in trouble. Instinct means that we feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. Suppose you hear a cry for help coming from someone in danger. You will probably feel two desires – the desire to help or the desire to stay back, away from the danger. These two desires come from instincts. The desire to help is the Heard Instinct and the desire to stay away is the instinct of Self Preservation. The interesting thing we find here is that in addition to the two instincts, there is a third thing in us that tells us to follow the instinct to help and suppress the instinct to stay away. Now, this third thing that judges between the two instincts cannot itself be either of them. The thing that encourages the instinct to help must in fact be something different than either of the two instincts. It’s like playing the piano; the sheet music that tells you which notes to play cannot itself be the notes on the piano. The Moral Law is the sheet music and our instincts are the notes. Moral Law tells us the tune we ought to play and our instincts are the keys.

The second idea is that Moral Law is a mere creation of society. Some people believe that all of the laws and codes of conduct are a mere product of thousands of years of social evolution and it is passed down by education for the benefit of all. They believe that it’s just a human invention. I agree that social justice and ideas of right and wrong are passed down from parents to children. No doubt we have all been taught some form of decent behavior by our parents or teachers. But this is not broad enough to answer the question “Where does Moral Law originate?” The real question is “Where did society get its idea that we ought to behave decently to one another?” Why would most human beings throughout history feel inclined to behave in a certain way even though there might not be any consequences for misbehaving? Something inside us says “Do the right thing”.

The other view, in my opinion, that seems to explain the origin of morality is the religious view. According to it, there is something behind the universe that seems to be more like a mind than anything else we know. And this ‘Something’ is conscious, has purpose, and prefers one thing to another. Now this view has existed as long as any other view. At any place in history, when powerful thinking people come together, this view has been a prominent player in the topic of morality. If there is ‘Something’ behind moral law then it would show itself to Man in certain ways or remain altogether unknown. The statements ‘There is something behind it’ and ‘There is nothing behind it’ are both statements that science cannot make. Science uses experimentation and observation to come to a conclusion about the outcome. Science takes a drop of this and puts it on a drop of that and records what happens. Basically, science is an outside observer. It only looks at the elements being tested. Please don’t get me wrong. Science is both necessary and useful in many ways and I would hate to be without it. I, personally, am a science nut. But in the case of morality, science can offer us nothing in terms of its origin. Now, the religious view would be difficult to defend if it were not for one thing. There is one thing that we know more about than any other thing in the universe. And that one thing is Man. We don’t merely observe Man, we are Man. We have what you could call ‘inside information’. And because of that we know that Man finds himself under Moral Law and cannot, as much as he may try, get it out of his head. Also, he knows that he ought to obey it. Science can’t touch that. If someone from another world did a science experiment on the human race they would never know that we had Moral Law. How could he? His observation would be based on what we did and Moral Law is about what we ought to do.

So, it comes down to this; we can say that the universe simply happens to exist, and is what it is for no reason, or we can say there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. This Power behind the universe and Moral Law, if it exists, would not be one of the observed facts. It would be the reality that makes them. There is only one case we have that can give us the information we need to know about this Power. And that case is US. If we are a product of that Power, you may very well expect it to communicate to us in some fashion. Since this Power would not be one of the observable facts inside the universe, then it would stand to reason that it would show itself inside of us. It would show itself as an influence or command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is exactly what we do find. In the only place we can expect to find an answer, that answer turns out to be YES. It seems to me that there is ‘Something’ that is directing the universe. It’s telling me to do the right thing no matter how painful or inconvenient it may be. I call this ‘Something’ by another name. I call it God. Or more specifically, Jesus Christ. But that’s another subject altogether, isn’t it? We’ll save that one for another time.

Brilliantly done, Bill. Next week we hear from TJ.

