Once I again I want to chime in on the uselessness of tradition. And in this case, not only the uselessness, but the actual net negative that comes from getting set in our ways. In the United States, we have this idiotic tradition known as Daylight Savings Time.

The tradition works like this: twice every year we screw with everyone’s sleep schedule by tampering with the clocks. We move the time either an hour ahead or an hour behind, depending on the season, so as to maximize the light in the morning. Now that I live in a country that doesn’t do this, it makes me rather happy, because I always loathed this twice yearly inconvenience. Now it seems the time change’s downside exceeds mere annoyance: it’s killing people.

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Today’s mantra is simple: just let us fuck on airplanes. Let us go into the bathroom and do it. Let us fool around under the blanket. Sex doesn’t hurt anybody; in fact, it’s vitally important to the expansion of the human race, and it’s a right that should be protected everywhere.

And on the new Airbus 380, whose first class has semi-private suites, Singapore Airlines should definitely leave people alone. I mean, for whatever outrageous price once must pay for such a first class seat, I think travelers ought to be able to get their grooves on if they feel like it.

(BBC article)

I’m going to be a little “mushy” today and write a short note about friends.

Normally, I am a pretty self-sufficient person. I don’t usually ask people for much, and I try to wriggle out of sticky situations on my own. Sometimes, it seems people are even a little put off by this, as if they would be happier if i asked them for more, but I see it as my way to just not be a burden to anyone. Recently, I moved to China, and this experience has made me more reliant on other people than at any other time in my life.

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Yeah, I get what they were trying for…but I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw that slogan on a girl’s tee shirt on the subway in Beijing.

Surfer Dreams Is Wet. Indeed.

I decided to pop into The King tonight and purchase a delicious double cheeseburger. There was a rather large, and, as it turns out, rather surly man in line ahead of us. We walked in right after he ordered, and the girl behind the counter was giving him his tray of food.

The man wanted a straw, which is a reasonable enough request in and of itself. The girl, also rather reasonably, pointed to the right where all the straws and napkins and ketchup and stuff was, telling him he could get one.

Surly Man apparently didn’t see the straws. He got really angry, yelling back at the girl: “Look, I see toys for kids meals and napkins and a bunch of other stuff but I don’t see straws. I do see them behind the counter, though, why the hell can’t I have one of those?” As she gave him one to shut his annoying ass up, he bellowed his big zinger: “You ever heard of waitress service?”

I just thought to myself, “Dude…you’re in fucking Burger King, and this girl is not a waitress.” However, his largeness combined with his surliness ensured that this point of view remained safely ensconced inside my thought balloon.

Truer words have never been spoken.

This BBC article quotes Time Asia, reporting about a unique new tourist attraction in India. Apparently run (and started?) by one man (Peter Dorje), this “sport” entails going up on a mountain with a bunch of yaks, attaching yourself to a rope and a pulley mechanism, shaking a bucket of pony nuts*, and then really really hoping or praying to your god that the rope or pulley doesn’t break as this giant yak comes stampeding down the mountain at you. When all works well, you get yanked UP the hill while the yak charges down.

What happens when you get to the top, I don’t know. Maybe you are catapulted off the other side of the mountain and you land somewhere in Nepal. That would be cool. Sign me up.

Anyway, the sage advice from Mr. Dorje is “Never shake the bucket of nuts before you’re tied to the yak rope.”, and, you know, I am not going to argue with the apparent yak skiing inventor.

* I was going to be all cool and informative and link to something describing what pony nuts are, but incredibly, a search for “pony nuts” (with the quotes) returned zero results on Google when I tried it (perhaps some kind of anomaly). So, I’m sorry I can’t tell you what the hell a “pony nut” is…but apparently yaks like them.

Every once in a while, you come across something that is just brilliantly designed. This is one of those things.

I have little to say, except bravo to Knife Party, and yes, sadly the topic of the video is as prescient in 2006 as it was when they wrote it in 2003.

Thanks to Younghui for the heads-up.

I wanted to wait for a bit before writing about this, to avoid writing something silly while getting caught up in the hysteria. Also, I had decided a while back that this wasn’t going to be a geek blog, but, geek that I am, it’s time to break the rules.

This is a week that shook up the computer industry, because, after Apple’s move to Intel chips earlier this year, this week they officially endorsed the running of Windows on their hardware with the release of Boot Camp. This is certainly a Big Deal™, for more reasons than one, and I’ll toss my opinions into the fray, having been a Mac user for 13 years now.

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Just read this story about a woman in Florida who reported that she was gang-raped by a bunch of “French men” in her apartment complex.

The men denied her story, and probably would have been in some serious trouble, except for the fact that they had a videotape of the incident, which they showed to police, and it ultimately helped to prove that the alleged gangrape was really just your garden-variety gangbang.

I remember one time in college I spent an evening alone with a girl who I later found out had wrongly accused a guy of rape. This scared the shit out of me, because the thing about this is, as a guy, if that happens, your reputation is totally screwed, and no one will ever believe your side of the story. Luckily, nothing happened with this girl, and after I found out what she had done, I just avoided her.

So, the moral of the story is: if you’re going to engage in some crazy perverted sexual escapades with someone who you think might regret their actions, be sure to keep your camera on. Hell, it might increase your excitement a bit anyway to perform for the camera, and later on you’ll have evidence that might just save your reputation.

If you plan on a future in politics, though, you might just have a catch-22…

I have to confess, sometimes I can spend an embarassingly long time doing the stupidest things. For instance, the other day, I was standing in a drug store near my apartment, and I was agonizing over a very difficult choice: what kind of dryer sheets to buy. Ten minutes into this adventure, after having examined my choices up and down, resolution still seemed so far away.

I was beginning to get desperate, and a little paranoid about the people around me. That woman behind the counter…sure, she seems to be concentrating on her phone call. But what are they talking about? I can make out some Spanish, though I don’t really speak it, but could she be talking about me? “You won’t believe this guy here in the store right now. He seemed cool enough when he came in; he smiled and said hi, but he’s been standing in front of the laundry detergent and dryer sheets for a long time now. I’m starting to get worried. Maybe he’s just stalling until his friends get here and they’re going rob us. Maybe he has some kind of sexual fetish for the bear on the Snuggle fabric softener bottle. He’s so weird.”

Clearly, I needed to find a solution before she hung up and called 911.

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