Wow.  Just wow.  You can’t make this shit up.

Let’s start with United:

True, by United’s standards we were late (we arrived at the line 45mins before our flight, and you are supposed to be through the line at that point) – still, we’ve never had that problem with Southwest.  Hell, we’ve gotten there 20 mins before a flight before and still been good.  45 mins would be golden with them.  Interestingly, nothing in the confirmation email we got from Orbitz said anything about a time cut off but whatever, I’m sure this is “common knowledge” for air travel.

Anyway, so the lady tells us “You too late,  just go through line anyway it will be ok, the computer will tell you you are late just click continue” (she doesn’t speak the best English) so we think it is cool. NOT!  Clicking continue gets you on standby..which would have resulted on us waiting around in the San Francisco airport for like 11 hours (until a 9PM flight!..our original eta for Santa Barbara was 10 AM).  Keep in mind this is happening at 515am and we’ve been up since 3am…so we’re not incredibly conscious.  That’s their first suggestion…standby and wait in an airport for 11 hours.  WITH A BABY.  Oh, and we can’t get refunds because we bought our tickets through an online  thing too…so from now on I’ll just get tickets direct from the airline in case we need to bitch at someone.  Lesson learned.  So yeah, we’re frustrated and saying “The plane doesn’t leave for 40 minutes!?!? Can’t you just let us on?”  Well no, because the computer won’t let you in..awesome; I love how they removed the human element so there is no one truly “to blame” – “Oh sorry sir, the computer won’t let you do that.”  Right, I’m sure you’re sorry.

So then they tell us to get in another line…ok wait back up, first the lady talking to us leads us out away from the lines and then just takes off for a while.  Eventually she comes back and tells us to get in a line which LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE THE LINE WE JUST WENT THROUGH.  So we’re like what the fuck why do we have to wait in the same line again?  What no one has the brains to tell us though is that while this looks like the same goddam line, it’s actually a different one and while it goes to a window labeled EXACTLY the same thing as the window we just waited in line for, it is somehow magically different.  Which it was I guess, there was a person who actually talked to us there, and eventually got us on standby flight to San Francisco (2 hours later) and another standby flight to San Luis (arriving 2-3 hours later than we would have originally arrived in Santa Barbara).  Standby with a baby….fun….but luckily no one took the spots and we were all good.

While we were waiting I called Avis’ 800 # and had them move the car rental/pickup from Santa Barbara to SLO (so we could then drive to Santa Barbara only arriving 5 hours late!).  No problems right?  Of course not.  When we get there the guy has no information in his system for our reservation.  Double awesomesauce!  Handy for us they had an Impala available.  Because we really wanted to drive a boat with choppy breaks.  But whatever, we made it to SB, visited Eric for a while, then made it back and dropped it off the next day.  And all was good right?  WRONG!  Jackalass motherfuckers called me that night and were like “Sir you returned the car with less gas than you took it with so we’ll have to charge y-”

Me (these are my actual words): THE FUCK YOU WILL!  I filled that thing up right down the goddam street, filled it all the way up.

Avis tool:Well sir we uh won’t be charging you for this but it says that we pumped 15 gallons into that tank -

Me: THE FUCK YOU DID, we only used half the tank anyway
(I only had to put like 8 in, we only drove to SB and back).

Avis tool:I uhh, ok I’ll go check the car myself but we won’t charge you

Me: Fucking right you won’t charge me.
(I was realllllly tired of idiots by then).
They never called back.  We shall see what shows up on my credit card.

Yeah, so all that was fun.  Hope the return trip tomorrow is much less eventful.

After all the drama we went to my Uncle’s wedding, hung out with family, and visited my grandpa in the hospital and he got to meet his great-grandson for the first time.

Man, they can already snoop on quantum encryption.  That took no time at all.  Like, less than no time.

This actually kind of inspired me and made me proud of California (no, it’s not the gay marriage thing!  But that’s true there too of course).  I never thought Arnold would actually make a good governor…but he really seems to be doing and playing the part of a Republican I don’t mind.  That he’s man/mature enough to deal with his wife openly supporting an candidate of the opposing party is a great example of an American family.  Not saying anything else about them personally, they could be horrible people, I really don’t know.  It’s just very rare for public political figures to be in situations like this.

