I wrote this letter to CRA today.
WARNING: This blog contains writings known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Archive for the 'General' Category
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Sabrina received a couple email warnings from well-meaning friends today, about this decade’s great evil conspiracy: Bisphenol A in baby bottles.
Continue reading ‘Bisphenol A is the new aluminum’
I recently had some body work done on my Infiniti G35. Why? I’d rather not talk about it…
Anyway, I got quotes from a few different body shops around town. Most were crazy expensive. But one quote stood out from the others. It was from Towne Collision, in Kitchener. It’s a small shop, mostly just one guy, named Sieg. His quote was very, very reasonable. And he seemed like a great guy. So, I went with him.
His operation is pretty old-school. The tiny little office is lined with pictures of Sieg in the shop, from like 1978. He’s still wearing the same baseball cap. No computers in the place, he does everything with big books and a telephone.
Just want to say, his work was flawless, and done right on time. Being a one-man shop, I had to wait a while before he could start the job, but when he started, he was done when he said he would be done. The paint match was perfect, no sign that there was ever any damage.
I’m always frustrated when I have to choose somebody for work like this, on a car or house or whatever, by the lack of independent opinions to be found. So, I’m putting this one out there on the inter-tubes: you can do alot worse than Towne Collision for auto-body work. Good work, and priced right.
I have a default forwarding rule on my domain, which has the effect that any email sent to any address at all, at my domain, will come to me. I do that so that whenever I have to give my email to some CompanyA, I can give them “companyA?thegatesofdawn?ca” (change ‘?’ to you-know-what.) Then if that company ever sells my address to a spammer, I can easily block it, and I’ll know who betrayed my trust. So far, that’s never actually happened.
But lately, somewhere out there in the world, some worthless, good-for-nothing, shit-for-brains spammer has started spamming people using random forged “From” addresses at my domain. He’s done two spam runs that way, once on Dec. 24, and again yesterday.
Every time this useless piece of shit does this, my mailbox gets bombed with thousands of bounces. Even though he’s using all random “From” address, I get every one of the bounces, because of the default forwarding rule.
I swear to God, if I had the power to erase every last fucking spammer from the face of the earth with just a snap of my fingers, I would do it. And not feel the slightest twinge of guilt. I would even look them in the eye, say “you are a fucking spammer”, and do it. Spamming demonstrates a complete and utter lack of even the smallest consideration for your fellow man. They are evil people. I’m pretty confident if these asshats were somehow prevented from spamming, they’d find something else at least as evil to do. Rob convenience stores, torture small animals, become an executive at the next Enron, whatever. These people are useless wastes of oxygen, we don’t need them. They are worth less to the world than the monetary value of the chemicals their bodies are made of.
Now, I suppose it’s possible that some small number of spammers might realize the error of their ways, turn around and make some kind of valuable contribution. Write a great novel, win the Nobel price in physics, or something. I know some of them must actually be fairly talented computer programmers, though unfortunately warped and twisted by the Dark Side.
But I’m prepared to take that chance. I would kill every last one of them anyway. With or without that hypothetical valuable contribution, the world will find a way to continue. Even if Einstein had been run over by a carriage in childhood, the world would still have found a way. I feel quite comfortable giving up the unknown hypothetical future benefits that reformed spammers might give us, in exchange for the very real immediate and lasting benefit that would come from sending every last one of them straight to Hell.
That’s how I really feel. If only I had the power.
The tabloid newspaper Weekly World News stopped publication of its print version in August, leaving only the web-site version. This gives me mixed emotions.
I will miss it. It was always a feature of any trip to the supermarket to see what kind of crazy bullshit they were spewing this week. I will miss reading about the continuing adventures of Bat Boy, and keeping up with Elvis’ latest doings.
On the other hand, some good may come of this. WWN was the very bottom rung on the ladder of transparently obvious bullshit. The end of WWN means that there is now a new bottom rung. The new bottom rung is occupied by only-slightly-less-transparently-obvious bullshit beliefs like these:
- Astrology
- Psychics
- Homeopathy
- Reflexology
- The healing power of crystals or pyramids or whatever
- Philip Stein Teslar watches (google it yourself… I’m not going to give them any PageRank)
- “Biodynamic” foods
- Perpetual motion / free energy machines
People who believe in those things can no longer say “Well, at least I don’t believe in Bat Boy. I’m not that gullible.” They no longer have that defense. This may force them to reexamine their beliefs with a more critical eye, and perhaps the level of critical thinking in the world will go up just a little bit.
More skepticism in the world would benefit us all.
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