Popcorn (1991)

2009-09-10T09:49:00.008-06:00

As part of my continual quest to find the perfect horror movie I stumbled across Popcorn (1991) a while back while flipping through titles such as The Beast Within, The Mangler, and Cannibal Holocaust. It has a pretty impressive cast loaded with veteran genre stand-outs like Jill Schoelen (Cutting Class, Curse II, The Stepfather), Dee Wallace (Cujo, The Howling, The Hills Have Eyes) and Kelly Jo Minter (Nightmare on Elm Street), and, like most decent slasher films, it has a great back story: insane filmmaker Lanyard Gates in an act of defiance against his detractors creates a movie with a live ending that includes the slaughtering of his entire family on stage which ultimately ends in the theater burning to the ground killing everyone inside. Brilliant! So I thought that I’d plunk myself down for a nice evening of gratuitous nudity, gore and off-color humor that the movie seems to have promised. Let me interrupt for a second to say that popcorn as a food is horrible. It is bland, smells awful, and gets stuck in your teeth (if you’re lucky enough to still have teeth after gnashing them down on a petrified un-popped kernel). Totally useless and annoying. Unfortunately, Popcorn (the movie) lives up to its name.

The plot of the movie is great. A group of theater students need to raise money to keep their department afloat. So what brilliant fund-raising scheme do they come up with? Auctioning off props from old productions? Selling celebrity autographs? Bake sale? Prostitution? Nope. How about restoring a burnt-out theater for an all night horror movie marathon? Oh yeah! I can see the bodies piling up already. O.K., maybe the plot doesn’t make too much sense since the theater restoration would undoubtedly cost more than the ticket sales for a one-night horrorfest, but this is supposed to be a horror film not Good Will Hunting after all. It turns out that this horror movie marathon is possibly the only good decision that the producers of Popcorn actually made. The movies that are featured are an homage to a bygone era of moviemaking. Creature-features like “Mosquito”, “The Stench (filmed in Smell-o-vision)”, and “Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man” are all throwbacks to the 50’s era films made by William Castle such as Macabre, The Tingler, and 13 Ghosts, and are absolutely the types of shows that are only likely to be seen today on Mystery Science Theater 3000, Son of Svengoolie or Joe Bob Briggs reruns. The coeds attempt to recreate the same gimmicky movie-going experience complete with electrified seats, nurses giving fake injections to out of control patrons, gag-inducing smell-o-vision, and a giant remote control mosquito that hovers menacingly over the audience.

The movie has a distinctly 80’s low-budget slasher flick feel complete with bad editing, grainy filming and plot discontinuities. It has all of the ingredients that it needs to slip delightfully into being a great exploitation flick, but sadly for some reason it never reaches that desired grindhouse status. Admittedly, the production of the film was fraught with problems including switching directors and lead actors midway through filming. But every fourth-grade fan of the genre knows how to solve any problem with production of a horror film: more nudity and more gore, bitches! If you pile on the dismembered corpses and nude coeds and pepper in some distasteful jokes all will be forgiven. Sadly, the makers of this film must not have gotten that memo. As it stands, I seriously doubt that Popcorn even warrants an “R” rating.

However, somehow almost inexplicably the movie is still watch-able, which I attribute to the way the cast, directors, producers…well, anyone involved in the film, really… seems to not take themselves too seriously. I mean, the villain is played by the sincerely goofy Tom Villard (One Crazy Summer), and the best piece of acting in the whole film is from a one-minute cameo appearance by Ray Walston (Mr. Hand in Fast Times at Ridgemont High). Popcorn also has probably the worst closing scene to a horror movie ever, which is saying something. Plus, there is a montage in the middle of the film as the students restore the theater, and you can never go wrong with a montage. Can you? Anyway, the saving grace of the whole picture is the hat-tip the horror films of the 50’s which (even though they distract the viewer from the plot) take on a persona of their own and act as their own character in the film. Also, the near total lack of gore, sex and suspense make Popcorn probably the only slasher movie in history one can watch with the whole family, but I highly doubt the uninitiated will have the patience to sit through the entire thing.

The Second Annual Misanthrope's List

2009-08-27T13:18:00.011-06:00

Well, here it is. The long-awaited Second Annual Edition of the Misanthrope’s List. This is the next catalog of some of the little items that keep me from living in peace and harmony on our dear planet. They are also the things that make life worth living, because what fun would it be if there was nothing to complain about? You can check out my first list here if you are a masochist and want to tackle them both in one sitting. Maybe you made the cut this time, Jerky. Enjoy.

Needs fixed / Needs washed / etc. Why is it O.K. to randomly omit critical words from sentences? What part of speech do the remaining words become? Vernouns?!? The subject of the sentence needs to be fixed, Hillbilly.
