Archive for the ‘idiocy’ Category

Rollin’ 60’s: Nazi meth gang in my neighborhood?

Friday, May 28th, 2010

These tags have been appearing in my neighborhood over the last week or so.  My best guess is that it’s either an Aryan meth gang, or some toothless white kid in a wifebeater who wants everyone to think there’s a Nazi meth gang operating in the ‘hood.  All three are within a city block of one another and would create a nearly straight line when plotted on a map.

Input from grafitti artists and/or experts on Nazi meth gangs would be appreciated.  Note the tag’s design evolution, as well as mixed use of apostrophes and misspelling of “sixties”.

Apparently abandonded house on Union Street, between 22nd and 23rd

Apparently empty house on Union Street, between 22nd and 23rd

Alley wall, connecting Union and Colhoun

Wall in alley connecting Union and Colhoun

Building in Kovacs parking lot on Colhoun, near 22nd

Building in Kovacs parking lot on Colhoun, near 22nd

What makes me think meth?  This:

What makes me think Nazi?  This:

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TIM clock is both useless and wonderful

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Via Boing Boing, here’s the TIM (Time Is Money) clock.  The inventor claims to have been inspired after enduring mandatory four-hour meetings.  That’s nothing.  I used to work for an IT training organization which had two week-long meetings per year, mainly to justify our managers’ existence.  That’s two weeks a year listening to lower management read upper management’s email out loud.  At the end of each week we’d have a “team-building” exercise which included:

  • Human foozball
  • Bowling
  • Laser tag
  • Go-cart racing

The other fifty weeks of the year management shoved their hands back down their pants and fantasized about the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award.  I shit you not.  Think of the cell phone company you least want service from and you’ve probably guessed my former employer’s identity.

See also:

Freelancer’s Taxi Meter

How to fail with Power Point

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More idiocy spotted around my dumb town…

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

I wonder if the one-way sign figures into the message somehow.  Also, I’m intrigued by the use of the term “gayness”, rather than any number of much more insulting homophobic slurs.

If you know any homophobes who hang out near 13th and Edmond, ask around, then let me know if there’s a subtext I’m missing out on.  Although this sort of stop sign vandalism is hardly clever, this particular graffito is damned near polite.  I’m imagining someone’s grandmother standing on a kitchen chair, shaking a can of blue paint.

UPDATE — From the comments:

codemenkey says: “there’s only one way left to stop gayness”?

My reply:

But, if there’s only one way left, what’s it supposed to be? I want to go back and add a [CITATION NEEDED] tag.

Even More Updated:

cory says:

After looking at the style closer, I have to agree that his wasn’t the first sign tagged with this message. It isn’t sloppy and the paint isn’t drippy or stuttered, like it is on the underline, meaning the person knew about can control. Plus, from teenage experience I know that writing with a can is different than handwriting. It takes practice to get a legible word out with spray paint.

My Reply:

You need a Daily Show-style ERIWA commentator title. My first thought was Resident Youthful Indiscretion Expert, but I’m reserving that title for myself. Maybe something involving the phrase “Statue of Limitations”? Naw, I’d better hold onto that one as well.

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Testing the new comment-spam plugin…

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

First, a little bait:

You know, there are few things I enjoy more than eating a handful of knockoff Zoloft and Viagra, then doing a little online gambling.  Now that I think of it, I AM interested in meeting women in my area.  Or, maybe, I’ll take my online casino winnings and buy a wife from China or Russia.

Discuss.

UPDATE — this came in literally two minutes after the post went live:

I like all of those things, so I’m going to let you in on a sweet deal. I have 30,000 USD in a bank account and I need someone to withdraw and send to me the money, then I will compensate you handsomely for help.
Gud Bl;es
Col. Prince Akbar

Cory’s a funny, funny guy.  Go show him some love at Keep St. Joe Weird.

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Wow, this was dumb.

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

Via the Glendale News Press by way of Jalopnik:

For an hour and a half, Glendale Police Officer Tom Broadway donned the eye-catching costume during an enforcement sting aimed at educating motorists to yield for pedestrians walking along unmarked crosswalks.

I’m the biggest pedestrian advocate in the world, but this is not how you educate motorists.  This is just, well, stupid.  Local councilman John Drayman summed it up pretty well:

Calling the enforcement sting a “stupid traffic stunt” that was “breathtakingly dangerous,” Drayman said city resources would have been more appropriately used to clamp down on speeding motorists — an issue that prompts daily complaints from the public.

