FEETFIRST!

Ugly and Swearing

Hi. My name is Adrian Smith. I word. I music.

Every day that is the 1st and 14th of each month shall bear witness to the ranting that be The Bi-monthly Bork, featuring something broken, destroyed, or what have you. This Land of Is, commence.

February 14th, 2008

?

I completely forgot about the 14th this month, and it is already three days later. As such, I had nothing planned out for this installment, excepting of course a few random ideas floating around in the usual Bork folder, none of which are in any state of completion. So this one is total bullshit. Honestly, after the first one, I assumed this idea wasn't going to survive for more than, well, any at all. So a .750 batting average is something I did not expect, even if I did initially set out, to accomplish. So this one sucks, but I'm not too broken up about it. Proceed:

The dishwasher died recently. Sucks.

I guess I should have just said "the Bork is borked," and ended this nonsense right then and there, but oh, such is life. Gone!

February 1st, 2008

Real Fucking Booze

I'm tired of alcohol not being treated like the serious drug that it is. Think about all the disease, death, and disfigurement directly caused by the overuse and muchabuse of alcohol. Yet in today's world you have idiots ordering beverages with names like Surfer on Acid and Gay Man on a Bike. What is this shit, fucking Playdo? Alcohol is dangerous. Alcohol demands respect. Alcohol deserves love.

The hideous loss suffered by the addition of pushbutton drinkmakers in the local watering holes is a disgusting chunk of modernity that I'm not sure my feeble little mind can fully comprehend, so rather than trying to make an excuse for it or accept the consequences associated as just facts of life, I choose to get angry. There are several things to take notice of in bars, be it the ambience, clientele, location, size, smell, mood, selection, history, and any other number of excentricities, but most important of all, the character of the bartender. I don't always expect good conversation, especially if it is a late and busy weekend night, but the ability to pour a good drink means everything when it comes to sitting down and paying 5 times as much as it would if you purchase the bottle(s) yourself remain at rest there at home with the television set to exactly what you enjoy watching, like a curling match on C-Span, rather than some vapid Hollywood gossip piece of digitzed HDTV trash run through your skull at 22 minutes per half hour. I want someone experienced in the ways of mixology, not some monkey mashing buttons toward the general vicinity of the wrong type of glass for the requested beverage. This trend had found its way to Vegas at one point, but I noticed it disappeared after not too long a stint. There is a good god damn reason for that, and say what you might about Sin City, they know their fucking booze.

The last time I ordered a martini from a bar (gin of course, other stupidities with the words "apple" or "vodka" in place of Capital-G Gin are not martinis), it was handed to me with absolutely no vermouth. Now, I cannot entirely fault the bartenders for not knowing how to mix a proper drink, but rather the majority of patrons who prefer their so-called martinis made from mostly ice and scoff when "there's too much vermouth," failing to realize that vermouth itself is meant to calm the harshness that is present in most (and by most I mean all) varieties of gin. A balance must be struck, otherwise you end with what I had that particular evening, which was a glass of cold gin. A glass of cold gin has an awful taste, that can only be described as such: a glass of cold gin. Rather than continue on, I shall direct your attention to The Perfect Martini which is where I finally learned the ins and outs of what a proper martini should be.

Another particularly bothersome tactic of bars, at least in America, is to serve dark beer ice cold. When I am drinking a stout or porter at home, and even something like a Belgian at times, I almost always chill it briefly, or if it has already found its home inside the fridge, pour the brew and then allow it to warm up a bit in the ambience of the lovely kitchen light. Granted, I realize that making a poured beer warmer is much easier than forcing it colder, but the overall preference of any beer, even real ones, has suffered the wrath that Shit American Lager has vaulted upon this continent, which is that ice cold it tastes moderately okay, anything shy and it tastes like shit. I find that no matter what you do to Chudweiser, Curs, et al. it always tastes like watery diarrhoea, but freezing cold it is only moderately offensive as opposed to completely so. This has unfortunately leaked into the psyche of beer drinkers who eventually move on to bigger and better things, and is a tough habit to crack. Be strong, drink your dark beer at a proper temperature.

I suppose this could be taken more seriously if the following picture of me was not taken just last weekend:

Whoops. I was hosed and without my proper bearings. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. Quite.

January 14th, 2008

Responsible Moneysing. Yes.

Everyone should know by now what is happening in the credit markets around the western societal portion of the globe. If not, pay Mish a visit and then perhaps few more optimistic sources that you can find on your own (don't ask me where to find them, all my links are subversive and/or pessimistic in nature). Rather than delve through the mess that decades of experience and education have caused, and pretend that a summer school econ class 12 years ago combined with a recent bout of casually reading economic blogs for a few months makes me some sort of an expert, I will focus on more specific things that I have observed in my own monetary history/policy/moronity.

Credit reports. Not the most confusing thing in the world on the surface, and finding yourself a high score can be as simple as using available credit accounts as much as possible, while paying the bills due on time without skipping a beat. A few years ago I began to notice something a bit odd about the whole system, and these days I recognize it as a nonsensical chunk of idiocy ripe with obfuscation and foolishness. The whole shebang is not based upon monetary responsibility, but rather being somewhat non-moronic with it while allowing the associated banks to make as much money as possible on interest rates, membership fees, and other terms of endearment. Grab 5 credit cards, buy everything you need with them (nobody builds credit by paying cash!), give back the minimum payment each month (likely some 3% of what you are spending), rack up interest fees with reckless abandon (the megacorporations need to feed their hungry wallets aferall), but as long as you keep your balances below the halfway mark of Maximum Credit (if you get too close, don't pay down the debt, ask for a credit line increase!), you'll be seen as a pillar of the financial community of responsible borrowers.

