First, there's been another sign of the Apocalypse - Yoplait Go-Gurt. Egads. Yogurt, the wacky fungal food of the eons, is being turned into something hip, trendy and catchy. Will we see this as a new health fad, with hip yuppies alternating between taking snorks off of their tube - tube, of all things! - of Go-Gurt and swilling their lattes. Will we see the youth of America trying to see if they can get a quick high by inhaling Go-Gurt? Clearly, it pulsates with a plethora of doom.
Second, an update to the 'GURPS cat-girl watch'. I picked up GURPS Technomancer a few weeks ago, during a slow comics week, and, sure enough, cat-girls. More on this story as it develops.
Thirdly, I've encountered several honest to goodness Y2k bugs, much to my astonishment. One was in the numbering system we use to generate unique IDs for assorted wossnames in our software at work, which, shockingly, used the year as part of the key. Or, rather, the last digit of the year. As the leading character. Oops! Oh, well, it hardly stands out amidst the other bugs we have. Also, my parents' VCR apparently has a Y2k problem. Now, this is where you get real "Y2k bugs". The VCR has routines that figure out what day it is (Monday, etc) based on the current year (which is, of course, '00') and the numeric date. Now, the initial running widget knows the correct day and date, apparently knowing that '00' is '2000'. However, when you try and program the VCR to record a program, you encounter a second routine, which does NOT know that '00' is '2000', and kicks out the wrong date. The VCR realizes something's not kosher and balks at the clash between the compliant routine and the incompliant one, and refuses to accept programs. Oops.
Oh, well. It's the little things that make life interesting.
In addition, I saw Princess Mononoke over the weekend, along with my sister, who was still in the winter break slackness. Mmm... Princess Mononoke. Well, it wasn't bad at all, really. The main character's voice actor sounded a bit stoic, but that seemed to fit the character, so hey. Not bad at all, really, which I suppose is what you get when you hire real actors instead of radio personalities and schmoes off the street.
That's all the quickies. However, there's still time for the outrage of the week. Or, okay, last week. So, baseball's poster boy for spouting off crap is undergoing psychological examination in lieu of being punished. Yes, everyone's current favorite in the moron department, John Rocker, is going to get to discover wether his urge to say stupid things comes from his hatred of his father or his love of his mother (as Freud was wont to say). Hmm. Yes. He goes off in an interview about blacks, gays, AIDS victims, immigrants, you name it, and they send him in for eval.
Let's think about this one for a moment. There are two gripes I can take with this.
Firstly, the man's not insane. This is sort of a feel good solution. He gets to say he's cured (until the next time he says something stupid), everyone gets to feel like they've Done Something About The Problem, as well as the cheerful, glowing feeling that you only get from having gotten people to go away without your having to give up anything whatsoever. What utter tripe!
Secondly, the man's not insane. He's just an idiot. They should simply have fired him and been done with it. But nooooo. So, simply being stupid and bigoted now makes you insane? Anyone with opinions, however moronic, that differ from ours is now deserving of a visit with doctor schlock, who will be given the amusingly execrable task of trying to find a scientific enough description of 'moron' to use that nobody who asked for the eval will understand what it really means, and go home happy that this person who dared to have foolish un-politically correct opinions has been given the lunatic appelation he so clearly deserves.
What febrile, infant blather! What tripe, what utter, formless cretinism! I can't tell what's worse, the soft, New Agey blither that we can psychoanalyse the morons of the day away, or the hard, calculating, un-knowingly pure evil that is so assured of its own glorious righteousness that it consigns people with stupid opinions to the category of lunacy, where they can be safely ignored. Are these people such drooling preadolescents that they don't realize that there are those in the world who are simply idiots? Or is this the start of a new trend of all-encompassing babble that seeks to classify all with un-comfortable opinions into the category of those who need psycho-analysis and, inevitably, medication? Shall we start with the morons, the cretins, the bigots, and work our way into those whose opinions are merely odd, and not offensive? After all, there are few mental problems that can't be fixed with a little psycho-analytical schlock and some high level psychoactives, once the definitions of 'problem' and 'fixed' are made wide enough.
Trust Focasyn. Love Focasyn. Snork the Focasyn. Mmm... minty.
Figures it would be the Atlanta Braves that would inadvertantly bring about the downfall of Western Civilization. Although I always thought it'd be the Red Sox, myself.
Am I going all Spider Jerusalem, or did I merely not get enough sleep last night? You decide!
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