Taxation is Theft

Pigs Fly department:

A federal grand jury will hear evidence that 9/11 was a controlled demolition.

This is huge, whether you believe the assertion or not. Because of the JFK Effect, I'm somewhat skeptical of the outcome, but movement is great. 

Both buildings came down in what looked like controlled demolition. One of the major news network reporters stated that it looked like controlled demolition, once. And never again. Then there was the rather inconvenient fact of Building 7, barely damaged, coming down in its own footprint too.

I guess this is the necessary first step to legally drill holes in the official story of what happened on 9/11. If it was controlled demolition, there's the question of who pushed the button, then who ordered the button pushed. Regardless of the ruling, one of the people involved has a name that rhymes with Rick Haney.

• I know you're losing sleep, wondering what's going on with my work phone.... two weeks after issue, the phone works, but the work configuration is still foobed. At this rate, the phone will be properly configured the week after I retire.

Speaking of Ancient Astronaut Theorists, there is proof from a semi-reliable source (NASA) that UFOs popped by to check in when our space missions were going on. Would you classify a NASA astronaut a reliable witness?

Things heard on missions:

"We have a bogey at 10 o'clock."

"We still have the alien spacecraft under surveillance."

The second one was even more interesting because the feed was being monitored by ham radio enthusiasts (the frequency is known and wide open). At the end of the sentence, audio went dead, as the transmission went to the encrypted feed. As for video, there are anomalies on moon footage and all sorts of interruptions on the space shuttle feed, as Odd Stuff appeared.  ymmv

• A man entering Singapore was found to have a suspicious bulge in his pants, which turned out to be kittens.
• Sir, your penis is moving and swatting itself. 
• Expect this to be on Twitter before you get home.

Christian Mare, serving a 40 year sentence for child pornography, was beaten to death in prison. He obviously slipped in the shower and hit his head repeatedly on the plumbing until he died.

• Odds are your phone provider is selling your location data (at very least).

Dear lefty:

• Why is there never a parking spot near my house?
• Because you touch yourself.

Parents just don't understand
Some of us have had to introduce our parents to cell phones. While this is about as much fun as beating yourself to death with a spoon, someone has to do it, and you feel sorry for the poor guy at the phone store.

• No, Mom, text messaging doesn't require a 'Dear Son' or a 'Love, Mom.'
• Yes, hit the little phone picture to dial. Yes, you have to dial a one first, just like the phone on the wall. Yes, you can use it in the car. Yes, you can call long distance to Aunt Sadie in Florida for no extra cost. Yes. Yes. Still yes.
• You can even put your doctor appointments in the calendar. Yes, there's a calendar - push the little calendar picture.
• Just because you text or call does not mean I'm going to pick up the phone.

I give up... "Just hit that button and ask Siri or Cortana. No, you can't call me; I don't have a phone anymore."

The funny and evil part about this is that people having an iDevice works for me for once. "Sorry, I don't know how to do that stuff on an iDevice. Call one of your children who have one."

Maybe sic-ing them on the guy at the phone store isn't such a bad idea after all...

• the Additive Suicide Principle of cell phones states that if you put one phone on top of another, the top phone will go rocketing to the floor as soon as you stop looking at them.

My personal recommendation of concerts arrived today. Keep in mind that I only attend instrumental guitar and classic rock shows...

Kiss - if I want to see too much makeup, I'll turn on the tv

Mariah Carey - speaking of Golden Globes...

Billy Joel - half of a classic rock, but yuck.

Tyler Perry's Madea - huh? Like top 10 radio, it's not music.

Bluegrass - that's close to classic rock, right?

Hootie and the Blowfish - we've all been holding our breath for a reunion

Backtreet Boys - backdoor boys? Killer guitar instrumentals

Disney Junior Dance Party - future meltdowns of America

Buckethead: be fair - it's instrumental guitar (with a KFC bucket on his head)

Piff the Magic Dragon - because they'll get sued if they use "Puff"

Other stuff I learned from watching police shows: 

• Without exception, no one has their license or I.D. on them.
• It's ok to blame your grandmother for the joint if it's her car you're driving.
• When drunk, people always admit to having 2 drinks.
• You must use your turn signal for two full seconds before changing lanes. Or you'll be pulled over, and naturally, searched for drugs.

