New Hat!

August 23, 2015

Hey, check it out. I was playing Minesweeper because, well, I’m me, and look what happened. I won. Well, of course I won. I’m awesome. But I won a field that had every number on it. 😀

Okay, it was on the third try, but still counts.

You may also notice something different around here. Sure, Why Not? is totally new and improved! The color scheme and whatnot are… ugly as all hell like usual.

But it’s got a new hat!

And by that I mean new header. The winning Minesweeper field with every number because why not? I was tired of the old one.

Enjoy the brand new Sure, Why Not?. 😛

This has been Day 92 of the 100 Days of Summer, Round 15.

Who Comes After Affirmed?

June 6, 2015

He won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. Nothing new. They do that all the time.

And they’re off in the Belmont Stakes.

Crap. He got off to an early lead. That’s certain doom.

Around the far turn. He’s still in the lead, but there’s still a ways to go.

There’s one of the horses coming up on him now. Sigh. Oh, well. Another let down.

Wait a minute…

That horse is quitting.

There’s no one gaining on him now.

Oh, my God…

OH, MY GOD!

…

HE DID IT!!!!

American Pharoah [sic] won the Triple Crown! It finally happened!!!! 😀

I’ve been waiting my whole life to see this!!!

Good job, American Pharoah! Who’s a good horsey with a misspelled name? Who’s a good fast horsey? That’s right. You are! 😀

This has been Day 14 of the 100 Days of Summer, Round 15.

Death by Paper Cut

April 28, 2015

So I was putting away some paperwork the other day when my left hand grazed the side of a folder sitting in an upright organizer. A sheet of paper inside that folder was poking out the side at that moment. Sure enough, I grazed the side of it so lightly yet just right that the paper sliced into my left ring finger.

Gah! Paper cut!!!!

I’m cringing at the memory. As are you, since you’ve had a paper cut and holy crap they suck!

Every time I get a paper cut or some other stupid incident that results in some minor bloodshed, I start to think… what if this is what kills me? Like if the cut got infected with some super resistant form of bacteria and I wound up dead from sepsis.

Aside from the death, which would suck in and of itself, there’s the shame of such a pathetic death. What if there is an afterlife? What if I’m hanging out with some other dead souls and they share how they died, whether heroically saving people during a storm or simply succumbed after a long battle with cancer? They’ll be all like “So what happened to you?” And I’d have to be like “Well, I got a paper cut that got infected and killed me just shy of my 32nd birthday.” And then they’d avoid me. I’d only be allowed to associate with those who died from choking on a hot dog or something. For all of eternity.

Or even back in life, when people ask “aww, how did she die?”, friends and family would be like “from an infected paper cut”. It’d probably be on my tombstone. In my obituary. It would overshadow just about anything else about me. Something about working in biotech or being a youth rights advocate? Nope. Dead by paper cut!

So I guess, if death by paper cut is even remotely a possibility, we should live our lives in such a way that we’d be remembered for something other than this pathetic death. Which is a rather tall order. Murder people by giving them paper cuts perhaps? That’d certainly solve some problems, but may create others.

Lion and Lamb

March 30, 2015

So we’ve all heard that saying about the month of March. That it “goes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb”. The idea is that the month begins with harsh wintry weather and ends with mild spring weather.

Yeah, I call bullshit. I mean, if anything, it’s the other way around.

What do lambs look like? They’re gentle, soft, white, and fluffy. You know what else is gentle, soft, white, and fluffy? Snow! In fact, it’s right there in that rhyme, that Mary had a little lamb “whose fleece was white as snow”. Not whose fleece was, say, like airborne pollen that will have you sneezing for the next four months.

What about the lion? Well, what do lions do? Other than lie around all day and plot regicidal wildebeest stampedes. That’s right. They roar! Know what else roars? Thunder! Know when we get lots of thunderstorms? Spring!

In white and fluffy like a lamb, out roaring like a lion. Much more accurate.

Mmmm, Candy Hearts 10

February 14, 2015

“Crazy 4 U” Aww how nice.

“Sweet pea” Isn’t that the baby from Popeye? That’s not romantic.

“Soul mate” Having a candy heart for a soul mate? Eh, could do worse.

Yup, it’s that time again, where I eat these traditional Valentine’s Day conversation hearts and mull over their messages, while musing in my traditional Valentine’s Day way about romantic relationships. Somehow I’ve managed to churn out ten of these now. What shall this tenth be about?

Ah, I know.

Ever notice in a romantic couple that the girl seems to take on this really cutesy and meek persona? Almost bordering on whiny. Okay, it’s hard to explain.

