JBot Mania

**UPDATE: Scheck out the comments to get the story straight from the source.

As you have seen from my sidebar, I have been reading “Why Do Catholics Do That?” It was a gift after repeated admissions and blatant examples of my ignorance of Catholicism. It’s not an “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” kind of thing, but rather a way for me to have a vaguely intelligent and informed conversation next time I feel the need to nit pick about something. And maybe with a little more knowledge will come more understanding. It’s not going to upend my feelings about religion. I’m not going to start regularly going to church, temple, or anything else, but I expect not to dismiss it. That’s a whole different conversation, however.

This conversation is about discipline. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s really the top notch reporting that brings me back to CNN. If I just announced that I had breast cancer, I couldn’t think of any better way for it to be covered than with this very touching and very sensitive piece by CNN.

NEW YORK (AP) — ABC “Good Morning America” anchor Robin Roberts has been diagnosed with breast cancer and will be undergoing surgery Friday.

Roberts, 46, told viewers about her cancer on Tuesday morning’s show.

“I am so blessed that I found this in the early stages and the prognosis is so promising that my doctor expects me to be flying planes and hanging on to submarines in the middle of the Atlantic and scaling the Mayan pyramids in no time,” she said.

Roberts, who is co-anchor of “Good Morning America” with Diane Sawyer, said she examined herself and found a lump on her breast the same day she had done a report on former “GMA” movie critic Joel Siegel, who died of colon cancer last month. The network wouldn’t say which breast was affected.

It’s this kind of attention to detail that I find really makes me feel secure in my news source of choice. Those kinds of facts are what Americans want to know. Which breast? Obviously one is more significant than the other. What? Are they hiding something? Does she have a third breast?

I also like these completely related details about her marital status—because marital status has a direct relationship to breast cancer risk.

Roberts, who is single, said there is no history in her family of breast cancer.

I then like how they end this story on a truly uplifting note.

She’s been a contributor to ABC’s morning program since 1995 and was the newsreader before being named in May 2005 as one of the show’s anchors.

Former ABC news anchor Peter Jennings announced on “World News Tonight” in April 2005 that he had lung cancer. He never appeared on the air again and died four months later.

Seriously, do they have some kind of personal vendetta against her or are they all just completely souless.

I think it was a couple of years ago when I was reading CNN, that I was so infuriated and insulted by the number of spelling errors, typos, and missing words, that I actually sat down and wrote four separate comments to them complaining about how this kind of oversight was completely unacceptable from a professional news organization. (Yes, some of you might question my use of the words “professional” and “CNN” in the same sentence, but frankly, that argument is soo old… if true)

At the time, it seemed to be a fairly isolated occurrence, happening mostly on CNN who apparently were so harried to get the “news” out about Britney’s cooch that they couldn’t even take the time to proof. But the problem is spreading, and I admit, even to my own blog.

Is it that we’re lazy or that we’re simply typing more and at faster speeds? I think it’s a little of both. We’re certainly typing alot more content and at faster speeds. But with this technology—the ever forgiving backspace—we don’t really take the time to make each stroke of the keyboard count, because we don’t have to. It’s not like the old days when one typo meant retyping an entire page. Type, type, type and you’ll fix it later. It’s about the ideas, not the specific words, right? Another offshoot of our educational system’s philosophy of “close enough”. Like “close enough” builds bridges that don’t collapse.

So why don’t we try striving for better than “close enough”. Dare we say perfection? No typos, no missing words. Life’s rough, get a helmet, and be ready for criticism when you make a mistake. Not everything is “okay”. You CAN fail. You CAN do something wrong. You CAN be “not good enough”. But you can also be the reverse. You can be perfect, flawless, unflappable, accurate. Would you rather be good enough in a mediocre world, or successful in a realm of superior expectations?

God forbid we strive for something, instead of giving up before we even try. Set your sights high, and when you get there, it might actually mean something.