Dear lefty:

• Which men's designer jeans do I wear to the feminist supporter protest?
• How did you become such a snotty, virtue-signalling utter bastard?

More adware posing as games, TV, and remote control simulator apps in Google Play. Trend Micro spotted this, not Google.

More Evil Villain News: Microsoft was sued in Finland and ordered to pay a Finnish man 1,100 Finnish Herring (1548 Canadian Pucks) for pushing a Win10 update, without permission, which broke his pc. There is another suit pending.

• The aliens have their own Comedy Channel in the ships: our weather forecast.

The Key(board) to All Phone Grief

I tend to get aggravated when I use my phone. What pisses me off isn't necessarily what pisses you off. Stuff like bad cells, dropped calls, dropped phones, and dropping phones in the toilet are points of contention, but not mine. The single largest point of annoyance with my phone is input. The keyboard. It drives me mad. No matter how hard I try, how careful I am, how quickly or slowly I type, it never comes out right. I wind up screaming at the phone, calling it things I usually reserve for spouses and family members. After about a day of this, you don't want to see an allegedly grown man cry. It's pitiful, like my attempts at being polite in social situations.

I've tried manual typing, using one or both hands, different keyboards, changing key size, asking the dog to type, and the swipey keyboards. I get the same result regardless, just like my pitiful pleas for sex. I'll grant that my brain wiring is a touch off (no, really?), rendering me a dyslexic typist, but I can tell when I've typed something backwards (unless the A.D.D. is active, in which case I only read some of the first sent of a paragraph). The only thing I haven't tried, besides asking my wife to type for me, is voice input. I know if I tried talking to the phone (as opposed to yelling at it), I'd probably develop a case of dyslexic speech. ALthough it's almost impossible to speel words incorrectly when saying them, I'd find a way. Plus you remember my warnings about speech input - Google and the others keep every word you say, 'to improve service.'

The method that works best, best being relative, is swipey. One advantage is that they learn from you over time, making typing faster and easier. Except mine. My keyboard has some sort of learning disorder, where it allows me to make the same mistakes over and over again, like my life. There are certain words it refused to spell, mainly my saltier vocabulary. I have to type them one letter at a time, then tell the little bastard to remember the word. It's a good thing the blog software has a spell checker, or this blog would be even more horrid. If it had a grammar checker, it would have died years ago, like dehumidifiers in PA.

Dear lefty.....

Makeup is Racist

Well, not yet.
Farmers' markets, however, have just been declared racist. Yes, according to the Washington Times, professors (you already knew that), say that 'Habits of white people are normalized' at the markets. This is why we can't have nice things.

• one way to help keep yourself safe and less annoyed when surfing is to direct adware/crapware/malware to the trashcan. You can do this automatically with a HOSTS file. Download it from this site and follow the instructions. It's a pretty cool, old-style hack. 
• To give you an idea of how it works, as you know, I have a great aversion to Faceyspaces. So I add Faceyspaces to my HOSTS file, which sends any Faceyspaces request to the digital trashcan. I don't have to do a thing - it happens automatically. Before you go thinking I'm ever crazier than my typing would show, Faceyspaces is also a huge ad network. The HOSTS file has a ton of ad networks directed to trash - ain't that convenient?
• This works on Windows, Mac (I think), and linux. Every advantage you have is a good one, and this one costs nothing. 

Mad

I took today off mad.
They didn't believe me... they thought I was sick.
But no, I was mad.
Maybe I just wanted a long weekend?
Nah.
Crazy mad?
Seriously - would you like me to come down there and show you?
Are you hung over, after drinking the bar dry last night?
Is there something you don't understand about mad?
Well... enjoy  your day off.
Fuck you.

I'm not 100% positive when or how it started, but I suspect it was the email from my benefits people, telling me to go online and fill out some forms. This should have come with a siren and lights. As I've mentioned, any time I need to go online to 'do something small and easy,' it results in screaming, airborne computer parts, and the dog running to a different floor, in sheer terror.

The benefits site was put together by drunk monkeys. The people manning the phones are very nice, but you get different answers from each one you talk to.

No, we don't like Internet Explorer either - use Firefox.
Oh, that's a browser issue - you need to use Internet Explorer.