People that leave time on the microwave. “Hey, Dan. What time is it?” Oh, it’s 0:03. Thanks…that’s useful. Are you too lazy to hit “Clear” or just too impatient to wait three seconds for your freshly nuked hot pocket? Either way, I’d like to defrost your skull.
People that slow down for railroad tracks. Maybe you shouldn’t transport your Faberge egg collection in the back of a 1981 Buick station wagon. If you’re worried about driving over some bumps, then put a lift kit on that thing, only GET OUT OF MY EFFING WAY!
When website login pages are too slow. Let’s get this clear. I am not a fast typist. If I can type both my username and password and hit enter before I’m supposed to, which gives me an error on the login screen, thus requiring me to reenter my information; the web developers are doing a seriously shitty job.
Cincinnati chili. What drunken Midwestern slob ever thought that this was a good idea? Hmmm…let’s see. I’ll throw some cinnamon into some perfectly good chili then slop it onto my leftover spaghetti noodles. Mmmm… {hork}… that looks {hork}... good {splash}.
Bad DIY jobs. I appreciate that people want to try to “fix” or “improve” their property. I also respect everyone’s right to eff their own houses up in any way they see fit, but don’t expect me to be nice when you brag about what you’ve done to the place. “Wallpaper, in the shower, that’s really...uh…really, nice-ish…”
Loud talkers. Hey, Bud, I’m standing right here. Sound generally travels through the air pretty well. You need to knock it down a couple of decibels or you’re going to set off the fire sprinklers in here.
Putting anything in my ears. I don’t know about you guys, but things tend to fall out of my ears when they are done growing. No need to go poking around mining for taters that aren’t ripe yet.
Nucular. It’s seriously embarrassing that I even have to bring this one up. If you can’t pronounce the word “nuclear” then you probably have no business engaging in a conversation about the subject, Billy Bob.
Women’s breasts. Just seeing if you’re paying attention.
Die-hard fans. “We’re gonna win it all this year!” We are? How are you affiliated with the organization, again? Oh, right. They kicked you out of the stadium four times already this season for being a drunken jaggoff. Good work, Sportsfan.
The zoo. If I wanted to look at a bunch of animals lying in piles of their own feces I’d hang out in the psychiatric ward. That’s what we have the internet for, people. Besides, if you’re going to force me to say ZO-ology, then shouldn’t it be a ZO - not a zoo? I’m just sayin’.
Full body mirrors in bathrooms above toilets. I enjoy looking at penises as much as the next guy. Wait a minute. No I don’t. Do I need to watch myself piss? My aim isn’t so bad that I need a secondary guidance system. Take the dam mirror down, or at least paste a fig leaf over the genital area, will ya?
Having to give my zip code whenever I buy anything. This is just annoying data grubbing bullshite. Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorite conversations to have with clerks: “Can I have your zip code?” No. “Well, I need it for the computer.” Do you want to make it up or shall I? “But, Sir…” Oooh, let’s guess! It’s a number between 0 and 99999…
Precision laser cut beards. Do these guys have CNC beard trimmers or what? Unless you’re in a boy band or you are a professional pedophile, I think it’s time to stop pretending you look cool or creepy - depending upon which way you are leaning.
People that say they love how something tastes the instant it touches their lips because they are too polite to say, “This tastes like Bigfoot’s dick.” Look, if you’re going to lie then at least wait a couple of seconds to sell the line. The “I Love It, But I Think I’m Gonna Verp” face is priceless, though.
Pop-ups. Really? You’re still trying to advertise with a pop-up window?!? That’s soooo 20^th century. Tell you what - I’ll give you a couple of bucks if you fire the mouth-breathing jackasses in your marketing department that have convinced you that this is a good idea, but I’m not buying you’re shite products, Fuckstick.
People that point at their wrist when they ask for the time. Thanks for the sign-language, Helen. I was just going to stare right into the sun, but you saved me from burning out my retinas with that visual aid. How do you ask if you need to find the restroom? I think I know where my watch would be if I had one.
New and Improved. If something is truly “New” it goes without saying that it is improved because there was (by definition) nothing before it. It is new. That is, unless you’re selling new forks or spittoons, but then I will be highly skeptical of your “Improved” claim.
Semitransparent network logos on TV. Why not just have all of the actors in your shows wear network logos on their asses or have peacock tattoos on their necks? It would be just as annoying and pointless. Nobody gives a rat’s ass what channel they are watching anymore.