The stock market. We all know that if you aren't investing in the stock market, you certainly are not Financially Secure. This one is simple and I won't even go into details. Better odds than Vegas, yes, but same shit, different asshole. Period.

The housing market. Oh fuckit, why bother saying anything about that? Q.E.D. and we're done with that entire issue.

Credit cards. Simply. Quaint. Somewhat evil. That system is designed to get you to Spend More Money so you can Have More Stuff with No Further Care In The World. Why bother saving up money for something you want when you can put it on credit? Go buy a $2,000 TV and not only do you not have to pay more than $60 a month for it, but you build up your aforementioned credit score so you can buy More, Bigger, Now! That mentality combined with more fine print than the back of a bottle of NutraSweet assures maximum profits with minimal efforts, at the expense of your debt becoming much larger than your bank account, but hey, someone has to grease the wheels I suppose. Of course, this goes much higher than basic consumer spending, which accounts for 70% of this entire economic farce. US gov't debt tally:

Reload page to get an update, fun for the whole family!

Let it be said that I do not entirely place the blame on the morons who sign themselves up for such death warrants, as this society does try as hard as possible to push as many of us into life-crushing debt as it can. One can blame the destruction of the middle class by the upper 1% of the US for that I suppose, or perhaps something more sinister like... underpants gnomes, but the fact remains that it does take two to make a thing go right/wrong, so, fellow plebians, we must at least try to fend off temptations of Playing The Game. I never had a higher FICO score than when I was looking down the barrel of a gun taking the form of $10,000 in credit card debt combined with a $25,000 car loan, which was when I realized just how fucked the system truly is.

January 1st, 2008

The Truth

I often wonder what happened to telling the truth. It seems that everywhere I turn, one person or another is feeding random lines of bullshit to whomever might be within earshot, for some reason or none at all. We've all had coworkers that just run by the seat of their pants, not in some exciting thrillseeker type lifestyle, but rather in daily conversations. Granted, some people just lead boring lives and have to rely on recreating bad television in their heads to spread around everyone near, but a lot of the time you wonder what on earth it is that drives people to just fly off about things completely unrelated to reality.

I look at how lives are lived online for the most obvious examples. In random forums concerning common interest shared by (possibly) common people, usernames are things like HotGurl9 and metalbob rather than actual birth names. Avatars are used to represent one's persona, but usually these are pictures of some other individual, an album cover, or goofy drawing as taken from elsewhere. There is little to no accountability concerning who is the man/woman/thing behind the handle and image, many cases of people portraying themselves as someone very different have become the norm, especially in places like MyShit and other social networking sites. Yes of course many instances are done with humour in mind, and very much out in the open, but the fact remains that the base lies strictly in deception.

I applied for my passport just recently (it is shameful that I am approaching 30 and have yet to visit outside the US, I know) and every bit of information contained was just a number. Birth date, social security number, address, everything was very impersonal. There was no discussion of where I was travelling, why, or how I felt about going overseas as an American in this post-Dubya world. The truth is unnecessary, only the numbers, digits, and factoids matter. Since receiving my passport, I see that the photograph contained therein gives me the appearance of a balding Russian drug runner. That combined with my girlfriend's passport boldly stating COUNTRY OF BIRTH: IRAN will surely lead us to some sort of weirdness at any airport, but with no criminal record on either of us, the only reasoning is once again a lie, based on external factors that have nothing to do with either of our lifestyles: one bad photograph and the happenstance that is place of birth.

Various facets of the US government have undergone a continual system of spreading misinformation about countless things. The housing and credit markets taking massive respective shits, various unjustifiable wars, falsified elections, fuzzy math budgeting, et al. are all full of lies ranging from hiding the costs of new toilet seats to causing entire nations to die off, crafted not unlike random teenagers fibbing to their parents concerning that evening's plan of abstaining from premarital sexual intercourse and avoiding completely the nest that is illegally procured recreational drug usage. Lies have become so expected that telling the truth would only complicate things further, rather than allowing the status quo of malfeasance to continually reverberate throughout time and space.

I'm plenty guilty of this sort of subterfuge myself, even writing this right now. I'm not out on a pulpit, I'm sitting on my couch listening to an obscure band (on headphones no less) and drinking whisky, safe behind the confines of locked door and closed drapery. Writing can be edited before coming to surface in the face of another, while speaking outloud would unravel this guise before me, at the very least to my sleeping girlfriend sitting next to me or perhaps a randomly passing neighbour outside the back porch.

Speaking of hiding behind writing, this closing paragraph is being crafted nearly two weeks later since most of this mess was initially created. I have given myself time to correct the partially boozed and sleep-deprived mind that originally concocted this maiden Bork. What have I changed? What might have existed just 20 minutes ago? Do I even mean half of what I say? Where are my pants?

This mess created and managed with Notepad and TextWrangler, both of which can mangle crudely typed raw HTML code just fine. Feel free to contact me with comments, questions, and erectile dysfunction advertisements. Kirk out.

What.