I grow up and finally accept the American dream of suburbia just in time for it to implode.  Hopefully that “.” should be a “?”.  Who can say, really, but this doesn’t bode well.  I sure wish those housing price drops would hit Portland though…

More studies on the brains of gays and straights.  Surprise (ok, not really)!  Gay men/women actually have brains more similar to straight members of the opposite sex.  At least in the areas studied.  I’ll go on the record here I guess as saying that while I don’t believe 100% of homosexuality is genetic, nor do I believe it is 100% choice/environment.  Based on my personal experience, people I’ve met & things I’ve read, I think that for a particular person, it can be anywhere at all on that 100/0 -> 0/100 Nat/Nurt scale.  There are people who will swear until they are blue that it can’t possibly be birth/genetics though, so this is a nice bit of info to have out there for people like that.

You may have seen the news about the massive plagiarism in a recent video game…this cracks me up because it is so, so obvious. I mean the have the goddam Wall of the Eyeless shield from Diablo 2 as a wall decoration!!!  3d environments aside, what self-respecting serious gamer wouldn’t recognize that?  For example, ANY magazine reviewer who would look at the game.

People will just keep getting stupider and stupider, especially when it comes to overreacting to media (video games in this case).  Of course, overreacting to media-within-media may be a new high/low.

A nice graphic of marriage density by county for Cali’s first day in a post-gay marriage world.

This is probably the stupidest legal bullshit I’ve seen in ages.  Seriously, what’s the point of parents if they aren’t allowed to parent?  Might as well just turn the kids over to the state at birth.

This is just stupid in general.  I used to think the UK would be a great place to live…but now, with all the CCTVs and general weirdness (happy slapping?? for real??)  WTF is wrong with parents in the UK these days?

OK, I get it. You’re so used to lining up for random shit that Apple people tell you is cool that somehow, subconsciously you decided that maybe the reverse would work: line up and random shit will appear.

But seriously guys, this is taking a bit far.

I like how the improv everywhere guy has already said it’s not them. Because that was my second though, right after pod-person stupidity and right before “maybe there actually is something coming out and they know about it and the rest of the internet doesn’t”.

$4.09/gallon for premium (not that $3.89 for the lower grade is any better) = $65 for the whole tank.

Wow!  – and it’s not going to get better any time soon.

And evidently, Bush went to the Saudis and politely asked them to produce more oil so the prices would come down.  Yes, that’s right, the leader of the “free capitalist world” went to what is effectively a giant corporation (which we LOVE here in the good old US of A!) and asked them to make less money.  Because that totally works.  I guess this was his second visit, and he made the same stupid trip in January too.  Wow.  What makes you think they (or any company) would care about anything other than the bottom line?  Words fail to describe the stupidity involved.

So we all know about honor killings in Iraq (and other backwards parts of the Arab world) by now.  We know how horrible it is, and we can’t understand how anyone could think that lowly of a child, wife or sister (yes, of course it’s primarily women – although gay men are put to the death too of course!).   We know all this, but it still hurts like a motherfucker every time it happens.

Just a reminder, this (READ THE STORY) is the kind of person the Iraq government condones.  I’m assuming it’s the government because the “police” let him go and apparently congratulated him.  And because it KEEPS HAPPENING.  Hey, maybe they even got him a “I stomped and stabbed my daughter to death and all I got was this t-shirt” shirt.  That would be swell wouldn’t it?   He obviously thinks highly of the foreign soldiers that are risking their lives every day to help “liberate” him, and spending billions of dollars to rebuild support that government which is allowing him to kill his daughter.

MOTHERFUCKING FUCK FUCK FUCKER DIE.  Seriously, I don’t have enough profanity to cover this.  I debated just posting several pages of expletives, but that’s not really going to do any good is it?  I’ve had 6 hours to cool down since I read the article, so I’m mostly ok. I’m sure a lot of this rage comes from being a parent – I cannot understand what would have to happen to someone to go from loving father one minute to stompy motherfucker the next, and have your brothers & sons along for the ride.  I mean, I understand the cultural context of years of religious brainwashing that put him there – but still the stupidity amazes me.  I can’t imagine what must happen to someone internally to turn the love of a child into this.  There many, many Muslims who’ve come out against this kind of thing, and even claimed it’s not in the Koran – but who am I to know that answer?  I guess it doesn’t really matter if it is or isn’t if Imams (or whatever they are called) keep teaching it and people keep doing it does it?  You can’t argue with extremists.

