More from the Bloody Stupid Files

I lost the link to the original story, but this was something I just had to share:

A rather naïve woman was tricked by a guy who told her he had to administer ‘ointment’ to her, using the tip of his penis.

She only realized that the guy was using this ‘treatment’ as a trick to have sex with her nine months later, when she told her doctor about the treatment. Apparently, the guy didn’t even pretend to be a gynecologist…but pretended to know one who gave ‘advice’ about the treatment.

Apparently, a clock next to the bed and the guy saying “Ok, the gynecologist told me to thrust slowly for the first 5 minutes, then fast for the next five.” Was all the convincing this woman needed.

Just to make things even worse, did I mention that this woman was a school-teacher? No wonder kids grades are so low.

Ok, ok, I know that this is rape and not really something to laugh at but how could anyone, especially a school teacher, be this stupid?

Ladies, if you meet a guy in an airport, and he tells you that you need a gynecological treatment, and that he’s going to do it by rubbing ointment on the end of his hoo-ha, and then putting it in you…how many of you are going think “Ok, that sounds reasonable”?

I could understand if this was a guy actually pretending to be a gynecologist, and just ‘applied the ointment’ using his fingers, while in an elaborately staged and decorated fake doctors office…but seriously, come on!

You see, if I was in charge, this would be a textbook case of the “Being Bloody Stupid Act of 2007”. The guy would go to jail for rape, but the woman would get at least a year’s community service on three counts of being bloody stupid.

Our second story from “The Bloody Stupid Files”:

This is a direct quote from a letter written to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:

“You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest march since the beginning of last century…This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know Daylight Savings Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they?

Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before congress passes laws with such far reaching effects.”

Well, that would be fine if she realized that ‘any reasonable person’ understands that DST has absolutely no effect on how much sunlight reaches the planet. I’m sure the politicians wish they had the power to control the planet’s rotation speed and distance from the sun just by changing a few clocks, but they can’t. Oh, and maybe you should do some ‘serious studying’ of your third grade science text-book before you write smug, self-indulgent letters to the newspaper. Congratualtions on showing yourself up as a complete dumbass, dumbass!

Oh, and this woman is a frigging lawyer!

This would be the point at which Judge Paulius would send the Stupidity Enforcement Squad to her house, and she’d spend the next two years attending grade-school science class and writing “I must not be a smug dumbass” over and over.

Come on! A Lawyer who thinks DST actually effects how much sun hits the planet…and she actually gets to argue cases in court???

Sigh...

You know, I actually try to keep this blog a little upbeat. You know, the occasional funny post, a weird thought that comes to me…but it seems the world is just doing everything it can to piss me off.

This latest little nugget is especially annoying, because it comes from the city I was born in, namely Liverpool in England.

Ok, are you ready for the earth-shattering news?

A ten year old schoolboy called a fellow student a “Gay boy” in an email!

Ok, I’ll give you a couple of minutes to let that sink in. I know it’s an astounding announcement, and you’ll need a few moments to recover. I apologize for shattering the illusion of safety you may have built up around yourself and exposed you to the cold, hard real world where abominations like this can happen. Go get yourself some warm milk and a blankie and you’ll feel better. There there.

Seriously though, you’re probably thinking the same thing I did when I saw that headline. Namely “Who cares? What’s so unusual about school kids swapping insults?”

In any sane world, the teacher takes kid to one side, tells him not to do it again, and maybe gives them lines or makes them stay in during break-time. In fact, in a really sane world, the kid just writes back “No, you’re gay!” and we never hear about it.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a sane world.

What actually happened was this kid got a visit from two police officers.

Since when is two ten year olds swapping insults a matter for the police? What possible reason could there be to get the police involved? Sure, if the kid beat the other to within an inch of his life, or threatened to bring a gun or a knife to school…then I could at least understand getting the police involved.

Back when I was at school, if a parent called the police because some ten year old called their ten year old a ‘gay boy’, they would have been laughed off the phone line. Chances are they’d have found themselves on the receiving end of some charges for wasting police time.

Unfortunately, times have changed, and an insulting email gets a pre-teen a visit from the police who say “This is a very serious offense”.

This is honestly making me despair for the whole human race. I mean, seriously, what the fuck is going on when a schoolyard spat ends in the police being called.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. School isn’t just about receiving a normal education. It’s about receiving a social education as well. School is where kids learn to deal with problems, including bullies and assholes. What lesson are we teaching kids if we get the police involved over something so mind-numbingly minor?

Seriously, in ten years, this kid is going to get job, make a mistake and his boss will chew him out…and he’ll burst into tears, run home and call the police because his boss was mean.

