Santa and Coal

For Xmas, here's a guest blog by Destruktikon the Elder:

OK, let's think about this:

Santa gives presents to good little boys and girls and leaves lumps of coal for the bad little boys and girls.  But look at the configuration of the sleigh--  a well proportioned seat for the ample girthed Santa to ride in;   a  place for a big bag of toys.  Where the heck does he keep the coal?  

He makes a list and marks it with who is naughty or nice -- suggesting that the proportion of naughty children to nice children is near equal and somewhat dynamic.  If there was a significant skew toward naughty or nice he would employ blacklist/whitelist procedures to make delivery planning easier.  This implies that there has to be a LOT of coal because nearly half of all little boys and girls are "naughty".  (This also raises the question of whether the list is maintained in real-time and if they use transactional guarantees to ensure that the integrity of the list is maintained -- but I won't go into that here -- maybe next year...)

Is there a separate just-in-time delivery process for coal?  If there were and considering the volume of coal delivery required, much more Christmas lore would be directed at that system.  I think we can discount the JIT coal delivery hypothesis.

Is there a supply of coal on board that we can't see?  Probably not because the mass of the sleigh, toys and coal when Santa initiates his route would be considerable -- and if he's hauling coal, it would probably be for an additional power source to supplement the reindeer on the first half of the delivery route when the sleigh and cargo are heaviest.  But coal must not be used for fuel or the sleigh would have a large boiler and smoke stack which is certainly not in any of the traditional images of the sleigh.

Is there coal mixed in with the bag of toys?  If so, wouldn't the good children's presents be sooty and grimy from the coal?  

Are there separate compartments in the bag for presents and coal?  If the density of the coal is significantly different than that of the toys, that may make the bag unwieldy to manage.  Also carrying a bag with a significant amount of coal into every home probably violates some local and regional ordinances.

Does he use his super Santa strength to crush the bad children's presents into black lumps?  That seems especially cruel and would consume a considerable amount of energy.  And it's probably not efficient to produce a toy and then crush it down into a lump just prior to delivery. (Though I admit this option appeals to me at some perverse level.)

No, I think the answer is elsewhere.  Look again at the configuration of the sleigh.  There is a component of the system architecture that can produce dark worthless lumps.  In fact, there are eight of them (nine if you count Rudolf).  So it's not coal that's being left to the naughty children...

I hope you've been good this year.

Lying Scumbags At the Smithsonian's IMAX Theater

The wife and I ventured to DC today for the sole purpose of seeing Tornado Alley, the movie that filmmaker/storm chaser Sean Casey has been making for the past several years. Basically, Sean Casey built the Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV) so he could drive into a tornado and film it. He, the TIV, and his crew have been on every season of the Discovery Channel show Storm Chasers. We've been watching the show and have really wanted to see his movie.

Tornado Alley at 4:55pm! Looks good to me!

Well, this morning we checked the Samuel C. Johnson IMAX Theater webpage to make sure it was playing. As you can see from the screencap, it clearly states that Tornado Alley was showing at 4:55pm until December 15. Today being December 10th, one would think the movie would still be showing. Seems pretty damn black and white to me that Tornado Alley was playing. So, we headed out to see that showing of the movie.

Now it's not an easy thing to get to the Museum of Natural History, where this IMAX theater is. We need to drive down I-95 and then ride 3 different Metro lines, each of which was single tracking, which causes huge delays. So it took a while to get there. We showed up around 4pm with plenty of time to get tickets and see the movie.

When we arrived at the museum, we saw this:

Tornado Alley 4:55! (Those with keen eyes will notice I took this picture at 5:21pm, which was after I decided I needed evidence.) There was also a small card nearby with all the IMAX movies that were showing with Tornado Alley at 4:50. Close enough, but the card had been removed before I had a chance to take a picture.

When we approached the counter to get tickets for Tornado Alley at 4:55pm, we were presented with this:

Dinosaurs?! I don't want to see dinosaurs! No one built a dinosaur tank to drive into the middle of a dinosaur! We complained to the manager, who basically said we should have called the theater before we left. Why the hell would I call the theater? It said in no less than 3 different places that are run by the Smithsonian that Tornado Alley was showing at 4:55pm on December 10, 2011. Plus, anyone who would go through the effort to check the website clearly has a specific movie in mind that they want to see.


