Whoa

Photo: Guatemala Government via Flickr

In case anyone has the notion that this post will be about either The Day After Tomorrow, Dante's Peak, The Core, Deep Impact, 2012, Descent, or Megafault, you will be disappointed.

I didn't really know what a sinkhole was, and I certainly didn't imagine it would look like that. If Guatemala got the choice of where to have the massive, bottom-not-visible hole, they might have chosen a field, swamp, jail, or better yet-landfill! Certainly not the middle of an intersection. I would have been terrified to be driving in front of the other cars, because getting people to all go backwards during traffic seems really hard. "There is a sinkhole, please tell the person behind you." I guess at that point you have to get out of the car and run, but if I had a chance to make a sharp right turn and save my car while avoiding the sinkhole, I think I'd have to do that.

It really seems like the rest of the world is just getting smacked around with some kind of big, dirty, and government destabilizing mop. Maybe not Europe. They usually seem to be doing ok. I figure there are two barometers for this:

1) The Euro is worth more than the dollar, rather than being valued somewhere between 1/2 and 1/1,230,000th of the dollar, as so many currencies in the world are.

2) The top headlines for today's European news are "Families honor Air France crash victims" and "Fergie to Oprah: I was drunk during sting". Problems just aren't on the same level there.

Meanwhile, Latin America just can't get much positive going at all. Last year in Juarez, a border city across the river from El Paso, Texas, 2,660 people were murdered.

Numbers can often be misunderstood or underestimated, but I don't know any city in America where on average more than 2 people are killed every single day; Juarez has by far the highest murder rate of any city in the world. For comparison, New Orleans has the highest murder rate in America, with 174. Juarez even had more murders last year than New York City did in its worst year in history.

The President of Mexico called in the national army, only to realize they are outmatched in terms of weapons and equipment. I just imagine these cartels with a bunch of hovercrafts and dune buggies, but apparently they actually use submarines and jets. Personally I prefer this smuggler's choice of transportation:

Photo: Flickr/Shiny Things

Silver linings and improvements are not part of the story right now. The publicized burden falls on the leaders of Latin American governments, but the actual struggle encompasses ordinary people, those who have no choice but to live in a community where they don't even feel safe at a library on a Tuesday morning. The Obama government would be criticized whether they intervened more or less, and honestly, it's just not that cut and dry. I can't imagine the people of Mexico are unified in a desire to have the American military in their cities, and a true solution involves the fiscal and political sectors of another corrupt country.

Cue Bono.

Always with Bono. It's like Sting before him. If more, or any of the musicians I liked more than Bono were in to anything, maybe they' be on TV more like him. If it wasn't him, it'd probably just be Dave "who is more vanilla than me?" Matthews, so I've decided not to complain.

Enthusiasm for this once in 4 years extravaganza is unbridled from the United States to North Korea, but especially in Latin America, which sends 6 different national teams to the World Cup, not including Brazil. Mexico has a chance to move on to the next round, is certainly not a favorite to even sniff a title game, although they would probably put Italy's celebration to shame.

Starting in a group with France (boo, of course) and host country South Africa is an opportunity for Mexico to play on a global stage, and for a damaged nation back home to root for their own. Even the criminals will be reminded that they themselves are less important than the game of soccer, but as they sit down to watch the very same game in front of a new flatscreen, it won't bother them in the least.

I have Spain beating Holland in the finals. Book it.

This is why we can't have nice things!

Hey you, gentleman driving the Isuzu with a red, white and blue "BUY AMERICAN" bumper sticker. You are the reason people think Americans are ignorant assholes. You know why? Because you are an ignorant asshole. I am flabbergasted that you were able to go through the entire process of getting from that purchase of yours to proudly affixing it to your vehicle without once thinking yourself, "Ya know, I should probably make sure I buy American myself before I make this declaration." Didn't you notice the big "Isuzu" logo right next to the bumper sticker?  Clearly the answer is no, most likely because you were so overwhelmed with your own patriotism..Do you even know why they tell us to buy domestically produced goods? Why don't you go look at the products in your house and see how many have "Made in China" written on the bottom. And don't worry about trading in your car for an American one. Our automobile industry is tip-top!

