Category Archives: Rant


Rant

Starbucks Red

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CNN: Starbucks responds to holiday cup controversy

I picked up my last Pumpkin Spice latte of the season yesterday and it was in a red cup. I thought to myself “Yep, it’s after Halloween.” In the back of my mind I also noticed it was just red which made me think of all of the travel mugs and real cups from ‘bux this year, which opted for a plain colored dot in place of the mermaid – made me think that the train was continuing.

Over the 24 hours, however, other people looked at the same cup and have proclaimed that Starbucks hates Jesus and/or Christmas.

My first reaction: what the fuck is wrong with you people that is a new story of any way shape or form?

Second reaction: please boycott – it will mean fewer people in my coffee lines.

Third reaction: are you telling me that you love Starbucks so much that you find a little bit of God in your cup?

Ultimate reaction: as a shareholder of SBUX, thank you all for the free press and the religious implications that the Messiah is found in coffee beans.

Rant

Baby Amnesia

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MSN.com: Baby’s day care death blamed on popular napping practice

The all up cause here is unknown, except for the fact that the kid was asleep in a car seat, something that “The Journal of Pediatrics declared an official danger just a few months ago.”

Totally sucks – completely agree – and maybe this new advice is akin to the firm crib mattress and no blanket and no pillows advice every new parent gets, to avoid SIDS. What I find funny is this quote from the article: To minimize this life-threatening risk, it’s as simple as waking your baby up and moving him to his crib when you get home from day care or the grocery store. You can also share this information with grandparents and childcare providers to make sure everyone caring for your infant is on the same page.

The author simply hasn’t had a baby in two or more years. No parent – and I mean no parent – in the early days of their infant months ever has anything like “as simple as waking your baby up” cross their mind. Ever. Anything that involves their infant sleeping is planned to let the infant sleep for as long as possible. No, no, no – this author is far, far away from the sleep deprivation that comes with year one to suggest you ever awake an infant so the kid can sleep [allegedly] safer. Remember that it wasn’t that long ago that the “solid” advice was sleeping an infant on hir stomach.

I remember the infant years clearly and I believe that I probably have let infant Kyle hug a half empty bag-o-glass if he fell asleep next to one rather than wake him up for plausible safety.

Rant

Syntax For the Masses

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MSN: During the registration process at Harvard University, students are now allowed to indicate which pronouns they use, with suggested gender-neutral options like “ze” or “they.” Harvard isn’t the first college to embrace gender-neutral pronouns, but it’s among a wave of major institutions that are widening their policies and pronouns

While reading the Star Trek New Frontier books, I found it interesting that when they encountered an asexual race that they changed the “common language” – aka English, thanks Gene! – to update their pronouns as s/he and hir, pronounced shi-he and heer respectively. I remember thinking that it must have been a painful habit for the authors to support that, knowing that there would never be a practical usage in common practice. Ya know, until we encountered an asexual race. Who would have thought they were simply forward thinking?

Of course, the larger question is how in the hell does Spanish adapt itself to be gender neutral, seeing as everything in the language reflects gender?

Rant

And So It Begins…

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MSN: Devouring a McDonald’s Big Mac or a Chipotle burrito is on a fast-track to becoming a luxury for many U.S. consumers. It’s not as crazy as it sounds, given the surging costs for beef and, above all else, hourly workers.

In May, San Francisco joined the city of Oakland in having the highest minimum wage in the nation at $12.25 an hour. Minimum wages in San Francisco will reach $15 per hour by 2018. These hikes have led to recent price increases at Chipotle of 10% in San Francisco and 7% in Oakland.

“In San Francisco, our occupancy costs are about double the Chipotle average as a percentage of sales, and our menu prices there [were] right around the average for Chipotle restaurants around the country, so increases to wages can have a greater impact than they might elsewhere,” Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold said in an email. Occupancy costs are the expenses related to doing business in a location, including charges for rent, electricity and water.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. This post is over a year old.

Rant

Business as Usual

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“We live in an age where mass communication has counterintuitively turned all attempts of verbal debate into a basketball game where the teams are on different courts and stand around the baskets racking up meaningless points and throwing shit over the dividing wall.”
– Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw, Zero Punctuation

Kinda scary when you can lift something so profound and accurate from a blog-based video game review. Especially when you consider the author lives in Australia and likely doesn’t follow American politics or want to. Yet it accurately captures what I’ve been feeling lately about politics, Facebook, and – sadly – my fellow citizens.

And it’s likely going to continue to be accurate, as I don’t see an end in sight.

You see, the conservative GOP supporters continue to get religion confused with government and the liberal Democrats supporters keep telling me “you have freedom to think what you like, so long as you agree with us; if you don’t you must change your mind” and the seemingly inability of either side being capable of fixing things that they themselves fucked up in the first place. Both sides suck and neither side wants to fix problems; the invisible third party has little to no traction either. The supporters of seemingly every party sides mindlessly preach what they are told to say and are just as fast to prove that the “other side” is wrong… the only hope left is that a party wakes up to it’s botched marketing message and reboots.

Meanwhile, the nation obsesses over whether a woman in a relatively small city in eastern Washington lied on her job application when she was asked to proclaim her race.

I think I’ll go play some Viva Piñata for a few hours – better use of time.

Rant

Fun with Numbers!

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CNN: Harriet Tubman should be the first woman on the $20 bill, according to a new online poll.