It takes 4 seconds to update a website so this won't happen, but I guess that's too much for the Smithsonian. The girl at the counter told us we were the fifth group of people that day to complain about the change.

Epilogue
Defeated, we went to see the National Christmas Tree. What a complete failure that was, too! First of all the tree this year looks like total crap. You know the Rockefeller Center tree in NYC? Got that nice upside-down tornado shape in your head? Now make it wider and lumpy and asymmetrical and you have the National Christmas Tree. And for some reason, they blocked off the pathway around the tree, so you couldn't see any of the state trees for states after the letter M. We did see the Maryland tree and it was wonderful. The DC tree sucked, which was fitting because DC sucks.

A Shocking Revelation About Mario

Small Mario: 3 fingers and a thumb.

Big Mario: 4 fingers and a thumb.

Every Episode of Big O & Dukes

I Got an Assist at Verizon Center

Yes, I am bragging.

Verizon Center (home of the Washington Capitals) has a promotion where a local recreational or high school hockey team can buy up a block of tickets to a game, watch the game, then play on the ice after the Caps game. The friends and family you brought along with you get to watch your game from section 100. My team, the Puck Hogs, took advantage of this deal last month.

Before the game started, we had to bring all of our hockey gear to the press entrance of Verizon Center. Before bringing it inside, some poor dog had to sniff each hockey bag for explosives or drugs or something. All that dog smelled was 30 different bags full of disgusting hockey gear.

We brought our bags into the basement of Verizon Center, passing by the locker rooms for the Mystics, the Wizards, the Red Rockers, and of course, the Capitals. We ditched our bags in what was basically a closet near the end of the hallway that connects to the Zamboni tunnel. Joel Ward was walking around the bowels of the arena and our Czech player had a chance to talk to his countryman, Milan Michalek.

At the end of the second period, we had to meet with our Verizon Center liaison, go back into the seemy underbelly of Verizon Center, and move all of our stuff to a "dressing room", which was not exactly set up to have a hockey team get ready in. It seemed to be more of a small, all-purpose dressing room. My area was just a folding chair.

The Caps game was fine, I guess. Here's the recap. Caps won.

At the end of the third, we once again met the liaison, and once again went to the basement to get changed.

The Puck Hogs sat on the visitor's bench; the Red Army (our opponents) sat on the Capitals bench. Despite their name, the Red Army wore white and we wore red. The bench itself is higher than at the rinks around the DC area. If I sat on the bench, my feet did not touch the ground.

The ice at Verizon Center is surprisingly nice. It's well-lit, too. I didn't find any of the ads on the ice or the boards distracting at all. The biggest downside to being on the ice is that you can't see the scoreboard very easily. Maybe there was a more subtle one hiding somewhere. I repeatedly attempted to look at the TyrannoVision while on the ice to see how long I had been on my shift.

From the ice, of course, you can see every single seat in the arena. Save for a bunch of seats in Section 100, they were all empty. I can't begin to imagine what it sounds like when all the seats are full.

My assist was anticlimactic. The puck was passed to me along the boards in the neutral zone. I centered it and crashed the net. The first shot bounced off the goalie; someone else picked up the rebound and scored. Still, it was amazing to have gotten an assist in Verizon Center, the same number Andrew Gordon has gotten there. That's right, I'm just as good as Andrew Gordon.

We lost, just like the Capitals. HEY-O!

Marathon Stickers

You've seen them, you just may not know it. They're on just about every third or fourth SUV (and sometimes on cars, as well) in the DC area. It's one of those white oval OBX-style stickers with a number in it, usually 13.1 or 26.2, which is how many miles long a half-marathon and a marathon are, respectively.

They come in several variations. Usually, the numbers are in Papyrus, which is a travesty on its own. Perhaps the saddest version of all:

Awww did somebody run a 5k? That's like meeting a guitarist that just figured out a blues scale.

When you see these stickers, it means a few things:

1. The driver of the SUV you're behind either ran, attempted to run, or makes you want to think he ran a marathon.
2. He wants you to think he's better than you because he ran a marathon and you didn't.
3. He's not afraid to brag about his marathon-ing, mostly due to the fact the he's a douchebag.

