Here's an example of how much people don't wanted printed, physical magazines anymore. I wanted to get access to ESPN Insider (stuff not available on the free website). Cost: $40 for a year. Or, you can subscribe to the actual magazine, delivered right to my door every 2 weeks, for $30 per year. This comes with the Insider access, and a $10 Amazon gift card. So ESPN is paying ME about $20 per year to take delivery of their stupid magazine.

Gluten

Gluten is not bad for you.
Gluten is not evil incarnate (like, for instance, Fox News).

For most people, gluten is fine. Unless you are one of the fairly rare people that who actually have a real medical reason to avoid gluten, just get over yourself and eat the stuff. And stop worrying about it.

There is a new TV show, Grandfathered, starring Rob Lowe and Fred Savage. It is not a particularly good show. However, one scene from the first episode won me over completely.

Rob Lowe owns and runs a trendy restaurant. His head chef comes over to him, and presents Rob with a dish to taste. It is the chef's new gluten-free pasta dish. I can't find the actual quotes, but it goes something like this:

Chef: Here's my new gluten-free pappardelle.
Rob: That's very good. What's your secret.
Chef: Gluten. Lots of gluten. It's basically nothing but gluten.

And there you have it. Let all of these ridiculous gluten haters keep questing for gluten-free crap. And let the normal people keep feeding them gluten without them knowing it.

I've got a new office mate. I know her name. But from now on, I think of her only as "gluten-free" because she had to ask for the gluten free items when we went to a work lunch last week. There's a tiny, tiny, chance that she has Celiac's or some other actual reason not to eat gluten. But I doubt it. She just looks like one of those people. Those skinny, fat-free, red-meat-free, gluten-free, taste-free crowd. Fucking idiots.

Two minor things, as a preamble, and then onto the real subject.

1. I'm beginning to believe that this winter will never fucking end.
2. I enjoy living in a place where, on a sunny March 24th afternoon, I can take a walk and get frostbit. NOT!!!


It's about 20 degrees out (with windchill, around negative 4000), and April is in a week. Fuck.


Sort of a rant follows, but logically presented

With the Boston Marathon on the horizon, after watching a bit of the details of the hunt for last April's Boston terrorists (and also thinking about the poor passengers and their loved ones from the Malaysian aircraft disaster): I am very comfortable with my feeling that all terrorists should be tortured and mangled and otherwise reduced to pieces. I consider myself fairly liberal on most topics. And here is how I come to terms with this feeling.

First, all human beings -- no matter their ethnicity, religion, age, or any other characteristic -- deserve to be treated with decency and fairness. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," if you will.

Second, once you study or commit your life to Jihad, then you forfeit these rights -- that is, as far as the civilized world is concerned, you are no longer a human being. If I were to draw a Venn diagram of human beings and terrorists, they would not overlap -- they would be two separate circles. Once you can accept this, then the moral imperative on how to treat terrorists becomes clear.

I understand that at different periods in history, some people considered other people "not people". For example, Americans at one point considered black people as property, rather than people. At other periods, some people would sell other people, and consider them as property. The Nazis didn't consider Jews people, or they would not have been able to kill so many of us without an uprising from the Germans. At certain times (even now in some places), homosexuals are considered less-than-human.

But in this case, when dealing with terrorists, it is their behavior towards innocent human beings that classifies them as terrorists. It is not through an accident of birth by with they are classified, but rather through their specific actions. By choosing to behave barbarically, all civilized people have the right to treat them as such. They cede their right to coexist with the rest of humanity.

Specifically, if you answer "No" to any of the following questions, then you are no longer a civilized human being:

• Do you believe that all people have a right to live?
• If you had a child, would you mind if that child were to die by an act of terrorism?
• Would you mind if any of the people you love were to be killed by an act of terrorism?


Once you turn yourself into a terrorist or terrorist wannabe, then you no longer share the rights of civilized people across the globe. I support any measures -- ANY MEASURES -- to eliminate terrorists from the planet. But let me be clear: while I would support an attack on a terrorist training camp, or torturing individual, confirmed terrorists, I do not support wholesale attacks against places where terrorists live and train. I would not want any human beings injured during the hunting and killing of terrorists.

Apropos of nothing, does anyone on the planet have a job that is more fun than Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman? These guys are the co-hosts of MythBusters. They constantly get to blow stuff up, burn stuff, and generally cause wanton destruction and mayhem. All in the name of entertainment and science, and without (usually) seriously injuring anyone! Holy Shit -- I literally cannot imagine a more fun way to spend my time and get paid for it.

Okay, maybe not so much for fun.

I have to blog now for work. It's a bit different from what and how I write here. This blog is raw, honest, filthy, and extremely partisan (hint: I'd be happy if we could have another Boston Tea Party, where this time, we throw all of the Tea Party into the ocean and drown them in their own imbecility. But that's not going to help me very much for my professional blogging.

When I say "professional," I mean it in its literal sense. I get paid, no more no less. Don't assume by any means that I am professional in the sense that I am good at it.

But what I do know is that it is an extremely painful process that I am enjoying only slightly more than my last root canal procedure.

My boss is trying to turn me into a blogger. I don't know whether the process ends with me being a good, professional blogger, or an unemployed, former, professional blogger. But now, I'm getting paid to write this shit (well, not this shit per se, but you know...), so I need to write a bit less acerbically. But still have my voice. Yeah; how?. I don't know either.

I'll be sure to let you know when and if it all works out.

This is the End, My Friend

This Sunday, September 29, 2013, is looming as a very depressing day for me. Two things that I love are ending (one for good, and one for the year):

• Breaking Bad, one of the best TV series of all time, is airing its final episode on Sunday night.
• The regular season for Major League Baseball also comes to an end on Sunday. Yes, the post season begins a few days later, but it just isn't the same.

The upside for these endings:

• We get to see the final episode of Breaking Bad, and find out the fate of Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, Todd and the neo-Nazis, Lydia, and the Gray Matter brain trust.
• As I mentioned above, the MLB playoffs begin. Additionally, my favorite team (the Boston Red Sox) is in, and my most hated team (the New York Yankees) is out.

So, I've been walking around in a funk the last several days. I need some kind of jolt to the system to get me back into the swing of things. Maybe I'll feel better Monday morning, when the endings will be behind me, and new beginnings will lie ahead.

A while ago (see my blog entry from May 23rd), I wrote a about the Religious Right, and their stance on gay marriage. When I went back and read the post, I realized it was a bit short, and that there was more to say.

The religious right likes to make the argument, "well, if we allow gay people to marry, what's next? Won't we then have to see men marrying goats, and women marrying horses and dogs?"

Well, there you go. WTF? What king of argument is that? How does allowing two human beings who love each other get married lead to people marrying animals? In what kind of fucked up reasoning is that reasonable?

This is an example of the slippery slope logical fallacy: asserting that if we allow A to happen, then Z will consequently happen too, therefore A should not happen.

Our society does not treat people and animals equally. (Not that some radical vegans agree with that stance, of course.) Most of us eat animals--and it is completely legal! So, does that mean, according to the religious right, that the next step is cannabalism?

(1) Gay marriage --> (2)sanctioned bestiality culminating in legal marriage between people and animals --> (3) equal treatment for people and animals, culminating in people being allowed to consume human meat.

The religious right has already professed that 1 leads to 2. If that is the case, then I say, just as logically, that 2 leads to 3.

Of course this is all total bullshit. Legalizing gay marriage is not going to lead to inter-species marriage any more than it is going to lead to cannibalism becoming legal.