Actually, no it isn’t. It’s well known. Basically, she pretends to be weak. Common examples are she has the guy kill a spider for her or open a pickle jar. More than that, though. She talks to him with this sad little voice that seems to scream “I’m a helpless weakling” no matter what words she’s actually saying. And it annoys the hell out of me.

I’m not making this up. I’ve actually seen it as relationship advice for girls! Not to mention any number of TV shows with plotlines in which a wife ends up the primary breadwinner or is otherwise independently strong in some way, and the result is the husband can’t get it up. And the relationship advice is based on that idea, that if you as a female are not at least giving the illusion of being a faint little flower petal of a being who needs some heroic masculine manly man to justify her existence, then he will lose interest in you.

Needless to say, this is pretty damn offensive to both genders! That an independent and capable female is incompatible with romantic relationships. That a male’s entire sense of self-worth is based on being superior to a female.

And yet maybe it’s effective? I’ve seen these guys eat it up. Offensive to both genders it may be, they grew up in a society where said offensive gender expectations are commonplace, so that’s what they’re comfortable with, unfortunate though it may be.

I don’t think I could pull it off, though. Not that I have much interest in trying. The idea makes me think of in Garfield comics when he sees Nermal acting all cute and getting attention and food, so Garfield wants the same food he’s getting so he pretends to be all cute too but he fails miserably at it and comes off as creepy and unsettling. Yeah, that’d be me trying to do this cutesy meek thing. 😆

But even so I hardly see the point. Relationships have real built-in aspects of interdependence without all these showy fake nonsense. Everyone is sometimes the weak one and sometimes the strong one. It’s called being human, and being with each other through those times is called being in relationship. Isn’t that enough?

Oh, well, it’s not like these things make sense. Back to hearts.

“Be true” Yeah, better than being false. See above.

“Don’t tell” Huh. That’s kind of rapey.

“I M sure” You’re a candy heart. Your sureness is limited.

“Get real” Uh oh. Made a wrong move? Come on too strong?

“See ya” Welp, even the candy hearts get sick of your shit eventually!

The Real Heroes

January 19, 2015

So I just got back from seeing the movie “Selma”. It was amazing. Brought me to tears a few times. Made me cringe a few times at the horrible racial violence. Powerful. Highly recommend it.

And it had better win Best Picture, damn it!

Not only because I like it when a movie I’ve seen wins Best Picture, but because it’s damn good. And also because I don’t want American Sniper to win.

Just to be clear, I have not seen American Sniper. I don’t particularly want to. I just read through a plot summary of it. Seems to be your run-of-the-mill soldier movie.

Soldiers are commonly referred to as heroes, and I suppose they are, or at least they’re really brave for putting themselves in that position. Not going to dispute that. And we have two holidays for them, Memorial Day for the dead ones and Veteran’s Day for the living ones. “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers and other such items are ubiquitous. After all, they’re the ones out there protecting our freedom, right?

Er, no, that one I will dispute. For one, their mere presence in many areas is pissing off the locals and thus encouraging support for the terrorists who might attack us and lead to more restrictions on our freedoms in the name of safety. Mostly it’s that the greatest threats to our freedom are internal.
Continue reading “The Real Heroes”

That Takes Religion

January 8, 2015

You’ve probably heard the line that goes something like “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” And as I’ve mentioned before, it’s full of shit. In that those doing evil things aren’t somehow not evil just because they claim it’s because of religion.

But I think I’d like to amend it a bit. Let’s try it this way.

“With or without religion, you would have smart people saying smart things and stupid people saying stupid things. But for smart people to say stupid things, that takes religion.”

Sound about right?

It works both ways, too. One might think of people who, despite smartness, have some religious belief or affiliation, something that the Very Smart anti-theist types, ironically, just can’t wrap their heads around. Or just plain a smart religious person turning an inexplicable blind eye to or defending troublesome or even abusive religious practices. But it’s for the atheists, too. In that, yeah, they are very smart, until the topic turns to religion and in beating the religion-is-evil drum, some of them start saying some astoundingly stupid things.

We’re of course seeing a lot of examples of both with this Charlie Hebdo attack.

You’ve got the otherwise-intelligent religious participating in some good old fashioned victim blaming, with the “they shouldn’t have been killed, but they shouldn’t have attacked people’s sacred beliefs either”. Ugh. And we’ve got the anti-theist “religion is for idiots” crowd saying “see? see? proof positive that religion is evil, atheists never do anything wrong!” Ugh (if, in all fairness, less so than the former!).