So you ran a marathon. Big fucking deal. I don't need to know about it. You're not better than me. I have better things to do with my time than to run around all the time. Complaining to the internet about people bragging about running around and taking pictures while I'm sitting in traffic are two activities that are better than running around like an idiot. Take that sticker and shove it.

A half iron man? I'm not impressed. The bike did most of the work.

Keebler Shat on My Childhood Dreams

It's a well-known fact that the butter-cookie-exterior-and-chocolate-fudge-interior E. L. Fudge cookies are Mankind's Greatest Achievement. Everything about them is perfect, right down to the consistency of both the cookie and the fudge creme, as well as the relative stickiness of the creme. The cookies are such a work of art that it is very easy to separate the top half of the cookie, remove the fudge creme, and make your own de facto double stuf-style cookie. Or as I call it, valhalla.

One day, the folks at Keebler (a subsidiary of Kellogg's) got a wild hair up their collective ass, and clearly in a fit of jealousy against Nabisco's Oreos (a subsidiary of Kraft), decided to steal the idea of Double Stuf-ing E. L. Fudges. If you told 10-year-old me that one day I would be eating double stuf E. L. Fudges, I would have kicked you in the shins for making up impossible shit that's too good to be true.

Now, it works on Oreos because here's the Double Stuf recipe (SPOILER ALERT!): Same cookie, twice the Stuf. Somehow, Keebler couldn't crack this code. Right off the bat, you can tell Keebler fucked it up. Behold:

That's not some forced perspective shit I'm pulling here. The original cookie (left) is far larger than the double stuf (right). And the double stuf (or DS, as I shall type it henceforce -- same initials as dog shit) cookie part is the wrong color. Perhaps the extra stuf in the DS will make up for it.

Why is the stuf on the DS so shiny? Why was it deposited onto the cookie differently? One taste and all is revealed: the new stuf tastes like someone took a waxy shit in my mouth. And there's not way on Odin's Midgård that there is twice the stuf on the DS than on the original. The cookie is ruined, too. It tastes a cheap knock-off Vienna Finger. It's dry, it crumbles all over the place, and doesn't taste good on its own. (Real Vienna Fingers are fine, but not when you're trying to eat a goddamned E. L. Fudge.) This cookie doesn't even taste good if you eat both the cookie and stuf together. More like double fail.

Keebler, please change the name of these cookies to "Not E. L. Fudge and Not Double Stuf: Smaller, Crumbier, Shittier"

Keebler needs to get this abomination off the market. And if they even think of fucking with the regular E. L. Fudge recipes, 10-year-old me is going to come kick the shit out of them.

Please note that "Stuf" is only capitalized when referring to Oreo-related Stuf. The E. L. Fudge double stuf stuf is not delicious and therefore does not deserve the capital letter.

RC Cola Theory

Theory: RC Cola has exactly one truck that just constantly goes around the country fulfilling the orders of the half-dozen RC vendors nationwide.

The Bargain Channel

Hey, I've got a great idea! Groupon... on the radio!

Someone actually said that at some point. And now, in Jacksonville, FL, 92.1 FM is The Bargain Channel. They basically took a bunch of no-talent, hack DJs and have them sell coupons on the air. The coupons are usually something like $75 off Al's Stump Removal. You call up the request line and buy the coupon for something like $10. The radio station makes $10 and Al honors the coupon.

I stumbled upon the station last night since I forgot my AUX cable for my MP3 player. The DJ on at the time reminded me of O'Dell from the Cutlery Corner infomercials I used to watch late at night in college. You know, this show.

Now the DJ isn't there alone. There is always a sidekick type person helping move the show along. This other person, for some reason, has dialed in. That's right, they have one guy on a microphone and one guy on the telephone hosting the show. It makes no sense.

The hypnotizing thing about the radio station is listening to these terrible DJs attempt to entice you into buying whatever deal they have at the moment. This morning, they were selling a coupon for Beachside Seafood in Jacksonville Beach. (Quick aside: This station is on 24/7 with the same programming the entire time. Seriously.) I've been to Beachside Seafood. In fact, here's my poorly written review on the place. I wouldn't go back even if I did pay $3 to get $10 off my entire order.