I’m reading one of my carpet, I mean granola, munching newsletters and, of course, they’re peeing themselves over Live Earth. Within the same page they say “From Shakira shaking her hips to the Beastie Boys bedecking themselves in green to the Police sending out an S.O.S., the shows — well, rocked. And while critics made noise about the event being too resource intensive and featuring “hypocritical” artists who own big houses and fly a lot, they didn’t dampen the day. ” - I like how hypocritical is in quotes. Looks like another nominee for The “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks. Then they offer up a book entitled “Wake Up and Smell the Planet: The Non-Pompous, Non-Preachy Grist Guide to Greening Your Day“. Non-Pompous and Non-Preachy, eh? Maybe, to be more accurate, we can call it “: The turn a blind eye to the habits of celebrities who want to get up on stage and support something they don’t even have the balls to do themselves Grist Guide to Greening Your Day”

Somehow I just don’t have alot of faith in people who think a massive concert is going to change the world. You have 2 billion people watching you. How about having those same 2 billion people actually f-ing doing something instead of patting themselves on the back for watching a concert. “Oh yeah man, I watched Live Earth. I’m really doing something. I’m really committed.”

I missed it, was Paul McCartney there singing, oh instead of the word “Freedom” 90 times, maybe “Clean up”. Memory Almost Full is right you jackass hack. Talent Entirely Gone more likely.

When having a debate with someone (or all of society as it may appear at times) don’t cite specific information or those new fangled “numbers” people are using these days. Numbers can lie.  What you should do instead, is cite past examples when people were wrong. Don’t address the difference in methods used to arrive at a conclusion or differences in available data from one time to another, just cite the wrongness - because once you are wrong, you will always be wrong - even if you were not, in fact, wrong, but some guy, say, across the country, whom you have never met and who happens to be interested in the same things as you are is wrong. You might then, in fact, be doubly wrong… forever.

Believe me, this kind of point of view sounds pretty good to people in such a PC society - almost good enough to make them consider what you’re saying as refreshing, you know, because it’s contrary. You will definitely be the class risk-taker and people will hang on your words as if they come from some other orifice than where normal bullshit comes from.

Here’s an example situation:

“Honey, I think the milk is expired.”

“Darling, 10 years ago you thought the mayonnaise was expired and it wasn’t. I fail to see how you could possibly have a valid opinion about the milk today.”

“But it has already turned to cheese and the date on the bottle says last week.”

“Yeah well, sometimes those dates are wrong, and do you honestly know at what point you can really classify that as cheese? Look, you were wrong about the mayonnaise and I am affraid that that makes you wrong about the milk. It really is just that simple.”

God, I wish she knew just how WRONG she had been. Then she wouldn’t dare to be right. 

Our next lesson will be entitled, “The Willing Suspension of Disbelief and Other Coping Strategies For When You Are Not Wrong, Just Not Right”

I believe in the judicious use of profanity in rock music. Profanity does have its place in language and I find it only offenisive when it is overused. A good “fuck” or “shit” well placed within a song does not offend me, but rather brings a smile to my face. It feels good to swear. But not too often, or like with all good things, it loses much of its power. A good example, by Ben Folds Five, is “Army”– “I thought about the army; Dad said ‘Son you’re fucking high.’”

I believe in the right for anyone, of age, to marry anyone else, of age. I am still confounded by people who feel the need to “defend” marriages and who are horrified by the desire of gay indivduals to marry. It makes me wonder what’s going on at home with these people. Last time I checked, marriage was between two people, not two people and a larger group of people who give it value. Marriage should get its value from the actual people in it. Why should the marriage of two people have any effect on the validity and value of someone else’s marriage? That’s what I think the problem is. It isn’t about what the Bible says, how the Bible defines it. The problem is that when just anyone can get married, what does the whole process really mean? It doesn’t mean a goddamn thing. It never did. Marriage is a collective idea wherein two people say that they are committed to each other and people decide to respect that. No one HAS to respect that–not even the two people getting married. They just choose to.

I find this whole idea reminiscent of fraternities. The only importance a fraternity has is the importance it gives itself. The single most important method for giving membership in a fraternity any importance at all, is by creating some means of excluding others, of singling people out as better or more deserving of this ‘honor’. Is that what we are creating here– a marriage fraternity? What kind of people need a fraternity? I’ll tell you–people who can’t garner the respect they desire on their own, so they attempt to force it out of people by giving themselves an imagined importance. If your marriage is so pristine, such a model of what marriage should be, you shouldn’t have to “defend” it. It should stand above all else based on its own merits. But if you need to hide behind a definition in some aribtrary book and then force that definition upon others, you, my friend, are the real loser.