After this interminable stretch, while there was still hair left on my head, I damn near almost got done what I needed. I sat quietly the rest of the night, lest I drop something and wind up blowing out a few windows.

The next day was worse. There's a person employed by supermarkets to follow me around. No, it's not Security. This person is a marketing expert, who walks around behind me, thinking I can't see him, and marks down what I buy. After we get in the checkout line, he runs back to the computer and immediately stops ordering everything I bought.  The next time I come back, they have none of what I want. Normally I shake my head and make a joke. But not today.

I have a little problem with Snapple. When I say a little problem, I mean that I have to limit myself to four bottles a day. Four or six. Definitely under a case, that's for certain. Fortunately for us, Snapple was on sale. This is a beautiful feeling. I felt the sun shine on me (which is odd, as the sun doesn't shine here anymore). And that fast, it was gone. Not even a single bottle of lemon Snapple. There was plenty of apple, peach and mango. Mango is just a peach wannabe, which I do not tell the wife, as she likes it. There was even pomegranate and motor oil flavor, but none of this was a substitute for lemon. I got so mad, the bottles in the cases started to shake. Several burst (except for the motor oil - Snapple should take note of this). Other shoppers started looking around. Some ran. Others prayed.

My wife, sensitive to my plight, ordered me to pick up a case of mango. Strangely this did nothing for my mood, as I picked up a case and observed it was apple, put where it said MANGO. Doing my best Kareem Abdul Jabar, I did a perfect, no-net throw into the cart. Nothing happened to the bottles because it landed on the birthday cake.

I needed water. They had none. No water. A supermarket with NO WATER.
I once went to Wendy's, where they were out of potatoes. And another where they had no ketchup. But at least THEY had water. I started to give my opinion on this, at which point my wife wisely pushed the cart away, hoping no one would notice she was with me.

The long and short of it is that I have nothing to drink, except maybe some mango Snapple. I hate mango Snapple.  And now she has to go back to the store for water and Snapple. At least she doesn't have to worry about anyone drinking her Snapple.

Just to help my mood, programs kept crashing, guitar strings kept breaking, and the wife kept finding excuses to take the dog out for a drive. I opened the fridge and an open can of Coke popped out to greet me and pour itself down the front of my clothes. When I typed, the cursor kept randomly jumping all over the place, but it cleverly waited til it knew I wasn't looking, so I'd look up and had just typed an entire sentence in the middle of the preceding paragraph.  Even the pope would've lost it. So I called out mad.

Wife suggested I call the doctor. I would, but I will only get the recording that they're closed until February, and if there are any emergencies, I should go to the emergency room. That would really make me mad.

I guess things are getting better, as the National Guard has stood down, the local police are back to pulling people over for untied shoelaces, and the news vans are no longer blocking parking on the street. It's a shame.. I really liked the morning lady. She had a certain way with weather.

• Chicago's new flagship Apple store is struggling with falling ice and cracking windows.  Even Mother Nature doesn't think you should use Apple products.

A Utah elementary school teacher has been fired because a parent complained when their child saw naked humans in an art class.  In a pack of art cards, provided by an educational company, were two cards with naked people in art.

This is a perfect illustration of a big problem with our societies: the naked body is 'dirty' or bad. It may startle this parent to note that we all have a naked body, which is located under our clothes. Do they insist their kids take showers with their clothes on? The more we worry about and protest naked bodies, the bigger the stigma we allow them, the more we screw our kids and society up. This kind of control is not needed now, nor was it in the past. I'll guess religion here.

There have been missives of support for the teacher, who had no idea the cards were in the deck, and went over them with the principal, who decided there was no obscenity there. At least the staff is on the ball, aside from that firing thing. What goes through their alleged minds?

• New train platforms are being constructed under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. An accountant identified 700 jobs needed, but 900 being paid. No one knows why.  The superfluous workers were laid off, but no one knows how long they were there, at $1,000 per day. On a per-year basis, this overage alone cost $10,400,000. Ten million on unnecessary personnel. Imagine the other irregularities in employment.
• This occurred in 2010, but they 'forgot' to disclose it to the public.
• These are the highest construction costs in the world, which could have been used to fix existing infrastructure and equipment.
• Costs on the Long Island Railroad project have mushroomed to $12 billion, or $3.5 billion for each mile of track (seven times the world average).
• Politically connected labor unions, construction companies, and consulting firms seem to have gained the most from the project(s).
• Yes, every city has its corruption, but this is How to Steal on a massive level. It's a manual for all other cities. More proof that stereotypes do not emerge from a vacuum.
• The M.T.A. did not dispute the findings. This is my favorite line in the story.

