Quit trying to kill me, facebook mafia

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/world/europe/31briefs-MAFIAFINDSFA_BRF.html?ref=technology

I don't want to hate on facebook. Without facebook, my life would be a hopeless abyss of jealousy-free dedication to my own thoughts, activities, and plans. Sux! Instead I'm able to silently/creepily peer into a carefully censored corner of other people's lives, and covet their apparently awesome existence. I even envy my past self. Analyzing my own profile, I've determined I used to spend 24 hours a day drinking out of red solo cups, fraternizing with frat boys, and maniacally grinning about how great it was (solo cups!). I also never looked fat, even during senior week, when I was on what nutritionists would call Cobra Diet since I routinely consumed my own body weight (a decent amount of King Cobra was also involved).

But putting aside its magical ability to make me feel like I'm missing out on some sort of fun somewhere at every moment of my life, I'm having issues with facebook's pro-Mafia agenda. I didn't know about this agenda, but someone on the New York Times' crack team of reporters asked his kid how to create an fbook profile and discovered pages dedicated to jailed mob bosses 'round the world. Although I initially took this to be encouraging evidence that today's youth are becoming engaged in world events and political issues, I later realized this might just be an extension of our other two main interests, Being Ironic, and Not Really Caring that It's Kind of Douchey.

Despite it being hilarious and super badass to "friend" someone who kills more frequently than Bird Flu (snore. Get serious, or get off the news.), do you really want your personal information accessible to a Crime Lord? All it takes is one sarcastic "Merry Christmas" post from you, and your full name, number, address, e-mail, friends, exact current location etc. are going in the "To Do" notebook under "stab needing". And he'll probably put a lot of stars by your name when he finds out your interests include "Lax" or your favorite movie is How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days (first tip: make him watch How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days).

I would advise anyone who doesn't want to wake up next to a decapitated barnyard animal to confine their irony to overthought Halloween costumes (I went as a starving Wall Street banker!) and embittered company e-mails. And anyone who does want to wake up next to a decapitated anything, should probably talk to a professional.

Quit trying to kill me, Victorian workhouses

Thrilled

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/health/30diet.html?_r=1&ref=science
So with the whole world being calm as balls and boring and whatever, the New York Times had a bunch of free time on its hands and decided to address the age-old question: did the Victorian workhouses of Dickens' time actually starve little adorable Oliver-esque boys who wanted some mo', or did they give those greedy orphans PLENTY of gruel so kindly shut the shit up about it. The Times is going with option b, shut up orphans, because of really solid scientific evidence they found in an old book somewhere.

Old Book sets out 6 different recipies for workhouse gruel (variety is the spice of life), all of which were found to be nutritionally balanced and adequate by a team of researchers who did not personally try out gruel diet. Obviously, with their time machine for verification that Old Book's instructions were followed to the letter by the well-managed and meticulously overseen workhouses, the Times concluded that Dickens really gave workhouses a bad rap in all those douchey novels.

Given the recession, the housing crisis, and now this article, I think we can confidently predict some business lobby or other appearing before Congress to explain how workhouses would help alleviate unemployment, engage the nation's youth, and improve our whack diets with some yummers balanced gruel. I don't know the specific source of this reasearch/propaganda, but my guess is: Chrysler, or someone else really into the whole child-labor idea right now. We may have thought Victorian workhouses no longer threatened our lives with their subpar conditions, production quotas, and universally loved novels, but they are clearly rallying for Round 2.

Quit trying to kill me, radioactive cash

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B01E2DD123CF935A35752C1A9629C8B63&fta=y

Today in Lithunia, the government wants everyone keeping their eyes peeled for some poison money they misplaced, specifically a radioactive US $100 bill. I've never been to Lithuania, but if I had to make an educated estimate, I'd say about every single Lithuanian citizen is already on the lookout for US $100 bills, which might explain why it went missing in the first place. And unless Geiger counters are standard issue in the former Soviet bloc (possible), or Eastern Europeans have gamma-ray detecting superpowers they keep on the down low, the government may need to come up with a more effective strategy than "watch out".