Commercials at the movies. I didn’t just apply for a second mortgage to take the family to the theater to watch goddamn soda commercials. The snack bar only sells one brand of soda anyway. So what’s the point of the commercial, again?
Celebrity relationships. Most people don’t spend enough time on their own relationships, but they seem to be concerned about who Pamela Anderson is sleeping with. Who the Hell cares?!? Well, unless there are pictures or video, then I might be interested.
Deliberately misspelled product or business names. Are focus groups telling marketers that we prefer names to be stupid and kitschy rather than correct? I refuse to shop at Toys-R-Us. You know the one. It’s by Krispy Kreme, next to Tastee-Freez, across the street from Kwik-e-Mart. Just Google it.
People that create walking jams. How is it, exactly, that someone can be so oblivious as to not notice the twenty-nine-person pile up that they created by standing in the walkway? Chrissakes! I need the Jaws of Life to extract my legs from the shopping cart that the lady behind me ran up my back when I had to suddenly stop because the jaggoff in front of me is friggin’ hypnotized! Walk the speed limit, Bub! I think we should be allowed to carry pedestrian horns that we can blast right in these morons’ ear hole in order to snap them back into reality.
People that read novels or surf the web in coffee shops. This is yuppie trendiness at its worst. Listen, Douche Bag, nobody cares that you’re reading “The Metamorphosis” or Machiavelli or whatever other B.S. you happen to think is cool at the time as you sip on your child-sized white chocolate mocha frappuccino (lightly blended with an extra shot of espresso, one pump of sugar free raspberry flavoring with no whipped cream on top) for four hours.
Anything on Ice. Unless there are two teams of semi-literate toothless goons firing frozen pucks at each other nothing else should ever be done on ice. I might actually go to Disney on Ice if Mickey would throw is gloves off, pull Donald’s shirt over his head and rain blows about the stupid ass duck’s ears and face once in a while. And I would definitely pay to see Cinderella and Snow White duke it out center ice.
Irish pride. This one has been stuffed down everyone’s throat for so long that it doesn’t mean anything anymore. What do the Irish have to be proud of anyway? Famine? Car bombs? Drunken red-heads with low self esteem are definitely awesome, but other than that let’s take it down a couple of notches shall we, O’Leary?
Fuel pumps that pump gasoline way too slowly. Ever get one of those pumps that just dribbles fuel out like it has an enlarged prostate? I usually like to spend as little time as possible sucking gasoline vapors, and when the gauge on the fuel dispenser turns slower than a sundial I can feel the water building up on my brain.
Idiot sign holders. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for equal rights for retarded people, but stuffing them in a Statue of Liberty costume and forcing them to stand on the corner twirling a “Do Your Taxes Here!” sign just doesn’t seem right to me. Funny, but not right.
Sitting on a warm toilet seat. There are very few things in life that truly creep me out. Dropping the deuce hot on the heels of some other hairy mook is one of them. I think all toilet seats should be made from Hypercolor material to let a guy know what he’s up against. You do remember Hypercolor, don’t you?
Anyone that has ever been in front of me in any line. It’s not that I’m ever really in a hurry or that I’m impatient that gets me fired up. It’s probably the anticipation of dealing with whatever moron that is proctoring the transaction we are waiting for that makes me want to pluck the hair out of the pimple that’s growing on the back of your neck.
Asshole cyclists. Yeah, yeah…You’re saving the planet by riding your bike to work, but you need to drop the magnanimous attitude before I plow your ass into the ditch.
People that drive slowly because it’s cold. This one is a particular annoyance because not only am I experiencing the same bullshit weather, but now I’m going to be late and pissed off, too, because apparently some schmeckel is afraid the tires on his car are going to shatter into pieces on the road. Hey, how about warming your shit up before you get on the road and destroy my life?!?
Obvious dentures. Is it impossible to manufacture dentures that don’t look like they were just driven off of the showroom floor? This one is especially off-putting when the sparkling neon white choppers belong to some octogenarian with whom I am trying to carry on a conversation. It’s kind of like putting a new hood ornament on a rusty Plymouth Volare, and it is entirely distracting.
Text/IM shortcuts. OMG wutz the BFD? The BFD is that it’s fekking annoying, especially when I’m not reading a text message. Just stop it.