Maybe if it was them in specific we were fighting.  Can we get honor killing perpetrators on our terrorist watch list or something?  They seem like good candidates for Guantanamo.

Maybe this whole war (and the billions we’ve spent on it) will be worth to me, in a tiny personal way, if some US/Blackwater/etc. troops “accidentally” break down that guys door and gun the motherfucker in the gut and leave him there to bleed to death.  Because I’ve got news for you buddy – there are no 71 virgins.  There is probably a whole lot of nothing, but I hope in my hard heart of hearts that there are instead, 71 Virginians (2:55 into that clip) waiting to ass rape that mother fucker with a scythe.

I’m just rambling here, but I guess what I’m wondering is:

Why are we spending so much money to prop up a country that supports this kind of thing? This is what billions of American dollars are going for?  I thought we were spreading democracy and the American way and all that bullshit.  Sure, thanks to GW we fucked up their country, but I don’t think I really care anymore.  Let the motherfuckers rebuild it themselves, if someone sane happens to get power and starts cracking down on this crazy misogynistic bullshit (because you know they feel like their dicks are HUGE when they’re gang killing a young woman)…then maybe we give them some money.  Otherwise, fuck ‘em with a jackhammer.

I think I’m going to have to take something from the traditional right wing playbook and say that any country we give this kind of money to needs to SWEAR OFF THE GOD DAMN BULLSHIT.  Or we nuke you.  Or something to that effect.  You don’t have to take our money…but if you do….you’d better play by our rules.  Actually, I thought we had something like that in place, but I guess we’re not really applying the whole civil rights thing over there.

Seriously.

I’ll just let that blog post do all the talking and joking.

There are lots of places to get fake tans in the Portland area. Because, you know, you won’t stand out at all in a city where THERE IS NO SUN 9+ months a year you have no sun. Here’s some random info about the history of sunless tanning (and the tanning fad in general).

Basically, lazy people who don’t actually work in the sun want to look like they do – ok, not exactly, BUT what the want is the natural result of being in the sun for long periods (historically the result of WORKING, but in the last 100 years those with time to spare (read: non-poor) have taken to languishing in the sun for whatever reason. But take the term “farmer tan” – a sort of condescending term, implying that one’s tan is similar to one actually gained from work – and thus uncool.

I don’t know if the previous paragraph makes sense, but the whole thing is funny/annoying to me.

But throw out everything and what you’re left with is that it is trendy to look dark (But not too dark! People with naturally dark/brown skin are scary! They will take your jobs and your women!). It is trendy and therefore people do it. People will take the path of least time (and often correspondingly most money). Even laying out in the sun all day actually takes time and *gasp* they don’t have that – time should be spent driving around in a hurry on a cell phone!

What really gets me is when people “tan” to like the nth degree and they look fucking orange. And they think this is hot. I mean, sure “hot” is subjective and all, but who the fuck thinks orange (and I’ve seen MUCH worse in real life, that’s just something that came up on the first google page) is hot? Well, them obviously I guess. And guys in general will fuck anything with a clear pathway to the funhole, orange or not. And Portland always has a decent amount of oranginas at any given point of the year. I mean, really, what are you supposed to think when you see them? “OH, they’ve obviously spent the last 4 months blasting their skin off on their yacht in the Caribbean!” I guess.

And it’s not like you could even CLAIM it is natural around here. At least lazy ass people in Cali who bakey bakey can try and be sly about it and pretend they were actually out in the sun (although of course they weren’t *gasp* working in it! That would be tacky! The work that is.). But here…no, no and NYET.

I guess it’s interesting that pale skin used to be the status symbol and now it’s flipped around. Oh, and don’t get me wrong, a tanned body can be HOT. But fake tan? You look nasty. But “Wait!” you say “I’m sure fake tans will eventually be indistinguishable from real tans!” Well, don’t you worry your pretty little orange head; I’m sure you’ll give me another reason to laugh at you.

Whatever, it’s annoying.