Aside from highlighting the apparent National Security policy of: be careful!, the bill also raises concerns about its origin. The going theory is leftover from Chernobyl, but Supervillanous plot against America sounds more plausible to me, especially when you consider that Ukranians walking around with USD 100 in the mid-80s probably had better things to do than hang out in Chernobyl, specifically, buying tickets out of Ukraine. Seriously, what better way to poison people than stick it on some money? It's like a monetary STD; regardless of what might happen to those on the receiving end, some schmuck will always be more than happy to spread it around.

t

Fortunately for non-pregnant adults everywhere, the article goes on to explain that, most likely, only pregnant women and children could be harmed by the killer cash, which is just one more reason to keep money out of the hands of women. Aside from being super terrible at math, they now also suck at surviving contact with dollar bills. So next time your wife/girlfriend wants to handle her own finances, carefully explain the life-threatening dangers of money management, then cut up her credit card.

Quit trying to kill me, Meredith Grey

I can haz boyfren?

So technically, being a fictional character, Meredith Grey can't kill me any more than Chuck Bass can escape Gossip Girl and sweep me off my feet in a whirlwind of passionate romance/sex. That doesn't mean I don't dream about the latter, and that, no surprise, the former is a recurring character in my nightmares.

Like most patients, I want my doctor to be slightly more interested in, say, the possible amputation of my leg, than in exhaustively analyzing the most recent conversation she had with a boy. Dr. Grey not only likes boys a lot, she springs inane monologues about them on every patient too incapacited to make a decent escape attempt.

Coma patient? Meredith will wonder if Derek will ever "wake up" the way your son wants you to. Brain dead? Meredith will sit by your breathing corpse and recount all the ways her relationship is just "being kept alive", like you.

Also, I wouldn't call myself a premature baby expert, but I don't know if, developmentally, something that came straight from the womb is ready to process the doc's reluctance to "let go and trust again." And even though she wisely steers clear of anything spry enough to pull its own plug, I wouldn't be suprised if she's slapped with an Assisted Suicide suit after one of her heartfelt romance run-downs saps up the last of granny's will to live.

Putting Meredith's Deep Thoughts aside, how many different ways can you contort your face to indicate a perpetual state of Deep Dissatisfaction? Her binary emotional range can express any feeling from kind of upset, to pretty upset.

Basically, the only symptom that might drag me into Seattle Grace Hospital is profuse eyeball bleeding, and even then I might try to walk it off.

Quit trying to kill me, mind reading technology

http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=can-brain-scans-read-our-minds-2008-12-12

Researchers in Japan are for some reason really, really excited to inform us all that, soon, MRI machines will be able to literally see our thoughts, reading our minds and peering creepily into our souls. Apparently they don't realize that no one is going to pat them on the back for inventing something that sounds more 1984 than Murder, She Wrote.

Scientific American vaguely describes some borderline cool stuff the technology could do- you know, maybe help people who hallucinate, or something, then goes on to utterly fail at journalism when it neglects to mention all the ways it could totally fuck up everything, probably because there isn't enough memory on the internet to hold that much information.

Someone needs to put these excitable Japanese scientists in their own Frankensteinien machine and find out the real reason they've created Artificial Intelligence which can't be lied to or tricked, because I'm willing to bet it has nothing to do with the expansion of human knowledge, and LOTS of things to do with Japan finally retaking the Asian mainland while the rest of the world adjusts to psychadelic cartoon animals permeating every aspect of our existance.

Hopefully the MRI machine can't read my mind from here, since I'm currently plotting it's introduction to good old American Carrie Underwood's Louisville Slugger. And I don't need any fancy science-majigger to tell me how the Japanese are going to feel about that.

Quit trying to kill me, ski lifts

Idiots trusting an evil ski lift

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/12/18/gondola/index.html
Always trust your instincts. Instinctually, I know lions could eat me. Instinctually, I feel attracted to strapping young men who would probably produce excellent heirs. Instinctually, I've been suspicious of ski lifts since the day one first kicked me in the knees and dangled me helplessly above a dizzying drop rarely seen outside the mortgage-backed securities market. Now CNN is reporting that a ski tower collapsed in Vancouver, due to a rare malfunction that will totally never happen again known as : ice. ICE??!?!?!? What kind of conditions were these ski lifts made to endure?? 31 degree weather with a smattering of light snow? 60 degree days with a Northeasterly breeze a-blowin? This quick concession of a battle with some mere ice was clearly premeditated and malicious. Stop trying to kill me, ski lift, I am ON to your game.