Anyone over 16 with braces. I find it hard to take someone seriously when they sound like a 13 year-old math geek and spray a mist from their mouth that casts a rainbow between us whenever they speak. Why not just buy a sports car or get fake boobs like everyone else going through a midlife crisis?
Watching obese people eat. Whenever I see someone over 300 lbs sucking down a baker’s dozen of Big Macs I flash back to the infamous scene in “The Meaning of Life.” “Betta get a bucket. Oym gonna frow up.” Yet, strangely, I can’t seem to pry my eyes away.
Axing you a question. The word “ask” has to be the most mispronounced English word on the planet. I’d find out for sure, but I don’t know who to ast.
Anyone that is afraid of a terrorist. Not only does this play into the terrorists’ ignorance and make their position stronger, but it also shows that you are a coward and very, very bad at math. You should be more afraid of me, especially if are in front of me on line.
Pointless conversations. Ugh. I’ve started carrying a tazer for these situations. “Oh, so you’re saying that G.W. Bush was the greatest president these United States have ever had as God and Sonny Jesus are your witnesses? And any logical argument that I can ever come up with will never change your mind? One moment please.” At this point I pull out my tazer and electrocute myself into unconsciousness. Keeps me out of jail.
Big Johnson anything. Really? You’re forty years old and you’re wearing a Big Joh….Oh, I can’t even be bothered with chastising you.
Walnuts. How does something so disgusting end up in so many recipes? This isn’t The Great Depression. We don’t need to scrape things off of the driveway to add as filler in recipes. Just leave them out, people. Nobody under the age of 75 likes them anyway. There are very few things as disappointing as biting into a beautiful piece of carrot cake only to find that it is peppered throughout with these vile nuts. Don’t yuck my yum.
Eric Roberts. I’m guessing I’m not alone on this one. Something about the guy just rubs my fur the wrong direction. Maybe it’s because he sucks so bad at everything he does. I shouldn’t say that. What I mean to say is that he sucks at everything that he does in public.
Bad potato salad. I hate, and I mean HATE, when I pile a huge mound of potato salad on my paper plate at an outing expecting creamy starch-riddled deliciousness only to be affronted by a concoction that any 15^th century alchemist would have admired. How do you screw up potato salad?!? Are those walnuts?!? Come on!
Weak showers. There are few things in life better than getting into the shower after a long week of slacking off in order to have your skin blasted clean with a high-pressure stream of steaming-hot watery bliss. Conversely, there aren’t too many things that piss me off more than a shower head that leaks water out slower than an incontinent civil war veteran on an ice fishing trip. Don’t waste my time with weak head…wait, that didn’t come out right.
Internal farts. There you are in a company meeting or on a date or in the confessional being a good little boy by holding back an hour’s worth of ripsnorting Hell, and suddenly a solenoid trips in your internal plumbing venting your trapped gas into some other chamber in your guts making a sound reminiscent of a Whoopie cushion equipped with a muffler. Then you get all of the social disdain and admonishing stares without any of the relief or satisfaction that you would have gotten if you would have just unleashed a cloud of dimethylburnyourlipsoff on your co-workers 20 minutes ago. Truly lame.
The grab-your-thumb handshake. This always makes me feel like an extra in an old Starsky and Hutch episode. Unless you’re helping me out of a well or indoctrinating me into the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes, I’ll take the standard handshake, Huggy Bear.
Chronically late people. Seriously, how hard is it to get your crap in a pile and show up on time once? It’s inconsiderate and lazy. You’re not that important.
Excessive key chains. Hey, Snyder, you don’t need the trunk keys from your first twelve cars, a dead animal’s foot, mace, a picture frame, and a fire extinguisher hanging from your ignition. Key chains are not the place to make a social statement and lugging around ninety pounds of scrap metal can’t be great for your back either.
The vague local connection that TV news broadcasts always push. Let’s say there’s a news story about a silo that tipped over in Bumblefuck, Wisconsin squashing 18 cows. Then (for whatever asinine reason) we cut to an interview with a local Colorado woman whose parents used to own the farm next door (before they moved to Denver in the 60’s) so she can describe her “emotions” surrounding the disaster and how it will effect her life. What the?!?
Repeat offenders. I like to admire my creations as much as the next guy, but there is something sad when part of the deposit is still hanging around after three or four flushes. Be free little guy. Go live with the rest of your family.