I'll paddle downstream, thanks

Much of the political noise swirling awkwardly around Philadelphia the last week centered around losing, because people in all economic classes like talking about a successful white guy getting the boot. It's probably the most politically correct way to root for someone's personal failure. And so Arlen Specter, aged 80, now gets to exchange his finest ties for havana shirts, and the senate floor for a bocheyball court, assuming of course that all rich old dudes spend their time jetting back and forth from Florida. Tens of millions on an election and it's decided by one ad:

Republican politicians, pundits, and many of their various minions and sub-lackeys have begun to proclaim this the start of a great Obama backlash, the natural reaction of average americans when confronted with the pressures of a socialist government.

Democrats recently won an open seat in a conservative area of southwest PA, coinciding with a Republican congressman and proiminent christian conservative in Indiana resigning because of an affair he had with a married coworker. Additionally Specter lost in a Democratic primary, and to a presumably more progressive candidate.

None of this of course will halt the spin machines, which have already been set to hyper-speed. Republicans hope to narrow the anti-incumbent sentiment to target only Democrats and the less than far right (those who only want to rewrite science textbooks) as their victims in the 2010 general election.

Fortunately, Democrats often do really silly, almost halfway democratic, but still mainly stupid things, like running 2 candidates against the lone Republican in a 3 way one-time election because they're constitutionally obligated to put a white guy in the race.

I'm skeptical of the importance of this because it happened in Hawaii and by tomorrow I will have again forgotten that it too is a state, but since Democrats lost an apparent lock of a win in Barack Obama's hometown, things might get even more silly.

Fortunately, the other side has recruited the best of the brightest. In Utah, 3 term incumbent Bob Bennett (should've been a 1st base coach with a name like that), couldn't even make it out of his the Republican convention, let alone to his party primary, despite voting the party line 88% of time while maintaining a right wing stance on every major issue. In Kentucky, the primary winner is the son of former presidential candidate Ron Paul, creatively named Rand Paul, who sadly might even be more popular after saying he wouldn't vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The common link? It's not the fact that Utah and Kentucky couldn't go 21 minutes without being the butt of a joke before this, or that the 5 reddest states in the country have a combined 1 pro sports team. The tie-in is the smell of chamomile, or maybe lemon verbena. Tea baggers claim responsibility for a unstoppable insurgency movement, the result of which will be a takeover of Congress and the White House by 2012.

I can't even imagine how long each day must feel to these people, knowing a black man is the leader of the free world. They probably waste a lot of time stressing out about it, sweat pouring down their button downs and soaking the seats of their SUVs, which in turn frustrates them into being a little too snarky to the various immigrant laborers working about their home.

The notion, apparently, is that tea-baggers, like liberals but motivated differently, disdain Republican neo-cons, disgusted because George W. Bush himself ended up too left wing. I find it unrealistic to believe that a group of organized Republicans are the type to buck the entire establishment, or that a few elections somehow symbolize an entirely new Republican party. Perhaps their internal meetings even go something like this:

For the time being, I refuse to be impressed by nerfballs winning in states that wouldn't vote reasonably if they had that Staples easy button. Kentucky didn't even elect George Clooney's dad when ran for Congress in 2006. What kind of sense does that make? The way I see it, no tea- bagger will beat a Democratic incumbent in 2010, and maybe not even win a single open Democratic seat.

Truly, I think everyone is just killing time, because the next 2 years Sarah Palin will take up about 93.4% of the space on television and in newspapers (if they exist by then). The system is set up very comfortably for our culture though, because I'm pretty sure one could purposely avoid all news for at least 7 months and still blend in seamlessly with most situations they find themselves in.

I'm afraid I can't do that Dave

Before I go on my anti-technology apolcalyptic tirade, let me first say that I love the internet. The world (I'm speaking of my own personal version of the world. I can't tell you what dudes in Namibia call "the world.") is dependent on the internet to streamline our workflows, shorten (if not outright eliminate) the distance between far away nations and reconnect with that girl who totally made out with you in seventh grade. The internet makes everything easier, faster, more accessible. I love the internet for that. As somebody who continually pines for a 30 hour day, I appreciate the internet for saving me untold hours of my life that would otherwise be spend researching things at the librbary or *GASP* walking to the store to buy porno mags. I just wish I could have all this without worrying that my privacy is largely a thing of the past.