“Hello (sob) police? My boss said I was (sob) stupid! I want him arrested for being a big meanie! Waaaaaaaaah!”

...and the saddest thing is, the police probably will get involved. It won’t be long before ‘Not Being Nice’, ‘Being A Big Meanie’ and the ‘Playing Nice Act of 2010” make it onto the law books.

How about leaving the police out of things, you know, try something radical and ‘out there’…like waiting until an actual crime has taken place before calling them?

Late Night Hilarity

The other night, as usual, I sat at the computer playing around in Photoshop, listening to ‘Scrubs’ on the TV.

After it finished, it went into the usual parade of infomercials and commercials so bad that the makers of them can’t afford to have them on TV before 3am.

Then we came to my favorites. “Natural Male Enhancement”.

I love these ads for the following reasons:

1) They refuse to say “Penis”

Ok, it’s 3am, no kiddies are watching, and surely ‘penis’ is a technical biology term. I’m not expecting them to say “With just one capsule a day, you’ll end up with a monster COCK! I mean, I real fucking baby-seal clubber! You’ll be pole vaulting to work, knocking shit over with it all day, and truly you’ll be a legend. The ladies won’t just be impressed, they’ll be fucking terrified of the monster in your pants.”

But say penis? Why not? The guy’s meant to be a Doctor. He has a white coat and everything!

Instead they don’t refer to a penis at all (but Enzyte has those sublimely subtle ‘wood’ references)…they just say “male enhancement’ or, and I shit you not here, ‘that particular part of the male anatomy’. Usually with a knowing grin or a smirk.

Seriously, I’m supposed to trust this Doctor, who wants me to take a pill that will do things to my twig ‘n’ berries, but he can’t say ‘penis’ out of embarrassment, and blushes when he says “that certain part of the male anatomy”. You’re a Doctor! Not a 5 year old who finds the term penis hilarious.

Look, dude, if you’ve devoted your life to improving ‘America’s Sexual Health’, and can’t bring your self to say “penis” “wedding tackle” or “pee-pee”, you’ve chosen the wrong profession.

“This pill will make your penis bigger.” How hard is that to say?

On the other hand, maybe guys are just more comfortable buying a “Natural Male Enhancement” product (which could literally mean anything), instead of a “Small Pee-Pee Pill”.

2) They’re so unrealistic.

Enzyte Bob’s perma-grin and powerful golf-swing aside, the people who make these advertisements have obviously never been in a relationship. In one ad, the guy’s wife buys the ‘Natural Male Enhancement’ product and hands it to him at breakfast. The guy is ecstatic about this and just smiles away while he reads the brochure about everything this miracle pill can do.

“Wow, honey! Thanks! This will make everything better for both of us!”

Yeah, because that’s realistic. That’s really the way a guy reacts when his Missus basically says “Here, take these. Your dick is way too small, and so small in fact, that I’ve bought you medication out of desperation to try and fix it.”

Buy your husband a pill to make his cock bigger? Why don’t you just castrate him there and then, dress him in a frilly pink tutu, and make him dance around dusting the house with a peacock-feather duster while watching Oprah…and tape it so all his friends can have a good laugh?

She hands him the pills and he gets excited and smiles. He doesn’t smack her about the head, sulk for days and retort with something like “I’m not small, you’re just so loose it’s like chucking a sausage up an alleyway!”…now that would be much more realistic.

It’s about as realistic as a guy handing his wife a gym membership, and boob-job gift card, a plastic surgery brochure and telling her that, no, those pants don’t make her butt look big, her gigantic ass does…and her smiling and saying “Thank you!”

3) The Small Print.

Gotta love small print. ‘Dramatic enactment, your results will vary, this pill has not been evaluated by the FDA”

In other words: “We’re just making this shit up. What you’re getting is a capsule filled with chalk dust and some shit we found on the floor. It doesn’t have a petulant cat at a dog show’s chance of working, but we know you’ll buy it anyway because you’re so insecure. Ha ha! You’ve got a tiny Peeeeeeee-nis!”

4) The overwhelming sense of despair and low-self esteem you get from the actors.

Think about this for a second. These guys are going on TV and basically telling the world they have a tiny penis and can’t satisfy their significant other without medical help. Think about poor Bob. He has to go to the grocery store every day and have people say “Hey look, it’s that perma-grin guy! Oi! Smiley! Your dick gotten any bigger yet? Whip it out and show us!”

Even if Bob sweeps the board at the Olympics, invents a water-powered car that will do 0-60mph in under four seconds and cures cancer…he’ll always be “Enzyte Bob, the weird smiley guy with the small penis”.