The fact that “expediously” isn’t a word. How is something as idiotic as “staycation” allowed into the dictionary, yet “expediously” can’t make the cut? Expediously (adverb): quickly; with efficiency; in an efficient manner. As in: The job must be completed expediously. You can take your “staycation” and your “webisode” and cram them up your arse.
People that wear scrubs when they aren’t in a hospital. I’m sure there is a reason that hospital personnel are required to wear scrubs. Namely, that they don’t want to get bodily fluids from Typhoid Mary on their street clothes and then transmit the Black Death from their place of work to the general population. So why is it acceptable to wear that smallpox-infested clothing outside of the hospital? Carry a change of clothes for Chrissakes, Scumbag.
People that drive cop cars. If you drive a Crown Victoria, Caprice Classic, Dodge Charger, or new Chevy Impala that is either white, black or navy blue, and you are not a police officer, then you are a complete douche hole. If you are in fact a police officer then it goes without saying. Your poor vehicle selection causes traffic issues and is the primary reason my middle finger is so sore right now.
The pretend sneak. You’re watching a movie or having a conversation and someone needs to pass by so for some reason they turn into one of the characters from Spy Vs. Spy, hunch their shoulders awkwardly and fake tiptoe past. Not only is this weird, but it is also very distracting which (I assume) is the opposite of the intent. Stop doing that.
Improper use of the word “fun”. Let’s get this straight. Curtains will never be “fun”. The pattern on a handbag is not “fun”, and the only way a hairdo can be “fun” is if it has a playground in it.
Munich – the movie. P. effing U. This one belongs right down there with A.I. and Gigli. In fact the only way it could possibly be worse is if they would have cast Eric Roberts as the lead. It’s so bad, in fact, that walnuts might actually make it better.
Pimples in odd places. You know, I’ve got enough shit to worry about without having a zit on the inside of my ass crack or inside my ear. It’s just crappy.
TV Typing. O.K. I think we’ve all been around keyboards long enough to know what actual typing sounds like. The light-speed mashing of keys when people are pretending to type is absolutely annoying. Knock it off.
Auto dealer names. You wouldn’t go to Olaf Gjoviczch’s Lingerie Outlet would you? Well, I know some of you would, but the rest of us would probably talk to the city council about it. Why in the wide, wide world of sports can’t these dealers come up with an original business name that doesn’t involve checking pronunciations in the Ellis Island register?
Milk. I’ve covered this one extensively before. I still just do not understand why humans believe they need to be breast fed by cows. Ick.
Cliff-hangers. I really dislike looking in the mirror and finding a stalactite swinging off of the end of my beezer, especially if it’s directly after having a conversation with someone that I’m trying to impress. Not good.
Smokers. Really? You’re still smoking? In 2009? I don’t have a problem with people killing themselves. Many people should seriously consider it, in fact, but smoking just takes way too long. It’s annoying. I think smokers should just get one pack that guarantees immediate death after finishing. Of course that pack would have to cost around $45k so the poor tobacco companies don’t loose too much business.
Dollars = money. Why do salesmen continue to do this? “Hey, Dan, let’s see if we can save you some dollars on this deal.” Well, actually, I’m planning on taking a trip overseas, so could you try to save me some dinars or rupees instead? Might want to throw some guilders and shekels in there while you’re at it, Moron.
“Not Responsible for Broken Windshields” signs on trucks. How nice would it be if you could just waive liability for your actions by putting up a sign? I think I’m going to get a couple of t-shirts made: “Not responsible for broken jaws” and just plain “Not responsible”. That should pretty much cover all of my discretions.
Having a sore throat. If I believed that I had a soul I would gladly sell it to the Devil if he would guarantee that I’d never get a sore throat again. Of course, I would then have to believe in the Devil, too. Jesus, it’s probably just easier to suck on some cough drops now and then.
Crappy shoelaces. Nothing ruins a morning faster than punching yourself in the face and flying backwards off of your chair when your shoelace breaks as you’re tightening it. Makes me want to nuke the day right off the bat.
Monitor touchers. Hey, Jag! Keep your greasy fingers off of my screen! I can tell what you are pointing at without you wiping your snot all over Hell’s creation. No touchy, or you’re asking for big owies.
