Tag Archives: Stupid

You can’t spell “Democrat” without “rat”…

I know where you think this is going. No, I haven’t “flip-flopped” (in supposedly classic “Democrat” fashion) and become a “red-stater.” What I’m speaking of is the Republican Party’s (and, by extension, the right-wing media’s) recent penchant for referring not to the “Democratic Party,” but rather to the “Democrat Party.”

I was getting ready to forget this little bit of GOP annoyance until I spotted it once again in a quote from George W. Bush in an article on the MSNBC website.

Not familiar with this obscure little issue? Hendrik Hertzberg had a great article on it in the New Yorker a few months back. It’s a great example of the Republican strategy of death by 1000 cuts. Maybe it doesn’t matter now, but it’s still just so… well, so stupid and petty. The only thing as stupid and petty is actually getting bothered by it.

Yes, I’m bothered by it.

(For what it’s worth, so is Hertzberg: “There’s no great mystery about the motives behind this deliberate misnaming. ‘Democrat Party’ is a slur, or intended to be — a handy way to express contempt.”)

More stupid web tricks coming your way…

I realize I’ve been working with PHP for too long when I get an idea like “I wonder exactly how birth rate affects population levels” and the first thing I think of is, “well why don’t I just build a PHP app to figure it out?”

This is the result of such thinking: Population Trajectory Calculator. It’s the newest addition to my Stupid Web Tricks page, and the first that’s not just JavaScript triggering an irritating pop-up.

This is probably just as pointless though, but it was a fun little exercise, and it’s starting to give me more ideas, which is always dangerous. Before long I’ll have built a web-based version of Oregon Trail.

I’m not kidding.

(Well, OK, I hope I am.)

It’s not finished yet, but it’s already pretty stupid…

You may or may not have seen my Stupid JavaScript Tricks A–Z page. For a while I’ve had a mildly enticing teaser on that page promising “something big” when I get to the letter D. Well, I finally decided to skip C and get started on that “big” letter D. It’s about half done, but since I only get the inspiration (and time) for these kinds of things in short, sporadic bursts, I decided to run with it and post it in a half-completed state. The real topper is what comes next, and hopefully someday I’ll get around to it.

In the meantime, please check out the incomplete… Delete the Internet.

Am I TOO Detail-Obsessed?

A strange thing happened to me the other day.

I was riding in the car with some coworkers, returning from lunch. We were stopped in gridlock traffic (which seems to be the case more often than not on Roswell Rd.), and as my eyes (as usual) flitted from side to side, taking in the colors, shapes, fonts, states of decay, and other assorted minutiae of the storefronts and signs in the supersaturated commercial district, I happened to notice a sign on a nearby Chinese restaurant. It said:

GIANT CHINESE B.BQ.

Now your average person, even your average detail-oriented person, may have glanced at that sign and not given it a second thought. But I was immediately consumed with perplexity over the liberties taken by the sign maker with respect to the use of periods. Why, I wondered, did the first “B” warrant a period while the second did not?

Or take another example: Tonight when I got home from work, I found a new MacMall catalog had arrived, and I perused it with passive interest while SLP was on the phone. I was mildly irritated to see yet another use of the annoying stock photos of perfect people in black mock turtlenecks with their arms folded atop some invisible barrier, which have become staples for use in stupid photo illustrations in these catalogs, where the perfect people are made to look as if they are leaning against a steroid-enhanced 5-foot-tall software package.

You’re probably thinking that my awareness of these stock photos of perfect people in stupid poses is the focus of my detail-obsessed attention in this story, but you’re wrong.

In fact, I noticed something even more stimulating to my detail obsession: On one page I saw a photo of a young woman with long blonde hair, and on the next, a distinctly different young woman with short, curly red hair. And that was when it hit me. I noticed that the hands of the two women were in exactly the same position. In fact, the arms in the picture belonged to the same person and were from one single photograph, but the heads were different. What’s more, the skin of the hands in the photo was color-corrected to match the facial complexion of the woman in each photo.

Clearly, if I notice something like this on passing glance, I have a problem.

Big Questions and Stupid People

“Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

–Albert Einstein

“Remember Kyle, there are no stupid questions, only stupid people.”

–Mr. Garrison, South Park

Ever since I was a kid, I have pondered the “big questions”: Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Why are there so many stupid people around? OK, maybe I didn’t ask that last question until I got a little older. But it certainly muddies the waters in which I contemplate the first two.

Another way to look at this is, are there really stupid people, or just people who do stupid things? Well, I know for sure the latter is true. I have even witnessed people I would not consider to be stupid doing stupid things, so definitely there are people who do stupid things. Perhaps whether or not anyone actually is “stupid” is irrelevant. But I digress.

It seems to me that any comprehensive worldview, any theory that attempts to “explain it all,” needs to take into account the infinite human capacity for stupidity. Though many of us like to raise our heads and lift our hearts with visions of the noblest acts of humanity, this is really just the equivalent of spraying air freshener in a befouled bathroom… no matter how advanced we become as a society, some of what we do still stinks.

So we are left with somewhat more complicated questions: Why are we here — in an overcrowded world with a bunch of people who hate each other for no good reason? What is the meaning — of all of the stupid, mindless actions that clutter our striving for a complete and satisfying life? What kind of God would create such a beautiful world and then fill it with creatures who seem hell-bent on ruining it?

The televangelists are starting to make sense to me now.