By the way, here’s how to handle traffic with style.

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Vegan oysters? This hurts my brain.

Monday, April 12th, 2010

The Onion did this a lot better in 1996.

Christopher Cox, Paris Review editor, has a piece on Slate entitled “Consider the Oyster — Why even strict vegans should feel comfortable eating oysters by the boatload“.  Cox’s position is that although he’s in all other ways vegan, he eats oysters because oyster farms are environmentally friendly and oysters don’t have central nervous systems, so they (likely) don’t experience pain.

Oy.  I hate it when some VINO (Vegan/Vegatarian In Name Only, of course) commits to structuring a tortured rationale to justify eating certain animals.  I’ve seen it over and over again.  It’s intellectually dishonest and uncomfortable to watch.  The only way it gets worse is when they also falsely claim to be a Buddhist (BINO).  That’s enough hypocrisy to literally make one choke.

You know who I respect a lot more than VINO’s?  The folks over at Meatpaper.  They totally own their carnivorous nature and are a hell of a lot less judgmental than your average BINO.

Discovered via the Consumerist.

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Topeka = Google, St. Joe = Free Porn

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Everyone’s already all over Topeka’s stunningly retarded decision to call themselves “Google” for a month in a bid to get the search company’s attention and become a test community for its new one-gig fiber broadband rollout.

My buddy over at Keep St. Joe Weird had a couple of suggestions for my dumb town via the Twitter:

keepstjoeweird RT @gregglynnonkjo If Topeka, KS can change their name to “Google, KS” we oughta change our name to Twitter (or free porn)

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An Old Chestnut: What not to do with Power Point

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Via Boing Boing.  Even though the video quality is quite poor, it’s still a great overview of how to ruin a Power Point presentation.  Back in my old telecom days I attended mandatory meetings with executives who took bad Power Point to another level of suck altogether.  They would print copies of all forty (or more, sometimes many more) presentation slides, then read them to us while we followed along, gradually moving them from the face-up pile to the face-down pile, each of us creating a physical version of the cartoonist’s pre-computing inbox/outbox office cliche.

Oh, and there were no projectors — it was a purely paper-based experience.

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A Shocking Turn of Events: Phishers Discover Google Buzz

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

The Consumerist is reporting that phishers and other scammers are already mining Google Buzz, ultimately targeting the users’ email info.  I apologize for not remembering where I read about Buzz described as “the answer to Facebook no one asked for”, but it’s pretty apt.  An investigation has begun:

The Electronic Privacy Information Center is currently preparing a formal complaint to the FCC regarding Google Buzz, the same group that led a similar campaign against Facebook’s questionable privacies policies.

“Both companies have broken promises to their users about how personal information would be used,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC. “They did so in ways that were misleading, unfair, and deceptive. These are serious concerns for any user of these services.”

As a Gmail user, the first thing I did when the scam-hole appeared was disable the evil thing.  At least I hope I disabled it.  Here’s an article which explains the steps necessary to keep Google from automatically turning your account inside-out.

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University security analyst shaking down student RIAA targets

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Via Boing Boing:

Just like a tick on a rat, University of Georgia “security analyst” (quotes mine) Dorin Dehelean has been twisting students’ arms for bribes in exchange for not turning them over to university officials for RIAA violations.  Apparently part of Dehelean’s job was to act as a sort of process-server and actually inform students of their RIAA violations.  I’m forced to assume that he was also the one who discovered and documented the violations, which is the only way he could hope to get away with this sort of thing.  That’s a dangerous combination of authorities and never should have been allowed to happen.  Dehelean was arrested in an undercover sting operation and charged with extortion.

Regardless of how I feel about the RIAA (Hint: It’s not very charitable), this guy’s scheme is truly evil.  The RIAA will cheerfully bankrupt you for file-sharing – whether you’ve actually committed the alleged crimes or not.  The amount of leverage Dehelean had over the students in question is enormous and this guy deserves everything the legal system can throw at him.  Then the RIAA/MPAA need to be looked into, themselves.  From the Torrent Freak source article:

One of the more profitable schemes are the copyright infringement notices that include the option to settle the issue for a few hundred dollars or pounds. After the RIAA scored two major victories against individual file-sharers last year, many people are now eager to settle immediately.

If they’re done with their investigation, it might be a good idea to look into the practices of some copyright holders, to discover if these fall into the extortion category as well.

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