I believe in the futility of trying to ‘beat’ traffic. You will never ‘beat’ traffic. You may escape for moments here and there but traffic will always get the best of you in the end. The best of you, that is, if your goal is to win. If you can accept it for what it is, create a schedule for yourself that provides you enough reward for getting in the car at all (say, a cookie and tea) you can achieve a stalemate. That’s about as good as it gets folks. And I suppose as a semi-liberal, that makes me a quitter by playing nice but really, I’m just not wasting my time and energy orchestrating my life around one obstacle.

Today is Local JBot’s Gonna Kill-A-Man Day. It would be National if I were to be traveling today out-of-state.

What kind of holiday is JBot’s Gonna Kill-A-Man Day, you ask? Well, it’s a day where you get to stay as far away from JBot as possible to avoid getting hit by the shrapnel of her self-destruct sequence.

Think of it as a Festivus consisting entirely of an airing of grievances.

JBot’s Gonna Kill-A-Man Day is a holiday that comes 12 times a year, approximately 4 weeks apart. It’s really more of a floating holiday, though. And although you may think this holiday comes every day, you’ll notice a dramatic peak in JBot’s Intolerance Module™ on this specific day.

Suggestions for a successful JBot’s Gonna Kill-A-Man Day celebration:

1. Don’t ask JBot why you can’t directly edit the text in a JPEG.
2. Don’t setup users on a web site and forget vital details that break things.
3. Don’t open Excel documents in Word and wonder why Word crashes.
4. Don’t delete important folders when there is a nice, safe archive folder where things can be put.
5. Don’t be old and senile.
6. Don’t say you open at 8:30am and then dawdle behind your little metal screen until 8:35am because you are the almighty Post Office. Remember, you are already on the verge of extinction but for your package pickup services.
7. Don’t chew in a way that JBot would find annoying.
8. Don’t speak in a way that JBot would find annoying.
9. Don’t BREATHE in a way that JBot would find annoying.
10. Don’t bail on a get together without explanation.

Other than that, giving JBot ALOT of space and quiet is recommended, unless you like taking your life into your own hands.

And yes, the day has been marked on the calendar, as I suspect a trend. Soon, I will develop a pool online to guess when the next JBot’s Gonna Kill-A-Man Day is going to be. It’s a surprise, much like Smith’s Mountain Day. However, Mountain Day comes with the clanging of bells while JBot’s Gonna Kill-A-Man Day comes with the clanging of skulls. A minor difference really.

On first reading the title of this article “Student boycott at women’s college suspended” I was quite certain that Smith College, my alma mater, had finally eliminated tofu from its kitchens. In reality, it was actually something important and not at all related to Smith.

I can say with certainty that I think it is very important to keep the women’s college experience alive. In my college career I went to three different colleges, all of which were one extreme or another in the gender breakdown. Frankly, I am quite happy to have taken a majority of my classes without boys (no, no–you are not men a 18). I can honestly say that the classes were more fulfilling without these penis toting individuals (PTIs) in them. ** ‘Penis toting individuals ‘ is a term of mine from circa 1999 or so. It was funny then and it still makes me laugh now.

Why you ask? Well, I’ll make a rough estimation here and say that about 75% of ALL comments made by PTIs in the classes I took were rooted entirely in a desire to hear themselves speak. That’s fine and all, but not on my time. I am back in a class now, mostly male, and it is the exact same thing. Any time they raise their hand it is usually to share some car’s engine specification (which is always posed in the form of a question to somehow make it a legitimate response to a lull in the lecture).

Of course, there are many vacuous and, sadly, chatty girls out there but you really didn’t see those at Smith. And I don’t think you’d really see them at any other women’s college either. Their needs for rampant hair brushing and frequent sex (with men) would not be met at an all women’s college. Here we can be grateful for the high concentration of dykes at these schools. They’re keeping it real even if they’re keeping it with each other.

So, I say sue. You got a penis? You go somewhere else. I don’t need you sucking up my academic air and spitting back sports scores.

And that’s how I see it.

My Anderson Cooper rage continues…

Golly gosh, Anderson, how do YOU feel about Hezbollah? Barely functioning minds want to know.

What I love, is offering a product with FREE training and people who, for some reason, absolutely refuse to take it. THEN they want to be able to call all hours of the day and night to ask questions. Yes… that makes perfect sense. Personally, I’d see a doctor about the possibility of a respiratory infection from having your head so firmly implanted up your ass.