But I digress. Since the DJ didn't have many callers, he started to read the menu from Beachside Seafood (which, by the way isn't on the beach, as he repeatedly claimed). It went something like this: "Aw check it out, they got um, they got snow crab clusters and uh snow crab legs, and let's see dungeness crab, and yeah look it, uh, that crawfish platter, and mm yeah they got uh, they got uh, beer battered cheesesticks and corn nuggets, and fried pickle chips. I love those." It's like listening to a trainwreck.

The good news is that they have a Ustream channel. Unfortunately they haven't touched it in two years, but you can hear an old broadcast here.

Lengua

So, I was in San Diego (which may or may not have been why I was flying over El Paso) and had the joy of eating at Tacos El Gordo. Now, if you ever eat anywhere that claims it's an authentic Mexican place, I want you to find the first waiter you see, punch him in the throat, and spit in his eye, because they are fucking liars.

Tacos El Gordo IS authentic. Basically, you order at a counter to guys who probably don't speak English. What do you order? Tacos, goddamnit! They are about half the size of Taco Bell tacos on a corn tortilla or two (but they're not crunchy). They cut of whatever meat you choose and add (usually 2) predetermined toppings, depending on what you ordered. Each one is more amazing than the last. I had a pork one, a chorizo one, and a steak one.

When I went back up to get more, I decided to go for broke and got the beef tongue taco. It. Was. Amazing. It tasted kind of like flank steak, but fell apart as you ate it because they had cooked it for probably upwards of 17 hours. I was the only white guy in the place to get it. I highly recommend it.

What's going on in El Paso?

So, I was flying across the country as I do from time to time. As I approached El Paso, TX, I noticed one of those undeveloped cities. There is a large network of what appear to be unpaved roads without any buildings or anything. It's creepy from the air, so I can only imagine what it's like on the ground.

Also, there was this:

...which I'm clearly not the first person to notice.

WTF is going on at RennFest?

At the Maryland Renaissance Festival last weekend, there were people in Star Tretk uniforms walking around. I don't know what's more distressing: that I noticed the captain's (red guy's) uniform had pockets, which made his costume inaccurate, or that I was upset by that fact.

Iced Earth's Songwriting

I gave Iced Earth songs the same analysis I gave Dream Theater songs: who wrote how much of each album. Iced Earth's results, as expected, look quite different than Dream Theater's:

Horror Show happens to be my favorite Iced Earth album. Clearly I prefer Barlow's lyric writing and Jon's music writing. Burnt Offerings has the least music that Schaffer wrote, which may explain why that's his least favorite Iced Earth album.

Anyway, I'll stop nerding over songwriting credits... for now.

Note: I was going to do the same for Opeth but the vast majority of their music is credited to "Opeth" and most if not all of their lyrics were written by Åkerfeldt.

Jon Arbuckle's Feet

Recently, I've been watching old episodes of Garfield and Friends, which originally ran from 1988 to 1994 on Saturday mornings. Some of it just doesn't hold up these days, especially the musical numbers about self esteem and such. Anyway, I noticed something pretty disturbing in one episode:

Jon Arbuckle only has 3 toes per foot.

You will never unlearn this fact.

Dream Theater's Songwriting

The next Dream Theater album, A Dramatic Turn of Events, comes out on September 13. It will be the first album without Mike Portnoy on it. I wondered how much of their songs he actually does contribute to, and if it will make any difference in how the songs will come out. In the free time I used to have several months ago, I made this chart. I'm just now getting around to posting it.

Clearly this is by no means a perfect was to determine Portnoy's impact on Dream Theater's songwriting. Nonetheless, Portnoy contributed to a vast majority of the music. However, Petrucci has been writing the majority of the lyrics for a while. Portnoy only got into the lyric writing heavily when he could add his own singing parts that pretty much ruin every song they're in. So, I'm glad to be rid of his vocal parts.

Now I just hope the new album is good.

Picasa is Amazing

I'm currently very backlogged on posts about my adventures and unending complaints. I was going through some photos for a future post and I just need to say that Picasa (Google's image editing program) is fantastic.