5) Lies, lies and more lies.

Listen, we know these pills don’t work, because if you could take a pill and get a bigger “certain part of the male anatomy”, Enzyte and Extenze would be as popular as Viagra and be making millions. It wouldn’t be advertised on a backwater channel at 3am.

We also know that the guy talking to us is not a real Doctor. Anyone can buy a white coat and sling a stethoscope around their necks. I’m Paulius MD! Buy my special natural male enhancement product and you’re guaranteed to grow 18 inches in the Joy Department overnight! See, not hard. (no Pun intended).

The real truth is you can sell anything on TV, and you can make all the outrageous claims you like. As long as you put ‘dramatic enactment’ in the small print, you’re good to go. That’s why people think you can lose 100lbs in a week without dieting or exercising, think flashing an LED light at your arm will cure carpal tunnel syndrome…and that taking a pill will turn your pecker into a legend.

Completely off topic here, but the other thing that drives me nuts is the infomercial products that compare themselves to another product to show how cheap they are. Like that fucking voice recorder that you can get two of for ‘$15 plus shipping and handling’, and they say “Other voice recorders can cost upwards of $100! Look what a great deal you’re getting!”…Yes, that’s because the hundred dollar model has 50 hours recording time, USB support, a filing system and great voice quality…and isn’t a 10 year old sound chip taken from a singing birthday card, put into 3 cents worth of vacuum-formed plastic by a 5 year old working for 6 cents a week in a sweatshop.

Buy this wheelbarrow with a lawnmower engine duct-taped to it for just $100! Other cars can cost upwards of $150,000!

…and just because Estaban’s guitar looks like the $800 guitar doesn’t mean it’s nearly as well made or as high quality.

I think you can all join me in saying: ‘Infomercial makers…you’re all douche bags.”

How Ironic...

Earlier this evening I was sitting in front of my TV, and I saw one of those “Over the Influence” anti-drug ads.

This one was a very bad animation, that looked like a 4 year old have drawn it (I’m not saying that is necessarily a bad thing, it was obviously a design choice). Here’s what happens in the ad:

A guy and a girl are sitting on a bench in a park, and an arrow points to something in the guys hand and the word “weed” appears above it. The girl gets a speech bubble that says “Not again!”

Then, in the background, a flying saucer lands, and an alien walks up to the couple. The guy offers the alien some weed, and the alien gets a speech bubble that says “No thanks.”

Love hearts appear around the girls head, and they walk off together.

Then the scene shifts to show the girl and the alien flying along in his flying saucer, looking ecstatically happy.

So kids, the moral of the story is clear: If you smoke weed, your girlfriend will leave you for an alien in a flying saucer.

In all seriousness, I’m all for keeping kids off drugs, but is an advertisement, that makes you wonder what the hell the writer was on, the best way to go about it?

Note to anti-drug organizations : The best time to write an anti-drug ad is not when you’ve just dropped a shitload of acid.

Cripple your computer with Windows Vista!

Today, just for the hell of it, I decided to run the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor.

For those who don’t know, Vista is the latest operating system from Microsoft. I should point out that I have no actual intention of upgrading, at least not until I have to. Microsoft has a habit of releasing broken software, then leaves you to limp onwards for a year or so before they finally get most of the problems fixed.

However, I’d heard all the rumors that the thing is a total bitch to install, and many people have gone out, dropped a couple hundred dollars on it, only to find they have to upgrade nearly everything in their computers to get it to work.

I was just interested to see what I’d have to do to run it.

Surprisingly, I was almost good to go. The only real problems it found was that the upgrade advisor didn’t actually know if one or two pieces of hardware would work…namely my graphics pad and printer.

Well, my printer is a Brother, and my graphics pad is a Medion. Neither of which are the most popular brands, so chances are they’d work anyway, but Microsoft hadn’t bothered testing them.

Then, we came to incompatible software.

Some was just standard stuff. The version of Nero I had (that came bundled with my computer) wouldn’t work. However, it said if I uninstalled it, and re-installed it after upgrading, it would work fine.

Then we come to the part that pissed me the fuck off.

Alcohol 120% wouldn’t work with Vista. According to the update manager, I’d have to uninstall it before Vista would install…and then I’d be unable to re-install it.

So why did this piss me off so much?

It’s because this has nothing to do with compatibility. The reason I wouldn’t be able to re-install Alcohol 120% is because it’s an application that can be used to copy DVDs and CDs and bypass copy protection.

From everything I’ve heard about Vista, they’re pretty much crippled it as a media machine, in order to satisfy the RIAA and the overcomplicated and ridiculously restrictive copyright laws.