I listen to music on Pandora. I do whatever it is people do on Facebook. There is no reason these two should be linked in any way. But every time a new song plays on Pandora, it tells me a Facebook friend who likes that artist. First off, I don't care that Henry Te likes Lil Wayne. (Side note: Yo Henry, where you at? We haven't talked since high school man!) Second, deceptive privacy settings or not, how is my Facebook profile even linked to my Pandora account? I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say since my browser automatically logs in to both sites, they are able to link together. But that doesn't explain how when I go CNN, the sidebar tells me which stories have been shared by my friends on Facebook. I don't have a CNN account. I barely even read the news. CNN shouldn't know who I am.

This might not even qualify as barely scratching the surface. That's what disturbs me the most. Some of the smartest people in the world think it's only a matter of time before artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence. Perhaps it's a bad idea then to voluntarily hand over our private information to computers. Computers are tools; tools are controlled by people. I hope the people responsible for information technology are keeping that in mind. Am I suggesting we're going to live in the Matrix or, worse yet, face a moment like judgment day in Terminator 2? No, those are movies are movies don't tell the future. Then again, there are people smarter than us who believe there will be a singular moment where computers surpass humans. The upside of that is we might get to download our brains onto hard drives and live forever. The downside:

Hopefully it doesn't play out that way. It could just be that Mark Zuckerberg is a douche. Well, I'm sure of that one. I just hope that douche doesn't destroy us all.

The Land of Unexciting Things

For the past week, I've been fairly jazzed by the goings of the world. Don't get me wrong, when people (myself included) say "world", they mean whatever constitutes their own world. For me, this has been the realization that non-winter weather really rocks, that real life jobs might actually be halfway enjoyable, and that a megaplex of sports both nearing their end and hitting their stride would mean constant fun.

Much to my chagrin, I am again left meekly uttering, "Zort". Outside it's raining, and the air is colder than Helen Lovejoy. For the most part, I've come not to be surprised by most weather phenomenons, and when it's warm in January I'll openly thank both global warming and the Mayans. Nevertheless, I feel like late May should not be like this, but what can I do? Watching some sports is easier than being bitter about not controlling the weather.

Fortunately for me, I am quickly reminded of just how anticlimactic and fizzletastic professional sports can be some times. When I was younger, my love of sports was fueled by a die-hard enthusiasm for a select team from each sport, followed by the fact that I was 9 and I couldn't do many things, followed by just generally liking playing sports. Nowdays, I feel like my passion for paying attention to sports would be tempered if not for the jawesome video quality, precision camera work, and flashy replays.

The 2010 NBA conference finals are starting to remind me of something. Oh yea, it's the 2nd round of the 2010 NBA playoffs, in which there were 3 sweeps. It'd be really cool if the Suns beat the Lakers, partly in fact because how much cooler are Steve Nash and Grant Hill than Kobe Bryant?

The problem is Phoenix might not win any games in Los Angeles, which is more of a problem because the series is 2-2-1-1-1 instead of 2-3-2. Both series could end up being real disappointments, and probably will be if Orlando drops game 2 at home against Boston. All of this is extra crappy because these games are spaced out for maximum fluff capacity.

Baseball is again very stinky, unless apparently you're a Washington Nationals fan, who themselves have dropped 4 in a row while their prized #1 pick remains in the minors. Clearly, this is baseball, and the system pays the kings and taxes the paupers. The Yankees and Phillies should be huge favorites to meet in the World Series again, and while both teams lose games sometimes, they obtain a balance by scoring at least 8 runs in all other games.

The real issue is that the Baltimore Orioles have finally clawed themselves into a position to maybe not have the absolute worst record in baseball in a month or so, but then dropped yesterday's game with arch nemesis/powerhouse the Kansas City Royals. If you're looking to be better than the 30th best team in baseball, it's a good idea not to lose at home to your most likely replacement.

Rasheed Wallace is from Philadelphia and I think it's awesome that he was wearing a Flyers hat after a Celtics/Cavs game. You can't get on Wallace, his team won their series even after being down 2-1. What does he have to do with the Bruins losing 4 playoff games in a row to the Flyers? I could understand if he had that lame big "P" Flyers hat that the white guys rock here, but he had a Flyers hat I've never seen. That's how NBA players roll. I remembering reading a Sports Illustrated article from the 90's that dissed Wallace and his then Portland Trailblazers teammates for talking on cell phones at an orphanage or boys home or make a wish type place, photos showing the players not caring about the kids. You just can't get that mad over a cap.