Just wanted to spread the news about the fabulous weather team here in PA. With a thirty percent chance of precipitation forecast, we received several inches of snow. Given the ability I'd have chosen some place with a real climate (and no snow). Somewhere that frowns on the cold, like Arizona, which is like living in a blast furnace. Still better than PA.

• For reasons I won't explain (because I can't), my one television weakness is police shows. Having watched police in the England, Ireland, New Zealand, the US, and Australia, as well as airport customs shows, it would appear that the main activity revolves around drugs (including cigarettes at airports). It is especially egregious in the US. Watch COPS and look for the formula: discover any small infraction, pull car over, ask if they have something the cop should know about, then find an excuse to search the car. For drugs.
• Speeding? Drugs.
• Broken license plate light? Drugs.
• Not wearing seatbelt? Drugs.
• Walking too fast in the airport? Drugs.
• Post office opening your mail in transit? Drugs.
• Whenever drugs are found, the police congratulate themselves on removing those drugs from the street. That joint the idiot kids have with them in the car.
• We all know the War on Drugs has failed, just like the War on Terror. The reason the Wars will never end is that they have created an infrastructure, including frightening amounts of jobs, and huge contracts for x-ray machines, that don't work, in airports. The states with medical and recreational marijuana must've gotten lucky. Sometimes the feds will prosecute them anyway. Government never gets smaller. Remember: the income tax was temporary.
• What we really need is a War on High Incomes.

To belabor the point a bit, the Irish now have a task force to help stop the illegal sales of tobacco products. Translated to Human, this means cigarettes which have not been taxed in Ireland. People have been going to ridiculous lengths to 'smuggle' cigarettes into the country. Therefore, more people are being stopped at the airport and having their bags searched. There are dogs trained to sniff for drugs, money, and tobacco. Now there's a task force.  Has anybody stopped to think that maybe the cigarette taxes are too high?

Pregnant?

I spend a lot of time picking on tv, as well I should.
There is a show called I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant.
No, really.
The female will behave normally and experience all sorts of weird symptoms. Eventually she winds up in the Emergency Room, where they always ask if she could be pregnant. She looks at them incredulously and says there's no way. Twenty minutes later they're back to inform her she's knocked up - assuming she hasn't already shot the infant out the old birth canal.

How, exactly, does one not know one is pregnant?
Except in one fabled account, this does not happen by itself. There is at least one requirement. You know... fun stuff. Knocking boots. Playing hide the salami. The beast with two backs. Boom boom. Marital relations. Paying the pizza delivery guy. Coitus. Sexual congress. Insemination by any means, including turkey baster.

So after that activity, pregnancy is always a possibility.
My paltry knowledge of the subject indicates a missed period or three. Or a weird one. It would also be difficult to ignore weight gain and the sudden appearance of a larger stomach, not related to beer. I will give large women a small break here.

Perhaps medical personnel should just ask if she's had sex within the last nine months and go from there.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

PornHub has a bit of a quandary.
While YouTube diligently struggles to keep porn off their site, PornHub is now struggling to keep safe for work movies off theirs.

Yes, one can watch or download movies like Hamilton and Disney's Zootopia from PornHub. PornHub is not amused. Quite frankly, I wouldn't be amused either, given the Mighty Arm of Disney, which keeps an entire city full of lawyers gainfully employed.  They are forced to toil in some sort of futuristic dimension, where "It's A Small World" plays 24/7. Rest assured, if you have to hear that song 24/7, you'll be happy to burst forth and sue too, right after you eat a few whole children raw.

The romantic comedy The Big Sick also wound up on PornHub. The filmmaker located his movie there and urged his fans who didn't have Amazon Prime to stream it from PornHub. This was apparently after locating Shakespeare's Daddy's Got a Secret, starring Nathan Lane and Macaulay Culkin and the award-winning Mommy Sounds Horse, with Rosie O'Donnell and "Trigger".