I took this photo from an airplane:

...put it into Picasa, hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, and got this:

It's amazing that Picasa can so easily make the image look that good.

Could I have done it myself manually? Sure, but I'm far too lazy for that right now.

Could my lovely wife fix the photo for me in less time and do an better job than I would have? Sure, but then I'd need to go all the way upstairs, and I'm far too lazy for that right now.

Do I hate it when people ask themselves questions and then answer them? Yes, it drives me insane, but that's a topic for another day.

The O's Are Depressing

I really need to turn off Orioles score notifications on my phone. Every day for the past two weeks, I have been reminded how horrible they are:

Tue, Jun 28 vs St. Louis L 6-2
Wed, Jun 29 vs St. Louis L 5-1
Thu, Jun 30 vs St. Louis L 9-6
Fri, Jul 1 @ Atlanta L 4-0
Sat, Jul 2 @ Atlanta L 5-4
Sun, Jul 3 @ Atlanta W 5-4
Mon, Jul 4 @ Texas L 13-4
Tue, Jul 5 @ Texas L 4-2
Wed, Jul 6 @ Texas L 13-5
Thu, Jul 7 @ Boston L 10-4
Fri, Jul 8 @ Boston L 10-3
Sat, Jul 9 @ Boston L 4-0
Sun, Jul 10 @ Boston L 8-6

One win in 13 games? Ugh.

Simpsons Predictions for 2010

Remember that Simpsons episode where the fortune teller shows Lisa her future and she meets that Hugh guy? Well apparently that took place in 2010. Let's see what they got right:

The Simpsons's 2010 Predictions
Simpsons' Prediction	Reality?
Holographic trees in memory of real trees	Nope.
Soy-based snacks (Soy Pops)	Yep.
Robot librarians	Does Kindle count?
Jim Carrey having starred in 40 films	No. Only 33.
Rolling Stones "Steel Wheelchair Tour"	They announced in January 2010 that they would not tour in 2010, despite the rumors.
quint-planes	Nope.
Digitized Big Ben clock (flashing 12:00)	Nope.
Communicator watches	Do smartphones count?
Video phones (rotary)	Yep.
Robotic nuclear power plant employees	Nope.
Digital fridge	Yep.
33% higher nuclear capacity (if the fourth cooling tower at SNPP is indicative of the entire nation)	Surprisingly, kinda. Our nuclear capacity has increased since 2000.
Pepsi-sponsored education	Eh, not really.
Virtual classrooms	Sure. There are online college-level classes.
1500 cable channels	The numbers on my TV go past 1000, so I'd say it's close enough.
Prince had several more name changes	Yes.
Virtual pool/darts	Does Wii count?
Fox became a hardcore sex channel	Close enough.
6-eyed fish	Not yet.

Not bad, TV. Not bad.

The Heaviest Heavy That Ever Heavied

Great news! All Metal/Hard Rock promotion has been reduced to a single adjective: HEAVY.

Everything is heavy! It's going to sound heavy! It's heavier than the last one! Heavy! Has the word "heavy" been ruined for you yet? No? Then keep reading!

SOUNDGARDEN Guitarist On New Album: 'The Vibe Of The Songs Is Definitely Very Heavy'

Well that clears everything up, doesn't it??

TESTAMENT Bassist On New Album: 'It's Coming To Be, And It's Heavy As S**t'

Okay okay I get it. You don't know what the album sounds like, do you?

EVANESCENCE Singer: New Album Is 'Probably The Heaviest Record We've Ever Done'

Gah! Choose a new word!

SEBASTIAN BACH Says His New Album Cover Is 'As Heavy As Rock 'N' Roll Can Be'

Sigh. At least no one is using it as a verb.

"We've decided that we wanna heavy it up a little bit on this next record"

Well, at least they're calling the music heavy and not just calling anything and everything heavy.

SLIPKNOT Singer Says Two Minutes Of Silence For Fallen Bassist Will Be 'Pretty Heavy' 

AHGHGHAHGAHG

Epic Meal Time is Incredibly Stupid

I hate Epic Meal Time. In their YouTube videos, a bunch of douchebags get together and make ridiculously unhealthy food. The premise itself is pretty solid: hilariously unhealthy food. I mean, If someone told me they were going to make an 84 egg sandwich, I would definitely be intrigued...