The problem with the first one is hopefully obvious. With the second one, while this attack was without a doubt religiously motivated, it defies and violates basic statistics horrendously to imply such a thing is representative of all 1 billion plus who identify as Muslim, let alone all the billions who identify with some religion. Now, is religion statistically and historically the most likely reason for any given terrorist attack? Absolutely. But it rarely acts alone, in that cultural superiority and good old fashioned power hunger have helped it in those attacks just about every step of the way, and if you remove religion from the equation (and, you know, actually learn something about the people and situations involved and find out how complex it all is, like a smart person might do), very little will have changed.

But I’ll get into all that in more detail in another post. The point is, when religion comes up, whether for or against, people have a way of losing their damn minds, whether it’s the anti-theist pegging anyone who sets foot inside a church as a potential violent fanatic when otherwise completely against any such blanket pigeonholing, or it’s the observant Jew who fiercely defends infant circumcision as some kind of cherished holy tradition despite being opposed to such violations of bodily autonomy in literally every other scenario.

Although, come to think of it, my amended quote has the exact same problem as the original. In that, no, these supposedly smart people really aren’t all that smart if they’re spouting this crap. 🙄

Or maybe they are. Varies by individual. It is just one topic after all, as opposed committing acts of evil for whatever chosen reason. But we all have those friends who are typically very thoughtful and logical on a wide variety of topics, while there’s one or two that they just start on and they sound like their brains fell out and all you can do is sigh and say “ugh, here we go with this shit again…” It’s just that this topic is usually religion.

Let’s Go 2014

December 31, 2014

Well, that was something. Another year gone. Time for another recap!

January: Viewer Discretion Is Advised

-Better change my address after lots of laziness.
-Ooh, possible job. All the way in Frederick, though.
-Mmmm, almond cookies.
-Why does Downton Abbey have a viewer discretion warning? There’s never anything racy or violent in it…
-Oh. That’s their way of saying “trigger warning” I guess.
-Cat ran away! 🙁
-Volunteering at WES. Because unemployed and bored.
-I made chili! 😀

February: Backwards N Thing

-Making chili and guacamole and cookies for Superbowl.
-Prep ran long. Did I miss kickoff?
-Aww, I missed a safety?!
-Winter Olympics in Sochi!
-Ooh, US women’s hockey is about to take Gold against Canada…
-FUUUUUUU- They remembered they’re from a country whose capital is Washington DC. :irked:
-Didn’t get other suggested job, but got interview for another one with same company but much closer location!
-And I got it!!! 😀

March: 37 Cents Per Ounce

-Ski night!
-French brunch thing.
-New job!
-So many trainings and SOPs to read.
-Lego Movie!
-More snow!

April: Existentialism

-Huh. The lab doors unlock each other.
-Brookside on Easter Sunday!
-Philosophy discussion lunch. Followed by fajita dinner. Fun day!
-Hendrik and Sasha visiting DC! 😀

May: Next Door

-I shouldn’t have said that.
-Where’s my birthday cake? Everyone else got a birthday cake.
-Oh, I finally got it a couple weeks later. Okay.
-Trip to New York sounds great… just not with my family. :irked:
-Wow, hotel room right above World Trade Center site.
-Good thing I came. My family couldn’t steer themselves around this city for anything. 🙄
-Holy crap, this sauce is spicy!

June: Councilmanic

-Netflix!
-Kingdom Hearts!
-What do you mean my voting registration address wasn’t changed with my address change? They said it was!
-I hate provisional ballots. They’re as good as not voting at all. :irked:
-World Cup!

July: This Fruit Salad Is Spicy

-Fruit salad has no business being spicy
-Dinner with Pam!!!
-How to Train Your Dragon 2!
-I think I’ll go to… Ugh, it’s too hot to drive anywhere. Stuck in so much traffic.
-Memorial service for dad’s aunt with lots of distant relatives I never see.

August: Red Trail

-Welp, I’ve gotten myself addicted to GeoGuessr again.
-Smithsonian with little brother
-Every Simpsons ever!
-Nats game! 😀
-Finally successfully went to Calvert Cliffs for Day 100.

September: Photospheres

-Mmmm, Middle Eastern Bazaar…
-Perfect 25000 score in GeoGuessr!
-To Baltimore with little brother! To Aquarium and other stuff!

October: Wild Pitch

-Nats are in playoffs!
-And lost badly. Sigh. :irked:
-Winter Festival rehearsal time!
-There’s a trick-or-treater dressed up as the Eleventh Doctor!

November: Windmill

-Sugarloaf climb!
-Auction night! I’m a devil! 😀
-A drunk devil.
-Big Hero 6! I’ve seen a lot of movies this year.
-Wait, why aren’t they playing Christmas Canon much in the Christmas music lineup this year? :irked:
-Almond cookies! Trying to get it just right.