The only things better than the fact that these movies are on PornHub is their titles for Hamilton: REVOLUTIONARY TWINKS HAVE HISTORICAL FUN and Revolutionary Boys Get Dirty on American Politics Part 1.

The only insulting part of the story is that this blog's spell checker keeps highlighting PornHub.

Our Next Long-Term National Nightmare...

Let me start off with some bright news: healthcare breaches hit an all time high in 2016. At five months into 2017, would you care to guess which way that trend is heading? From my memories of working in healthcare, we're pretty much screwed.

• As I type, there is a noise like a 100 pound bee coming from another floor. It has depth like no other. A quick search of archival memory brings back last year, when the wife told me this noise was spooking her and the dog (back when the dog could hear). A window is open, apparently creating currents of air so strong that it's playing songs with the miniblinds, like some sort of gargantuan kazoo. In addition to normal human laziness, I'm typing and don't want to be bothered with the alleged musical instrument, but it's so loud even the mostly deaf Marshall can hear it.
• I've mentioned trash before too. It's less immense for me than mowing but still annoying. I'm a big boy, though... I don't have to be reminded constantly. The Crazy Lady next door found out that cans can't be put out til 7:30 the previous evening, so she stands out there with her atomic time standard and her clipboard, waiting to POUNCE on getting those babies to the curb by 7:31. And after they're collected, they're put back precisely where they came from and ready for next week's assault before the truck is two houses down.
• Speaking of trucks, I've worked out that there are three very loud trucks that come to collect cans, every trash day. I know this because when I'm off work, each one of them wakes all the dead at the cemetary a few blocks down. After further thought, and further leaping out of bed, screaming, I realized there are not three, but six trucks in the morning, as they take care of the other side of the street.
• Just to make matters more amusing, someone is having yardwork or something done, necessitating very loud construction gear. Very loud construction gear. It might be tree-related, which means it's only a matter of time until the Industrial Tree Chipper comes into play, like a mighty present buzzsaw, with loud spikes.  A coworker often tells me about her h fantasy of putting her ex into one of these, so I know it can be done.
• Oh wait - correction... the loud noises also have something to do with stones. A humongous pile of them got dropped in the drive, and the time since has been spent shoveling them. Ever hear Repeated Stone Shoveling? It's American Water Torture.
• This might come as a surprise to you, but I'm off work today. As I type, I can hear the kazoos, with their swan song. As God is my witness, I will stop this minor annoyance!

If you're an IBM or Lenovo Storwize customer, IBM wants you to locate that flash drive they sent you and feed it to the cat. Apparently it has malware on it. Oopsie.

• A pair of Pennsylvania medical clinics have reported a 'privacy incident'. They determined that in March, a person "could potentially have accessed" data on their systems. There is no evidence that they did.   Let's dance, shall we?

If you feel your android phone needs optimizing, do not install Full Optimizer or Full Optimizer Lite from Google Play - they're full of malware and only show ads. Your phone really doesn't need optimizing. Install Android Assistant to clean it up weekly (among its other talents) and Malwarebytes to run scans for junk.

• In the latest set of public excuses as to why she lost, Hillary Clinton blames the FBI letter and "Russian WikiLeaks".  Somebody should explain to her that the election was over in November and she lost.  Even after the George W Bush Hanging Chad Miami Fiasco, the crying didn't go on this long. You'd think simply having Chelsea omnipresent in the news would be enough for her. Someone has to take over...

Some poor fella was just struck by lightning. He's alive, in the hospital, and has a rather ugly red mark from neck to below his waist. He also has another lasting trophy: a permanent erection.  In unrelated news, there is a line of nurses outside his door, stretching back to the front of the hospital. An anonymous female charity group has paid off his hospital bill, and doctors have advised him that if his erection lasts longer than 4 days, to call a dating service and have them show up at hourly intervals.

• At a fast food expo in the Netherlands, two Dutch pranksters served McDonald's food, cut into pieces and skewered with toothpicks, and then told attendees that that they were eating an organic product. Participants described the taste of the samples as being very rich, and very pure. the link goes to a YouTube video in Dutch, but subtitled. One day, I want to pull off something on this level.