Until I saw these morons bro down on eachother. The lead bro guy yells at the camera like he's about to rape you. I'm fairly sure these guys all play lacrosse. I bet they use the word 'mancation'. They probably all have raised Jeeps or Mitsubishis or something else equally douchbaggy. The magic of the word 'epic' is wasted on them, not to mention how much the awesome power of bacon is ruined by them.



If I wanted to watch a douchebag cook, Bobby Flay has like 10 shows on the Food Network.

Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time is the exact opposite of Epic Meal Time. Clearly they did it to mock EMT, but then it took a on life of its own. Just have a look:

The Missing Link: Soda Machines

You are no doubt familiar with the humble soda fountain:

And you may be familiar with the newfangled touch screen soda fountains:

If you haven't seen these things, they're wonderful. Basically, Coke went into the future and brought this back. You can choose from your standard products (all of them: Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Sprite, Sprite Zero, Pibb, Diet Pibb, Vault, Barq's, Diet Barq's, "Lemon"ade, Powerade, like 34 different Fantas, and crappy old water), but then it will let you add flavor to them! For Coke, you can add cherry, vanilla, lime, cherry vanilla (not pictured, but I've seen it!), orange, or rapsberry. Orange coke is godawful. Stay away at all costs. Rapsberry coke is quite amazing.

I recently found the Missing Link in soda fountains, though:

Thousands of years from now, after the soda fountains have become sentient and eradicated mankind with type 2 diabetes, soda fountain archaeologists may one day find this many-choiced, yet sparsely-nozzled machine. I imagine it won't slow the debate between the sentient soda fountain creationists and the sentient soda fountain evolutionists, but it will be a breakthrough for sentient soda fountain scientists!

Alabama

Last month, I went to scenic, beautiful Mobile, Alabama!

This is Mobile, AL's actual skyline. ...You can stop laughing now.

I saw the sight there. (Yeah, there's only one.) The USS Alabama (BB-60). It was a World War II-era battleship. (Interesting fact: They filmed parts of Under Siege on it.)

It's got everything from giant guns of death...

...to what must have been the worst thing about WWII.

That's right. Sailors had to poop into troughs while sitting on two planks of wood in a doorless half-stall. What you can't see in this picture is that the half-stalls all face another stall, so you had the added bonus of watching the dude in front of you, too!

At least the sleeping arrangements were ni-- OH GOD! Now I know why they call beds on ships "racks". Nowadays, they have the much more comforting name of "coffin racks". As horrible as they are, at least they're not like this!

It is quite an epic buoyant deathbringer!

Later on, on the way to Mississippi, I saw this:

That chalkboard says "THIS PoLiTicain Don'T Lie" (sic). This... thing... was on a property along with a doubletall trailer. It looked like the landowner built a lower level himself, mostly out of plywood, then stacked his mobile home on top of it. I didn't get a picture of it because I was fleeing for my life at that point.

Google Voice Transcription

Google Voice is great and all, but the transcription of a recent voicemail frightened me:

Hi signage alright, Sir. Got be a good right now on them when the list of what it was worked out for it. ON the pastor stock reared it was one little and find out so we got a correct everything on them on the way, it's not that strong with my mechanic everything's great here at the 7 o'clock tonight. Thanks so much misery you have a great day sir

I deleted it and have been hiding in a bunker ever since.

Why The USA Is Doomed

I was a little late getting up the other morning. At exactly 6:01 AM, the north side of the DC Beltway instantly becomes a parking lot and remains that way until 9:00 PM, which is about the time they start randomly closing lanes to make sure no one gets where they're going. Yes, the Beltway works the same way Congress does.

How did I get so off topic so quickly? PERHAPS IT'S DUE TO THE RAGE I'M SEETHING IN.

