Category: Perennial Indignancy Watch

just when the fuck Cinco de Mayo became an American holiday?
The assistant principal who told the boys to turn their shirts inside out should be fired and blacklisted.
Cinco de Mayo is the Mexican independence day. Let Mexicans in Mexico celebrate May 5. For people in the US — including those of the Hispanic persuasion — May 5 should be just another day.
H/T.
Related: We were in Applebees the other night and apparently the corporation was celebrating some damn “ten days of Cinco de Mayo” promotion. I flatly told the waitress (who happens to be a good friend of ours and knows my conservative propensities) that Cinco de Mayo was not an American holiday and that I didn’t celebrate it. Of course, she was flacking the free taco appetizers, and I really don’t like tacos anyway 🙂
LATER: Ah, it goes deeper than I thought:

So here we have the Principal and the Vice-Principal of an American high school treating the Stars and Stripes as if it was a gang bandanna; even worse, the school administrators took sides in this imaginary US-vs.-Mexico gang fight by allowing the widespread display of Mexican flags on campus but banning (under threat of punishment) any display of the American flag.

Hmm.
Zombie adds (and I have to admit that I did not know this; I’d always been told that May 5 was their Independence Day):

Furthermore, remember that Cinco de Mayo is actually a minor holiday in Mexico itself, commemorating a little-known military victory; Mexican Independence Day is on September 16, not May 5.

The more you know.

Just heard an ad for smokefreeindy.com. A couple out for the evening pops into one of the few remaining Indianapolis watering holes where smoking is still allowed and spends the next 30 seconds pissing and moaning about how terrible the smell is and how many Indianapolis residents die from secondhand smoke every year (never mind that secondhand smoke science is just as bogus as anthropomorphic global warming) and obviously pimping for the legislature to just ban smoking altogether.
Look. I have asthmatic bronchitis, and one of the fastest ways to ramp it up and make me have to take antibiotics for a week and a half is for me to hang around smokers and smoky bars.
But I am ABSOLUTELY against government regulation of smoking in public places.
If I walked into that smoky venue, I’d simply turn to my wife and say, “Sally, we can’t stay here, let’s find another place to eat.”
But I’m an adult who recognizes that he has a health problem, not a stupid ass liberal who thinks bars should be forced to ban smoking.
You stupid ass liberals don’t seem to understand that all those big taxes that have been passed to extort money from smokers to pay for extra Medicaid and Medicare are predicated on smokers actually being able to, well, SMOKE.
And those taxes are a smokescreen (heh…I said “smokescreen”) anyway. Smokers won’t benefit from those extra taxes — smokers typically die before non-smokers, typically after short illnesses (heart attacks, strokes and cancer are usually pretty quick in comparison to, say, Alzheimer’s Disease) and it’s actually NON-smokers’ end of life costs that are breaking government-paid health insurance.
So basically, smokefreeindy.com, stuff that in your pipe and smoke it.

If this had been you or me, we would have been arrested, charged, tried, found guilty and done time or probation, and probably placed on the “no fly” list.

Lindsay Lohan’s frame isn’t the only thing that’s fading — it seems her star status is too.
The 22-year-old caused chaos while departing on a Delta Flight from Tampa, Fla. on Saturday morning when the airline was unable to provide her with a first-class seat on the already overbooked flight. According to an insider, passengers laughed as the starlet acted incredibly entitled (and embarrassed), stomped around and warned a friend traveling with hre: “you’d better come and visit me back there in case I die.”
But fortunately for Linds, she didn’t have to suffer the life-threatening ill of business or economy class as she was eventually moved into first following her entertaining tantrum. Phew. However it seems as though the Mean Girls starlet is being plagued by even more problems in her personal life.

She’s lucky she didn’t suffer being Tasered and made to walk back to wherever she was going.
UPDATE: Fixed spelling errors. Bad day at work, blood pressure high, fingers not obeying brain.
Also: Used to think LiLo was hawt. Now I think she’s more like something that rhymes with hawt, to which Tibby alludes in the comments to the next post.