Pet personifiers. I get that people want their pets to have some sort of human emotions for whatever effed up reason. It’s just that some of these folks push it way over into the fruitcake column. “He says, ‘Hi.’ He says, ‘Hey, I want some of that yummy sandwich.’ He says, ‘I’m excited.’” ENOUGH!! Hey, Doolittle, nobody cares what you think your unruly goddamn dog is feeling. What’s he saying when he licks his own arsehole, Nutjob?
Traffic cops. It must make these guys feel great to know that they can’t perform a function with the same efficiency as a slowly-blinking multi-colored light. Horrible.
Carmex. Hey, here’s a great idea. How about you smear a petrochemical concoction that smells like Magellan’s shorts all over your face a couple of dozen times a day? It will give you that glossy “I just made out with a St. Bernard” look, too. Sounds great. Did you know that Carmex was originally invented for use as an aircraft bearing grease in WWII? O.K., that’s not true, but it wouldn’t surprise you, would it?
TP that isn’t structurally sound. If during clean up operations I give myself an unintentional shocker I am not going to be a happy camper. There should be a warning on the roll: WARNING: Digital stimulation hazard!
People that try to get every last milliliter of fuel they can into their gas tank. Ssssssptuh. Sssssssssptuh. Ssspt. Ssssssspt. Sssssptuh. Tump. Tump. Sspt. Ssssspt. Tump. Sssssss. Sssssptuh. Just about done there, Juicebag?
Guys that wear bandannas. See #15. These people are often double offenders.
Dividing up large meal bills. Holy Hell! Nothing ruins an excellent meal with a group of ten friends faster than having Herschel Goldberg complain that he’s being screwed out of $0.39 from the tip because his wine spritzer cost less than my Maker’s on the rocks. If you go out with more than three people, just divide it up evenly, and then go home and kill yourself if you have a problem with it.
Accidentally ramming my pen cap into my gums. Here I am pretending to pay attention to whatever nonsense presentation or lecture I am attending for the afternoon, lightly resting my teeth on my pen cap when suddenly I nod off and cram the damnable device into my gums. Now not only am I agitated because I’m stuck in a useless meeting, but I also have bleeding gums and was rudely disturbed from my nap. Not the best.
When I can tell what someone’s skull looks like. I find it hard to concentrate on anything someone is saying if is too easy to imagine what they would look like with no skin on their head. I always feel like I’m talking to the creepy guy from Poltergeist II. “Are you lost, Sweetheart? I'll sing you a song until your mom gets back.” {shudder}
Snoop Dogg talk. Imizzle if evizzle wizzle to tizzle thizzle wizzle. It is absolutizzle annoyizzle and stupizzle. Try it out at your nizzle intervizzle. Gizoogle it, Biotches. See what I mean? It wasn’t funny the first time.
Two streams. Ever stagger into the bathroom at asshole early to take a leak only to be woken up by the sound of water being poured onto the garbage can lid? Now you have to make some rapid-fire pre-dawn calculations about which stream will create the least amount of collateral damage before you manage to squeeze off the flow. This is where that mirror might come in handy.
The Eagles. Alright. I’ll give you Hotel California. Other than that, you can keep your week-ass, fake-harmonizing, Beach Boys wannabes music to yourselves. Joe Walsh is their only saving grace. Plus they have a singing drummer which is never good…unless you’re Levon Helms of course.
Fake lips. Come on, ladies. PLEASE stop injecting ass fat into your face. I don’t know who decided having lips that look like a baboon’s hemorrhoids is attractive, but they either had bad eyesight or a brilliant sense of humor. The whole “I’m having an allergic reaction to an insect sting” look is silly.
Misplaced apostrophes. I understand why some people have an issue with this one since it requires an actual thought process. Apostrophes indicate either possession or contraction. I know. It’s pretty complicated. This is one of the many reasons I don’t eat at Quiznos. Does Quizno own the place (Quizno’s)? Does the Quizno family own it (Quiznos’)? Or are there just a bunch of weirdos hanging out in there (Quiznos)? It’s just too confusing for a shop that sells burnt sandwiches.
When people obviously do something. This one is going to be a bit hard to explain. Say someone is strolling down the sidewalk when they trip over a crack and stumble for five yards before they manage to regain control of the ship. Then they walk back to the crack and obviously look at it so that other people notice that they are looking at it, as if to say, “Look at me looking at this crack. I’m not just casually looking at the sidewalk here, people. I’m looking at something.” I don’t know. It’s just annoying, so f*ck off.