December: Give Us Hope

-Shoulder hurts.
-Holiday potluck at work. I think I’ll make hummus.
-I put a lot of chopped parsley into the hummus. Now it’s green. It looks like guacamole.
-Got to bake lots of cookies for Cookie Walk!
-And dress rehearsal.
-And Washington Ethical Society’s Winter Festival. I’m Pandora! And my little brother’s a prince!
-And I get to pull the Hope banner!
-Cookie Walk! There are my cookies! 😀
-Trans-Siberian Orchestra! Damn, Verizon Center is packed!
-Dinner with Victoria!
-Time for Christmas shopping. Oy.
-Running around at work giving Christmas chocolate to coworkers!
-And finally… Christmas Eve. And Day.
-For New Year’s Eve, saw Mockingjay in movie theater.
-And now I’ve posted an entry every day in December!

With 2014 about to be in the books, it leaves a few things dangling. Though I suppose every year should, what with the arbitrary nature of when we determine when a year ends and a new one begins. The next year could prove very quickly to be great or another let-down. I guess, of course, that remains to be seen. We’ll see if I have more to say this time next year. Or at least something more interesting.

We’ll see.

Happy New Year!

Leelah Alcorn

December 30, 2014

What happened to Leelah Alcorn is tragic and infuriating.

She was transgender but stuck with super fundamentalist religious parents who told her that she’s really a boy and that she’s going through a phase. When she wouldn’t relent in wanting to transition, her parents pulled her out of school and removed her from social media and friends, completely isolating her for months. Finally, after leaving her suicide note on Tumblr, she committed suicide.

Why didn’t her parents accept her? Because she brought shame to them. Because they wanted to maintain for themselves an image of Good Christians. In their minds, she stood in the way of that. In their minds, she had to be removed.

So they did. They removed her from school and from public pretty much. They tortured her with religious pseudo-therapy. Did they think they would “cure” her? Or keep her out of “sin” long enough for her to outgrow this supposed phase?

Any way you look at it, they wanted Leelah gone. They might have preferred that she simply stopped being LGBT or maybe not. They wanted everything that Leelah was to be gone, out of their life, out of sight, so that she would no longer sully their image, their honor.

So now that she’s dead… problem solved! It may be more extreme than her parents intended, or maybe not. They saw her as a problem that needed to be removed, so she removed herself for them. In fact, given the treatment of her leading up to it, clearly this is exactly what they were hoping would happen.

They couldn’t kill her themselves without going to prison or – gasp! – tarnishing their image as Good Christians, so they drove her to do it herself, not only to keep their hands clean but to ensure, in their minds, that she goes to hell where she belongs. They wanted an honor killing, and they got one.

And, as a youth rights supporter, I must ask the very important question here. Why in the hell were her parents even able to put her through all this shit in the first place? She should have been able to transition whether they wanted her to or not. She should have been able to stay in school and stay in contact with everyone regardless of how her stupid parents feel about her. She should still be fucking ALIVE and happy!

But they had power over all of this. Because just like they cared more for their image than her life, our society cares more about their “parental right” to control her (even to death) than for her life. And that right there speaks volumes.

Tyson the Christmas Troll

December 29, 2014

On Christmas Day, Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted the following:

On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton b. Dec 25, 1642

Hehehe. Cute. I shared it. Why not? 🙂

Then, as I should have expected, a bunch of idiots complained that this was offensive to Christians. Tyson tweeted a bunch of tweets on Christmas, all of them a little snarky, yet somehow this is the one that pissed people off so much.

How the hell is this even news? Is anyone that surprised?

Well, actually, I’m a little surprised. This Newton tweet was just a clever play on words. I can’t even find anything in it that would even be offensive to Christians.

If anything, it’s some of the other tweets they should take issue with. Like this one:

Merry Christmas to all. A Pagan holiday (BC) becomes a Religious holiday (AD). Which then becomes a Shopping holiday (USA).

Two problems with this one.

One, Pagan IS Religious. It’s so often that the non-religious calling out Christian hypocrisies talk about paganism as if it’s some other thing entirely, forgetting that pagans are also religious, just not members of an Abrahamic religion. This sort of statement implies that only the Abrahamic religions are truly considered “religions” and that those that aren’t are just something else. Which is, needless to say, rather disrespectful and othering.

Two, yeah, the USA is not even close to the only country that spent the past month in a shopping frenzy. Come the fuck on! 😆

But aside from that, well played, Tyson. Well played.