Quit trying to kill me, Wall Street Bankers

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/business/18pay.html?ref=business
Like most of us have guessed by now, paying out $35 million dollar bonuses to every executive in your organization is actually not the most solid of business models. When I was a kid running a lemonade stand, I knew not to swallow all of the quarters I earned until after I had enough to buy more lemonade, but investment bankers are laboring (ish) under the belief that a penny saved is a penny someone else will put in their bonus. In 2006, Merril Lynch gave out 5-6 billion dollars in bonuses, all of which was immediately poured into the good old Conspicuous Consumption fund, none of which seems to have been put aside for a rainy/pouring/you country is going out of business type-day.

Anyway, in the face of this whole National Financial Crisis thingy, bankers are promising to cut their bonuses to a more manageable number of millions, which for some reason is not satisfying the insatiable douchebag we call "public opinion". So now we have a national blood feud on our hands between the Corporate Elite and the entitled, newly pissed off rabble trying to steal those hard-conned dollars back cause they can't afford their Prozac no mo'. Those of us in between are left waiting for that "let them do coke" moment to trigger a revolution so French they'd demand royalties (ironically).
-
Quit trying to kill us all, you greedy fucks, and get your man-manicured hands out of the bailout cash.

Quit trying to kill me, freak weather

Christ, chill the fuck out.

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/2008-12-17-weather-travel_N.htm
First, we were all getting global warmed to a crisp. Now there are snowstorms in California and Las Vegas? Weather, if you want to go batshit crazy on us, at least pick a team. It kind of seems like you graduated from the Britney Spears School of Public Meltdowns, because right now you're all over the map (ha.) and I don't know if I should be terrified of heat waves, cold shocks, tornadoes, flooding, or the new natural phenomena of unimaginable destructive force you are undoubtedly plotting to come up with next. Get your act together or someone's going to conservateur-ship your ass.

Quit trying to kill me, alternative energy

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=can-nuclear-power-compete

According to Senior People Who Are Trying to Sell Nuclear Power, nuclear power is the safest thing since lying motionless on a pillow wearing protective gear. I kind of wanted to believe this, back when I was considering donating my eggs to science in order to gas up my Toyota, but now that oil prices spazzed out and I will be keeping all of my potential children, I'm back on team Nuclear Power is Scary as Fuck.

Also, ever wonder how nuclear power could save money if it requires construction of cement bastard Taj Mahals all over the place? Apparently it's not, and the solution is: Box o' Nuclear Power Plant!

"Wallace’s vision is for standardized plants, identical right down to “the carpeting and wallpaper,” that could therefore be manufactured and approved for less than reactors of the past, almost all of which were custom-built. Teams of engineers and craft workers would construct the same plant again and again in different locations; just like assembling furniture from kits, practice would make perfect."

So there you have it, practice would make perfect. I plan to steer clear of the "practice" regions of the country- maybe we can localize them all in those Western, empty-ish states? As soon as those workers get the hang of things, it would be just like assembling furniture from kits. And as anyone who has ever shopped at IKEA knows, we would all be fucked.

Quit trying to kill me, makers of "Day the Earth Stood Still"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/science/space/12earth.html?ref=space
Let's say you believe in intelligent alien life forms. You believe these life forms have the power of sight, language, and an appreciation for Christmas blockbusters. As it so happens, you live in America, so you quickly find someone willing to beam transmissions into space at your aliens for the low low price of $300/5 minutes. What kind of message would you send them? Maybe a simple greeting; maybe a beautiful piece of music, or a mathematical equation. Or how about a movie about ALIENS COMING TO EARTH AND THREATENING TO KILL US ALL UNLESS WE CHANGE OUR WAYS. Smart, makers of The Day the Earth Stood Still. I'd save you a seat on the Emergency Humanity Evac Rocketship, but I'll need a place to put my stockpile of every Independence Day DVD in the world.