In all honesty, I struggled to remember who was on the $20 because I have dealt with paper money so infrequently over the last five years. In fact, if I have to have cash, it has to be something really, really good – like coffee or festival food – or else I’m moving to the next store and using my plastic there. And of course, no one blinks an eye that the majority of the faces on our cash were presidents – the only standout I can think of being Ben Franklin who was simply an Ambassador – and Jackson had a strong hand in working to create more than one national banks.

What I find offensive in this article is how media and people are reacting to it, both the people that say we must do this and the people that are against doing this. Someone ran an Internet poll, ya? Harriet beat everyone else in the list of 15 people and after three rounds of voting, there were 609,090 people that voted with 118,328 people opting for Harriet. Lets be polite and make a case that this was a huge poll and we add up all of the people that participated and say that 1,218,180 weighed in on this and all of them want Harriet.

There are over 320 million people in America right now. How can the media or people promoting this cause take 1.2 million people and say that a majority of Americans want to see someone new on the $20 bill? That is 0.375% of the populous. If you stick to how many people want Harriet and it drops to 0.037%.

Shame on you, mass media, for yet another set of misrepresenting results to sell papers clicks. Shame on you, Americans, for blindly believing headlines without reading articles and using logic before making conclusions.

Unless, of course, we are believe the theory that the wealthiest 1% of the country is running things behind the scenes; in that case, the majority of citizens has spoken on changing the $20 bill.

Rant

Right On, Principal Kelley

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MSN: Principal explains decision to disallow varsity jacket for special needs hooper

Oddly I missed the original story that called out the school last week of being “horrible” for prevent a special needs student from wearing a varsity jacket but I’m thrilled that I saw the rebuttal by the principal. The righteous bumper-sticker rabble rousers have risen again to torment the school and the principal yet they screwed the pooch on the facts:

“Suggesting that our school doesn’t support and embrace special needs students is simply not reflective or indicative of the culture we have in our building. Our administrators, our teachers and staff, as well as our entire student body value ALL of our students. This is continually demonstrated in our activities, our celebrations, our honors and the daily way our school conducts itself.

For those of you who don’t know East High, please take an opportunity to learn about us before you judge us based on one story that originated approximately a year ago.”

Props to the media and the CauseHeads for creating a tempest in a teacup and slapping the self righteous paint brush around yet again.

I love it when people put blind principles before facts, even if it abuses a principal and his school.

Rant

Chick-fil-a Comes to Bellevue

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Chick-fil-a’s Bellevue location opens in only a couple of weeks, which I call I triumphant return. Most people didn’t know – or forgot – that there was a university based Chick-fil-a up near Bellingham up until a few years ago, but since they were closed on Sunday, I never got up there. The Bellevue store is more convenient by far.

I can’t wait to see how long it takes me to get in there as I expect an Issaquah style Krispy Kreme mob scene on Day 1. Of course, I also expect half of that crowd to be protesting the privately owned business that model their beliefs based off their religion. Make no never mind to me. People have the constitutional right to protest and I support that. A private company’s owner has the constitutional right to guide their business based off religious beliefs, provided they aren’t breaking the law in doing so, and I’m happy to support the local franchise owner and the jobs she/he has created. But of course, not everyone sees it that way. Most people that fancy themselves to be freedom-loving liberals, which is funny because the same people cannot tolerate people that disagree with them… I guess the freedom to disagree isn’t available to everyone.

Either way, there’s a chicken sammich in my not so distant future and that’s good times.

Rant

Why I Could Never be a Justice

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NPR: Is A Confederate Flag License Plate Free Speech?

Citing free speech, this has made it’s way up to the Supreme Court. And it should have. But at the same time, celebrating the Confederacy in 2015 feels… dumb. I don’t care if it’s offensive. If you are a person and you have a problem with what you see, why do you expect someone else to change their behavior to please you? Get a thicker skin, for feck’s sake.

But why do I think this case is clear evidence that I shouldn’t be on the big bench? Unable to weigh evidence? Too hard to evaluate the law? Constitution is too vague? Can’t be unbiased?

No, that’s the easy part – it’s because I would send Texas an eight-figure bill for legal services, for sending this to the highest court in the land and clogging the docket.

Call it a consulting fee.

Rant

Old Habits Die Hard

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Over the last few years, I’ve been toying with the idea of changing my blog engine. It’s not a change I’d take on lightly: SharpMT is still my primary blog writer and that’s tightly coupled with MovableType… yet, I’ve had a less than happy feeling with MT over the last few years, mostly because SixApart keeps talking about their new hotness that I won’t be offered on my MT5 instance. Sure, they continue to update MT5 with security updates, but their updates are a nuke-reinstall-in-place which makes my feet itch, and I wasn’t keen on having to shell out Enterprise pricing for my little corner of the intertubes.

Simply put, the biggest challenge is that my blog is… old.
Continue reading Old Habits Die Hard →

Rant

GTA V in the news. Again

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Business Insider Australia: Target And Kmart Have Taken Grand Theft Auto V Off The Shelf Over Violence Against Women Claims […] Two of Australia’s major retailers, Target, and now Kmart, have pulled the controversial game from their stores in the wake of claims of misogyny and violence against women, including the ability to have first-person sex with prostitutes and even watch it. In one example, a sex worker was killed with an axe in the game. A Charge.org petition bearing 40,000 signatures on it was sent to Target and yesterday, the company announced it was pulling the game.

I am appalled.
Continue reading GTA V in the news. Again →