Kiss. O.K., O.K. Alright! O.K., OW! Stop kicking me! It’s just that saying the same five {ducking} words over and over for four minutes is a bit…OW…annoying {dodge}. JESUS! {running away}
Unnecessary live on location news reports. Suppose a mailman decides he’s had enough of delivering the mail in the sleet one day and goes ballistic, killing everyone in twelve-block radius around the post office in some tiny suburb of Pawtucket, 2000 miles away. Now our local news sends out a reporter to our post office to do the story. Huh?!? Why, exactly, do they have to be at a post office to get their point across? It’s needless and silly.
In Loving Memory bumper stickers. Let’s get this straight right now. If I ever die (and the odds are that I will) do not - let me repeat - DO NOT dedicate the back window of a Ford Escort to my Loving Memory. Am I the only one that thinks this is cheap and disrespectful? Slap the sticker on the toilet tank, why don’t ya for fekk’s sake?
People that breathe really heavily through their nose. I’m sure whatever you’re saying is very interesting, but I can’t concentrate as long as the yeti next to me is breathing through his nose like a surfacing sea lion. I’m pretty sure he’s awake and snoring. Gross.
Forgetting what I am doing. Ever walk into a room and have no idea why the Hell you’re in there? Seems like that’s happening more and more since I’ve stopped sniffing glue.
People that say fluid when they mean liquid. By definition a fluid is anything that flows. Liquids are fluids, but it doesn’t work the other way around. “Please refrain from bringing fluids onto the plane.” Do you mean AIR?!? ‘Cuz I’m pretty sure I’m gonna need that, Einstein.
Cops. It takes a special kind of jerkoff to want to become a police officer. You know, the kind that doesn’t have the critical thinking capacity or the good looks that it takes to become a firefighter and fails the math section of garbage man exam so they decide to destroy everyone else’s life. That’s the one.
Hangovers. Did you know that children wake up and need to eat at the same time every morning regardless of how many bottles of Cuervo you smash over your head the night before? It’s true.
Biting the inside of my cheek. Why do my teeth suddenly decide that they want to escape the confines of my mouth by chewing a hole through the side of my face? No, sir. I don’t like it.
Women’s sports. I understand that women want to play sports, but why on Earth would I want to watch anything done clumsily at half speed by a bunch of fit, sweaty girls in close contact with each other? I think I just answered my own question.
Hospitals. These places give me the heebee-jeebees on top of the screaming willies. Who knows what kind of airborne lurgy and creeping crud is floating around in there? Makes my lungs itch just thinking about it. Plus you always have to be on the lookout for zombies. Everybody knows zombie attacks usually start at hospitals and malls, right?
People that quote bible verses. This is the kind of BS that semi-literate religious zealots pull on me when I make them feel bad about their life choices. The verses don’t mean anything out of context. For example, 2 Kings 2:24 - So he turned around and looked at them, and pronounced a curse on them in the name of the LORD. And two female bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths. What…the…f*ck are you talking about, Mac?
Little kids with grown up names. Aw, what a cute little baby. What’s his name? “Gary.” *Gulp*…{insert spit take}…Gary?!? Gary is the wrestler in high school that has a mustache when he is 13 and has pimples all over his back. It definitely does not fit on a cute little baby in a stroller. I don’t know it just creeps me out, O.K.?
People that are proud to be computer illiterate. “I just don’t know the first thing about computers.” Get over it, people. Technology is technology. Still riding the stagecoach to town to drop off a Pony Express letter to the barber to schedule your yearly haircut and bloodletting, are you? It’s not cool to be stupid, especially intentionally so.
Grabasstically disorganized dishwasher loading. Why is it impossible for people to take ten seconds to figure out how best to situate their dirty dishes in the dishwasher? You should be able to fit more than three coffee mugs and a spatula in there, Slob. Whenever I open the door and see dishes scattered randomly around in there like bodies at Jonestown I want to pour liquid soap into my eyes. Too anal retentive?
Fingernail biters. Something about people that chew their nails down to the bone makes me want to york. It’s probably that it’s just plain gross. What if those disgusting weirdos with the longest fingernails in the world started chowing them down? Ew.
And, finally, me. I truly can be a jaggoff sometimes.