Here’s the thing. I own a lot of movies. Sunny and I have completely different tastes in movies, so very often I’ll sit at my computer to watch a movie. The other big factor is I have a 22 inch HD Widescreen computer monitor, while our main TV is a standard 4:3 set. On my computer I get a much better picture, and it’s widescreen.

So, simply for convenience, I’ve taken 10 or 15 of my favorite movies, (Movies I legally own) and ripped the disc image to my hard-drive. I then use the virtual drive functionality of Alcohol to play the movies on my computer.

In other words, instead of looking through my collection every time I want to watch a movie, find the disc, take it to the computer and put it the drive... I simply turn on my computer, select the movie I want to watch from a list, and away I go. Many people also do this on laptops, because running a DVD drive for 2 hours seriously eats up the battery power.

Now, the big point to understand here is that this is completely and totally legal. As long as I legally own the movie, and don’t distribute it, I’m 100% inside the law.

(For example, it’s legal to make a thousand copies of a movie, as long as they’re for your own personal use, and you don’t give away, sell or let people borrow them…of course, you’d have a hell of a hard time explaining to a judge why you decided to make 1000 copies! When you buy a movie or some music, what you’re really buying is the license to view it…it gets illegal when you watch a movie you haven’t bought, or distribute it to other people who haven’t “bought a license”. Technically, if Me and a friend both bought our own copies of a movie, and his disc was destroyed, it’s legal for me to copy my movie, and give it to him. He’s bought a licence to view it.)

However, just because this application is capable of being used for illegal purposes, I’m not allowed to use it.

The same is true of a lot of legal software that can be used for illegal purposes. It’s legal to rip tracks from a CD you own to put on your MP3 player, or make an extra copy of it for the car. You’re legally able to back up your software, movies or music in case the original media gets damaged.

But under Windows Vista, you won’t be able to do any of this.

In essence, Microsoft, the RIAA and MPAA are dictating what we’re allowed to do on our own computers. They’re not just attempting to stop us from doing anything illegal, they’re also trying to stop us from having any software, or doing anything that is potentially illegal.

Basically, it’s like making the sale of tape recorders illegal, because they’re capable of recording music from the radio, or video cameras, because you might take one to a concert and make your own video.

In other words, they’re penalizing honest users and dictating the terms of what you’re allowed to do with your own property.

The saddest thing is that they’re doing this to honest users, when the actual pirates and hackers will easily find a way around anything they throw at them. The encryption for HD-DVD has already been cracked. There’s almost no copy protection that can’t already be bypassed…so what’s the point?

For example, take music.

Say you have an iPod, and download music with their “unlimited tracks for X amount a month” deal from iTunes. That music will stay on your computer and ipod and remain playable until a set amount of time after you bought it. Once your license has expired, you have to reconnect to iTunes in order to renew that licence to make it playable again.

In theory, this is a good idea. You can only listen to music as long as you’re still paying your subscription. It’s a big deal to crack the encryption, but the thing is, you don’t have to.

Simply connect your speaker outlet to the microphone input on your computer. Then, you have a shiny new MP3 file on your computer, that has no protection at all.

When you can bypass the protection that easily, what’s the point in having it in the first place? And definitely don’t cripple honest users computers because they’re capable of doing something illegal.

The biggest problem here is that the movie and music producers are acting like piracy is a new thing.

Remember how easy it was to copy an audio tape or a video tape? For an audio tape, you simply put the original in one tape deck on your stereo, a blank in the other, and pressed record and play. For videos, you simply connected the output on one VCR to the input on another. It was just as simple when video games came on cassette or floppy disc.

Now I’ll say I don’t condone piracy. If you want something, you should pay for it…but what it boils down to is piracy today is not hitting music, movie or video game sales, or at the very least, no more than it was 10 years ago before anyone cared about piracy.

There’s also the cast iron fact that music sales actually increased when Napster first came on the scene.

I’m all for copy protection. I’m all for fighting piracy. My point is, no one has the right to tell me that I can’t run perfectly legal software on my computer, because it is capable of being used for piracy.

There are a hundred legal reasons to copy a CD or DVD, there are a hundred legal reasons to run a virtual drive. What’s next? No printers or scanners because they can be used in counterfeiting? No cameras because I can take pictures of copyrighted artwork on my monitor? No paper and pen, because I can use them to copy out books by hand?

Enough is enough

Most Extreme Idiots

So a couple nights ago, I was flicking through the late-night TV, and stumbled across a show called “Most Extreme Sports”.

Now, as a sane person, I automatically avoid anything with ‘extreme’ in the title. Not because I’m against taking it ‘to the max’, but because ‘extreme’ is one of those words that has been so over used, it’s become meaningless.