I was taking some back roads to work since I had gotten up late, and I witnessed something that almost made me go on a murderous rampage. I was stuck behind a school bus that was picking up kids on a two-lane road. It was one of those routes they have now where the bus picks kids up at the end of their driveways, which pisses me off to no end. The bus ends up having to stop every 3 houses because no one can keep it in their pants these days, AND no one wants their precious snowflakes to actually have to WALK anywhere! In my day, which wasn't all that long ago, I had to walk to the damn bus stop, which wasn't even all that far away, and no one complained, goddamnit! And my grandfather had to walk uphill both ways and wrestle bears to the ground to get to school.

But as annoyed as I was for the bus having to keep stopping, I saw the thing that nearly caused me to have an aneurysm. The kids had been DRIVEN to the end of their driveways. The houses were on an acre or two. The driveways were perhaps one-tenth of a mile long. And the parent GOT IN THEIR SUV and DROVE their kid to the END OF THE DRIVEWAY! Then, after the bus picked them up, they would REVERSE ALL THE WAY BACK UP THEIR DRIVEWAY. The first person I saw do this I figured was the laziest person in America, or perhaps disabled or something. BUT NO! Literally TWO HOUSES DOWN it happened AGAIN! A few minutes later, at the end of an even shorter driveway, I saw another kid and her mom standing at the end of their driveway next to their running SUV waiting for the school bus!

These are the people electing our politicians. These are the kids who will one day grow up and have to make important decisions one day. We are 100% completely, totally, and utterly FUCKED.

Atlanta Loses Another Team to Canada

Canadians: If you want more Canadian hockey teams, lobby for another Atlanta team in your spare time.

Earlier today, Atlanta lost its second NHL team to Canada. In fact, the only two teams in League history to move from the US to Canada have both been from Atlanta: the Atlanta Flames became the Calgary Flames in 1980, and now the Atlanta Thrashers are going to Winnipeg.

Winnipeg's former team, the Jets, moved to Phoenix to become the Phoenix Coyotes. For a while, it seemed they would be the ones to move to Winnipeg. At that point, it would have made sense to call the "new" Winnipeg team the Jets again. But now I'm torn. Should they remain the Thrashers? And what is a "thrasher" exactly?

I don't think calling them the Jets is completely out the window. But consider this: according to the deal, the AHL team currently in Winnipeg, the Manitoba Moose, are moving to St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. I think the Thrashers should seriously consider becoming the Winnipeg Moose (or Manitoba Moose if you like the alliteration) and use the greatest team logo ever:

The Actual Confederate Flag

Most racists who for some reason love to celebrate their history of embarassing defeat will do so with this flag:

You may have just gone, "ah, the Stars and Bars!" Well, you're wrong. You may also have said "hey, I'm not a racist! I just love the South and this flag shows it!" That flag represents the racist institution of slavery. Don't believe me? Go read the actual Articles of Secession or this speech by Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens and then try to tell me the Civil War was about state's rights.

That flag up there isn't the flag of the Confederacy. In fact they changed flags so often it nearly rivaled the frequency of iTunes updates. Here's the last one they used:

That's pretty terrible-looking in my opinion. I wouldn't want to use it either.

Some have said that the Confederate flag is a Naval jack. First of all you're close, but still wrong. The Naval jack in question was colored slightly differently:

And furthermore, why is saying that the Confederate flag on the back of your truck is a Naval jack supposed to make it okay? The vast majority of the battles were on land! The Confederate Navy didn't do all that much aside from dying! And besides, who goes around saying they love the United States by whipping out this thing:

So where did the popular (and incorrect) version of the Confederate flag come from? Some may say it was the Battle Flag, then spew some lies about how even slaves fought for the Confederacy to pretend they're not racist. The Confederate Battle Flag was square. There were some (read: very few) Confederate Army units that used the rectangularized version. Yet somehow, that's the one that gained popularity.

Interesting side note: Town Line, NY actually flew this incorrect Confederate flag on purpose because they couldn't find a real one. This tiny chunk of western NY state held a town meeting in 1861 and decided to seceed from the Union for a variety of half-baked reasons. As the war pressed on and the townsfolk sobered up, they pretty much forgot about that whole secession thing. Then in 1946, like an alcoholic going through Step 9, they rejoined the Union. They flew the incorrect Confederate Flag prior to rejoining, despite the fact that those in Town Line who fought for the Confederacy did so under yet another version of the Confederate flag:

Morons.