On this day in 1991, Texas governor Ann Richards declared ZZ Top day.

• Remember in the last post I reported that the NSA is suspending collection of US data because it referenced a foreign target?  Check out this article on how they collected data on 151m Americans.

Yes, I could've written this, but no, I didn't. A female UCLA student and member of MENSA has developed an IQ of 220 after drinking sperm for a year. Her original IQ was 154 and she was already a MENSA member.

The article details her decision to go with this method. Her new IQ makes her smarter than Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Leonardo DiVinci. Also listed are some benefits of sperm ingestion.

You have to know I didn't let this news go to waste, alerting Mrs. lefty, who promptly told me to "get chugging." Witty as this was, I was forced to remind her that my IQ is several points ahead of hers.

You can tell neither of us belongs to MENSA because there is a regulation that you tell people you're in MENSA within five minutes of meeting them (similar to the Vegan Rule).

Judging by the story on Yoko Ono admitting to a lesbian affair with Hillary Clinton, this 'newspaper' is probably more of an entertainment source than pure news. The story above on the lightning strike came from the same source.

• One of our charities is Oldies But Goodies. It's a Virginia-based non-profit that finds homes for old cockers.  We're on their mailing list, having donated and because we're stupid enough to keep reading their emails (which would make Sarah McLachlin shoot herself). The latest is about Snoopy, who's 12. His owner died and family members took him to a vet to be put down. The vet refused, saying Snoopy had much life left in him. So the relatives dumped him at a shelter.
• Not. Human.

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I don't like to mow the lawn.
You might remember this from paragraphs to entire blog posts, ranting on this topic. In fact, there are an awful lot of activities I prefer to mowing:

• chewing razorblades
• dating dead people
• eating stinky cheese in a pit of fire
• a quiet weekend with my cannibal in-laws

My wife, dear smart woman that she is, figured out I don't like mowing (after ten years of forcing me to do it at gunpoint) and went in search of a solution. We can't afford a service and don't really have a lot of grass.

My nemesis in life, the mower, is seriously a great piece of hardware. And when I say great, I mean the engine still runs after ten years. Almost out of the box, the throttle cable broke. I purchased a replacement, which of course did not work at all, even after I did a remarkable job of attaching the cable to the handle. So I had to devise a custom rig that would keep the throttle open enough to run the bastard. This involved a pair of locking pliers and a foot of wire. Also about 30 minutes of screaming per effort. Suffice it to say the neighbors, even the very old ones, learned some interesting new vocabulary words.

Don't let my technical words and inventive solution fool you - I should not be allowed near a mower (or under the hood of a car). My solution was somewhat less than optimal, in that it lasted for less time than I needed to complete the mowing, resulting in a second case of interesting verbal output.

I am mortally terrified of going to the dentist. Even though I can generally allow him to work on my mouth, the other 2/3 of my body keeps trying to escape. I would gladly spend some quality time in his chair than mow. It's ridiculous and illogical but it's reality.

Alas, the seasons took their effect on the mower: the engine started every year, but the body got cancer and I'm afraid it won't support the engine much longer.

Just the other day I was advised that a box would be appearing. Boxes appear at my house all the time.  I gave up on asking years ago, as the answer would only frustrate me. Just the other day an outdoor gazebo/tent thingie appeared. No one knows why but I thought I caught a glimpse of the dog with a sly grin on his face.

The box arrived shortly thereafter. It was a new mower. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or give it back to the poor driver. I was 'urged' to put it together, as that's generally the safest task, as opposed to me actually using the device. It was battery-operated, with a cute battery that looked like a car battery that was left in a dryer and shrunk to 1/3 normal size. It was also considerable more narrow than any mower I have ever seen, generating complaints because I'd have to mow more rows. After getting halfway done, I realized the instructions, which made Ikea instructions look like fine literature, failed to mention that the handle needed to be attached in only one direction. And look at me - I was cursing before even running the little bastard for the first time.

Once again the wife outsmarted me. She hired a neighbor's kid to use the new Infernal Device. He was thrilled to get paid for what he has to do at home for free and eagerly took the job. In fact, he just got done.

I have never been happier in my life.

I guess it's time to start using my dental insurance now.