For example, you can buy ‘extreme’ potato chips now.

When a potato-based crunchy snack can be considered ‘extreme’, ‘slightly bored’ must describe being tied up in a chair and forced to watch the first half of an episode of ‘Full House’ over and over again for approximately 2.8 billion years.

Anyway, I digress.

This show used ‘extreme’ in the most common current usage of the word, where it means “People doing dumb shit and getting hurt for your amusement”.

So I left it on.

Hey, why not try to jump off a 30 story building on rollerblades and try and land in a bathtub of water? Could it possibly be inadvisable?

However, on this show, I found the dumbest man in the universe:

He appeared on the screen, gave the uniform grin of a short-bus rider… and proudly announced that he was going to break the sound barrier on a bike.

Now, let me be perfectly clear with this. I don’t mean on a motorbike, as stupid as that would be to attempt, he was going to attempt to break the sound barrier on a regular bicycle.

That’s right, one you have to pedal.

He was going to do this by riding his bike down the side of a mountain.

Wanna know the funniest part? He was taking this shit seriously.

I mean, don’t you think that at some point, someone would have told him that this was impossible…and by impossible, I don’t mean ‘highly unlikely’, I mean breaking the laws of physics impossible. About as possible as stopping a freight train by laying one of your testicles on the track

Ok, to elaborate on the, here’s physics 101:

Every body on earth has a terminal velocity. Terminal Velocity is the speed at which a freefalling object will stop accelerating and remain at a constant speed. Basically, it’s the point at which the force of gravity and the force of drag from wind resistance equal out.

For the average human body, this speed is roughly 120 miles per hour. If we’re generous and add a bit of weight for the bike, let’s say that increases to 130 miles per hour.

Of course, with terminal velocity, the only thing acting as drag is wind resistance, so the bike on the mountain etc takes away that little advantage.

So let’s be even more generous and say that through pedal power, he can increase that speed by roughly 30mph.

So, this guy is looking at a top speed of, at the very most, 150mph…

This is just a tiny bit shy of the 761mph required to reach the speed of sound. 611mph short actually.

It must be a bit of a hurdle to overcome, I can imagine his trainer:

“Ok, idiot boy, we’re a little short on the power, so I want you to dig deep down and somehow supply the same amount of forward thrust as a fucking passenger jet! You can do it! Harness the power of your stupidity!”

So there we go. 15 minutes research on the internet would have proven that this feat was impossible. With gravity and pedal power factored in, he still has to add to that the same amount of speed that a passenger jet cruises at…in fact, more than a passenger jet.

Even if he did it, it couldn’t end well. It would be like me sitting you in a wind tunnel, sitting you on a bike that’s vibrating like a bachelorette party-favor hooked up to the national grid…putting a 761mph wind in your face and saying “Hold on!”

However, one other thing about this bothered me even more than the physics of this.

Ok, not everyone knows physics (even the schoolboy stuff I just said), it is possible that someone is dumb enough to believe that if you ride a back down a big enough hill, that you’re going to just keep accelerating indefinitely.

But if you were attempting a land-speed record, no matter how dumb or inadvisable, wouldn’t you at least do a little research into other people who’ve attempted speed records and succeeded?

I mean, look at the car that holds the current land speed record. The Thrust SSC (yay, the brits!), the car that broke the sound barrier.

If you’ve never seen this vehicle, let me describe it. It’s essentially a cockpit that weighs about 5 ounces, suspended between two frickin’ jet engines taken from the British F4 Phantom Jet Fighter. These jets produce 50,000lbs of thrust

Even with all that power it just managed to break the sound barrier. It managed a speed of 763 mph

Don’t you think a single glance at even a picture of the SSC might have made him think:

“…and I wanna try this on a push-bike?!?!”

Put yourself in his position. Look at these pictures and imagine the pitch session:

“Ok, idiot boy, here’s what we want you to do. We want you to break the sound barrier on the ground.”

“Okey dokey!”

“Ok, here’s the one and only vehicle in the world that’s managed it so far.”

“Oh boy, that looks like fun! I’ll do it, I can’t wait to try!”

“Hold your horses there boy…we want you to do the same thing as this:”

“…but on this:”

Honestly, how many of you would have said “I’ll do it!”

Oh, and in case your wondering what happened…His bike snapped in half when he got to about 90 MPH. For some reason a racing bicycle didn’t appreciate being taken to 90mph on rough rocky terrain.

The guy attempting it broke nearly every single bone in his body as he left his bike and continued down the mountain.

This whole episode has proven one thing to me:

Nature punishes stupidity.