Bought a SanDisk e280 Sansa 8GB MP3 player at Costco today. (No, I am not an iPod kind of guy and I don’t need 80 fucking gigabites of music in my pocket. Just to get that over with.) The price was right ($89.95 with the $20 off coupon) and my old 1GB Moto was giving me fits. And this player is very cool.
So I got it home and plugged it in according to the instructions, the drivers started to load, and then one driver failed to install properly. At that point the device wasn’t recognized by Windows. Hmm. No CD with drivers or anything, so I went online to the SanDisk e200-series forum to see how others were dealing with this.
What a bunch of pissers and moaners. Loads of people saying “I bought this POS at Costco, it’s a v2 model so it doesn’t have an option to switch USB from MTP to MSC mode (or vice versa), can’t update the firmware with the SanDisk firmware updater, crippled device, Windows doesn’t see it, wah wah wah taking it back because I’m too stupid to figure this out for myself.”
Then one guy actually very calmly notes, “Open the device manager with the device plugged in, and see if you see the device listed with a red ‘I got problems’ icon. If so, open up the property sheet and uninstall the drivers, then unplug and replug the device and the drivers will reinstall.” (I didn’t even have to do that — I just clicked the “update drivers” button and it reinstalled them without any problem.)
Now I will be the first to state that it ought to be easier to find the solution to this problem, since so many people seem to have it. And I really wonder how many people didn’t even get to the forum to find the answer and just boxed it up and returned it. But at the same time, if you persevere and don’t let yourself get pissed off, generally these problems can be solved, even if you ARE running Windows.
And for the guy who pissed and moaned because he didn’t have a Windows PC but expected it to work anyway — dumbass, it says right on the box that minimum requirements include, duh, Windows XP and Windows Media Player 10.
On the other hand, why am I upset about all this? These are the same people I listen to every damn day at work.
Sigh.
Oh, and the player is definitely NOT a POS. It’s very, very nice, and it’s working very, very well.
UPDATE: Refreshingly, a guy who not only writes a good review, but who has been using his e280 actively for over a year without a problem. Well, one problem, but it was self-inflicted: “DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT defrag your Sansa!”
Note that his even his complaints about non-existent chargers and extra cables no longer apply; these items are readily available, or at least the Sansa website says they are.

Yeah, we get them here, too.
My favorite of this bunch:

“Pro-Child, Pro-Choice” – I’m for the kids, but I’m also for aborting them willy-nilly too. This bumper sticker has the intellectual consistency of “Pro-Ants, Pro-Raid.”

Heh.
Via Jonah.

Either the Boy Scouts are bad:

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The city has decided that the Boy Scouts chapter here must pay fair-market rent of $200,000 a year for its city-owned headquarters because it refuses to permit gay Scouts.

or they’re good:

READING, Pa. — A Boy Scout troop came to the rescue of a hiker who had fallen and hit her head on the Appalachian Trail, building a stretcher from scratch and carrying her 3 miles to help.
Jane B. Scholl of Mohnton was hiking on Blue Mountain in northern Berks County with a friend Saturday. As the two reached the Pinnacle, a popular overlook, Scholl was looking for a good spot to take pictures when she fell about 5 feet.
“I landed right on my eye,” she said Sunday. “I was cut and bleeding and felt really woozy.”
Scholl, 41, and the friend started down the mountain, but Scholl began to feel worse. That’s when they ran into Boy Scout Troop 226 from Rockledge in Montgomery County.
“As we were hiking back down we caught up to her and that’s when we saw that she was bleeding,” scoutmaster Christopher J. Gallagher said.
The eight Scouts built a stretcher from tree branches and their sweat shirts.
“We took sticks, shoved them into each sleeve and made it long enough for her body to fit on. We carried her three miles,” Eagle Scout Andrew Swartz Jr. said.
Gallagher had called for help on his cell phone and the troop was met by medics who began treatment. Scholl was then taken to a helicopter waiting to fly her to Reading Hospital, where she was treated for a concussion and cuts and bruises and released Sunday.
When Troop 226 returned Sunday, members were met by a cheering crowd and a band featuring drummers and bagpipes.
“I feel really good. It’s nice to know I helped someone out in their time of need,” scout Bill Bowman said.

Make up your fucking minds, Pennsylvania. You need the Boy Scouts more than they need you.
Full text of “bad” article below the break.

Continue reading “World needs to make up mind”

Racy Burger Ad Leaves Teachers Furious
Sunday , September 09, 2007
A fast food chain’s racy new advertising campaign has left at least one teacher’s organization demanding it be pulled.
The ad for St. Louis, Missouri-based Hardee’s Corporation features a sexy teacher, making provocative moves in front of the class while two students rap to a song called “Flat Buns,” according to a report on myFOXstl.com.
Click here for the report from MyFOXStl.com
“How irresponsible can you get?” said the Tennessee Education Association in a statement on their website. ”At this very moment, there are female teachers in high school classrooms with 30+ students who are working hard to teach our children so that they can compete in today’s world. It is unbelievably demeaning to every one of them to promote a television advertisement showing a young teacher gyrating on top of her desk while boys in the class rap about her body in order to sell hamburgers!”
Hardee’s claims the ad is obviously a spoof, pointing out that the target demographic for the ad is young men who find this type of ad campaign appealing.
The fast-food chain courted controversy before with a provocative hamburger ad featuring Paris Hilton.

So, go to Hardees and watch the commercial.
Is it racy? Not necessarily. No worse than most of the other rap videos corroding young minds today. I think it’s pretty damn funny. And I remember a few of my teachers I wouldn’t have minded seeing do something like that.
In all fairness, the second ad on the Hardees site is a hell of a lot more “racy” than the one with the teacher. I didn’t hear any bitching about that one possibly corrupting young minds, but then teachers and their union are actually more interested in preserving their phoney-baloney jobs than they are in preventing soft-core pr0n from influencing young male minds. So naturally they’re only upset about the ad that makes teachers look bad. (They’ll probably endorse showing the other one in sex-ed classes.)