Why Is It That No Matter Where You Live The People In Your Neighborhood Are The Stupidest People On The Planet?

Case 1:
It has been snowing off and on for several days now.  Kind of a nuisance, as we seldom know the night before if the kids will be in school, if we'll have to go to work the next morning, if we should really make that emergency run before the snow starts to the supermarket to buy bread and milk and toilet paper and other so-called 'essentials'.  But we live on a cul-de-sac, which I guess is some ancient French name for a road that does not "go through" anywhere and, conversely, ends in a circle.  Got it?  One way in, and one way out.  And the road is not very wide, I'd say maybe about 3 car widths.  So inevitably some of my my genius neighbors park their cars on the street and leave them there before the snow storm.  And when the snow begins, and continues and continues and continues, and the snowplows come to our neighborhood to clear our road, well, they can't do such a great job.  They must slalom around the cars that the idiots decided to leave on the road.  I cannot wait, and I will truly rejoice, when a plow takes out one of these cars, and I will take a day off of work to go to court to defend the plow driver by saying that, yes indeed, the cars should not have been parked on the relatively narrow street before a snowstorm and that they should have instead been parked in the idiot's driveway (yes, we all have driveways capable of holding up to 6 cars ... yes, 6 cars).

Finally someone else gets it ...

Well, almost.  Let me explain:

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal a guy named Matt Ridley wrote an article titled "Who to Blame for Natural Disasters".  Ultimately he basically says that if prosperity, the big key word in his article, were to spread throughout the entire world, as it has not yet done, most people who currently die from natural disasters would instead end up alive.  Says he:

In short, prosperity buys survival. (The shocking thing about Hurricane Katrina was not that it killed so many people but that it did so in such a prosperous country.) ...

... Suppose world per-capita income were to octuple in the next 90 years, as it did, roughly, in the last 90. So long as countries like Haiti get their share of this prosperity, we can expect most of the world to become as nearly disaster-proof as the rich West is today: through building standards, warning systems, health and emergency services, and technology.

This, he says, is borne out by the actual statistics of wealth and technology over the last almost-century.  But this is not what I am interested in ... that in which I am interested??  Whatever ...

I am interested much more in his opening paragraph:

My Anti-Katie Couric rant

So back in December 2009 I wrote a rather long-ish rant about a bunch of various things, and in there somewhere I mentioned that I needed to write my Anti-Katie Couric rant.  So here goes ...

A few years ago I was listening to the radio, minding my own business, when Katie Couric really, REALLY pissed me off.

OK, to back up just a couple of minutes for some perspective ...

"Panspermia"? Really???

So I found this article a while ago: Professor: We have a 'moral obligation' to seed universe with life.  The idea is that we should send some earth-bound organisms into space in hopes that they will someday reach other planets and populate them with earth-like thingies.  I disagree with this, and I think it's stupid, but that is not the point of this post.  (Of course it isn't ...)

In this article I learnt a new word: "panspermia".  It means "the theory that life exists and is distributed throughout the universe in the form of germs or spores that develop in the right environment".  And this is, of course, a wordicle.

I had never heard of panspermia.  However when I first read the article, and when I first saw the word but before they really expressed the definition, I was under the impression that to spread human life throughout the universe they'd have to ... you know ... do like the word itself sounds and send some ... you know ... mens' wiggly things up into space in some kind of ... you know ... repository which would somehow keep them alive for ... you know ... a very long time until they got to somewhere that they could ... you know ... do their human spreading thing.

But I was wrong.  Doesn't matter though, becase some dumbass (hopefully not our Gubment) is going to spend buzzillions of dollars to rig up an environmentally-proper repository for the organisms, shoot it into outer space and then die happy because their Earth-originated germs will populate the universe.  How ridiculously stupid ...

They all just "go dumb"

In my last post I explained, briefly, how we Maryland folk are not supposed to get a lot of snow at one time.  There is evidently a biological reason for this: the more snow there is on the ground, the worse Maryland drivers drive.  As my family and I were walking through our neighborhood today, trying to once again get out of our house for just a short time, we saw more of our neighbors doing stupid things.  I won't go into details (at least we did have some comic relief watching these people), but as we watched my wife, somewhat astonished, said that when the snow comes they all just "go dumb".  It is true.  We saw the "going dumb" over and over again.

And unfortunately it is in their genes, so it won't ever stop.

It's not supposed to be like this!

We are in Maryland.  We are supposed to get just a little bit of snow at a time.

This is what we first saw when we opened our garage, a good foot and a half of snow covering ... everything.  And we still had 6 inches of snow yet to fall.

This was after just a few minutes of shoveling, the beginning of about 8 hours of work to clear our driveway.

My body hurts from shoveling.  It's not supposed to be like this!

Teeth

I'm just not sure where to begin ... but I can say that I don't know whether the proper phrase for this is "just slightly over-the-top" or "ABSOLUTELY STUPID!!!"  I think the latter.

http://www.toothartist.com/

Yes, these are teeth.

You can have your teeth tattooed in Utah.  Oh, I am not shitting you.  It is real.  Wouldya like Elvis, or the Space Shuttle, or perhaps if you are a staunch Republican you might could go for a big ol' Dubya!  I have always thought that if I really wanted to be a rebel I would just have an earring tattooed on one of my earlobes, thereby killing two birds with one stone.  This, however, throws a wrench in that idea.  Perhaps I can save some money down the road by tattooing braces on my kids' teeth, rather than having real braces put on them when the time comes.  That must be cheaper ...

Credit to Dudecraft's blog for first bringing this all-important piece of idiotic Americana to my attention.

The Jesus Iron(y)

Saw this photo online today:

The accompanying text:

In this photo taken Monday, Nov. 23, 2009 residue is seen on the bottom of an electric iron at the home of Mary Jo Coady, in Methuen, Mass. Coady says an image of Jesus Christ that she sees in the pattern on the bottom of the iron, which she first noticed on Sunday, has reassured her that 'life is going to be good.'

All I can say is "People believe this crap.  Holy shit."

I'd be willing to bet that I can vomit and make a picture of just about anything I want, including Jesus.  Think people would like it if I advertised that I had vomited Jesus?