“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
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Hi folks.
It’s Black Friday.
This is the day they let the crazy people out.
They wrestle and fight and tug
and roll around on the floor hitting each other
in a frenzy of greed and stupidity.
It’s fun to watch, but I’m staying at home.
How about you?
If you want to know why then have
a look at these videos and photos.
Enjoy and be safe.
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“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
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In case you hadn’t guessed from the title, it’s Pun Day again.
Another selection of great jokes or terrible jokes depending on your point of view.
So get those groans ready.
Enjoy or endure!
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The time will never be wrong.
Not on my watch.
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I used to live in a normal house,
but then steps were taken to make it into a bungalow.
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My dog has just eaten my entire James Bond DVD collection.
Luckily I managed to beat The Living Daylights out of him.
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I got an answering machine today but I think it’s broken.
I’ve asked it loads of questions and nothing’s happening.
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My wife lost her Tampax and got really angry.
I hate it when she loses her rag.
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I’ve finally remembered the word that
I’ve been thinking about for two weeks.
It’s ‘fortnight.’
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Me and my mate are having a competition
to see who can steal the most dog related stuff
from next door’s house.
I’ve just taken the lead….
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They call me Mr Rhetorical.
Can you guess why?
I’m looking to start up my own business,
recycling discarded chewing gum.
Just need help getting it off the ground.
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My whisky kept going missing so I confronted the wife.
She told me that the guilty party was the family dog.
I found it staggering.
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I lost my job today because I said the office is full of assholes.
Bit of an overreaction to my opinion about a TV program I think.
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What’s black and gets abused 24/7
on social networking sites?
Punctuation!
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I’m a much better fighter now that I have a blackbelt.
I was hopeless when my trousers kept falling down.
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Shopping for antiques won’t make you gay,
but it will make you buy curios.
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A lady at the supermarket asked me if I’ve ever drunk orange juice with pulp.
I said, “No, but I once had coffee with The Bluetones.”
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“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
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We all happen to be living during a time when there are great advances and changes being made in the way we live our lives. Some of them are to our benefit, other not so much so.
Politically and financially the world is in turmoil. There is an accelerating and inevitable shift of power and influence towards the east, with former great powers like Britain and America declining in their influence and their economic might.
Perhaps that is a natural phenomenon, after all as they say “every dog has its day”, but I happen to believe that a lot of it is due to stupidity and mismanagement allied with a self-defeating philosophy that the west somehow has a duty to police the world and to create nanny states for its citizens where they will neither have to work nor want.
Technologically there have also been many changes and many more to come. During the past twenty years with the advent and growth of the internet everything has changed, from the way we interact socially, to how and where we work, and how we manage our affairs whether that be banking, shopping or whatever.
What a lot of these changes mean is that future generations will have no idea of how our lives used to be. Already many of us who have lived through the changes have forgotten how we used to have to do things. What would it be like trying to explain the ‘old days’ to a generation with absolutely no point of reference to the world we were born into?
To remind you of how it used to be here is a list of some of things we have known and lost, consigned to the rubbish bin of history. Feel free to add your own items to this list of things that your grand-kids will probably never know.
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Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
Dewey Decimal System
Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
Reference books such as phone books, encyclopaedias
Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
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Having to manually unlock a car door.
Looking out the window during a long drive.
Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
Getting lost in a world without GPS.
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Being able to add and subtract without a calculator
Long division and multiplication
Trig tables and log tables.
Slide rules
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House phones
Phone books and Yellow Pages.
Rotary-dial telephones.
Pay phones.
Phones with actual bells in them.
Answering machines.
Fax machines.
Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
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Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
Betamax tapes.
Video tapes and renting movies
Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
Laserdiscs.
8-track cartridges.
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Casette Tapes
Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
CDs and DVDs
Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo.
Taping songs off the radio
A Walkman.
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Rotary tuners that scanned the radio dial and hearing static between stations as you went through the ether.
Shortwave radio.
CB radios.
Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
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DOS.
The buzz of a dot-matrix printer
5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
Counting in kilobytes.
Joysticks.
Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.
NCSA Mosaic.
Netscape
Alta Vista
Being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
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Cash.
Writing a check.
Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
Being able to buy something in Walmart that isn’t made in China
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Privacy.
Being able to take a drive or walk down the street without being surveilled on numerous cameras
Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
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Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
Neat handwriting.
Spelling
Grammar
The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
Typewriters.
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Putting film in your camera
Sending that film away to be processed.
Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
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Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.
Ashtrays
Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
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“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
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They call it Black Friday nowadays. It could just as easily have been Red Friday or Purple Friday or Green Friday or Any-Color-You-Like Friday. But the marketing men called it Black Friday and we’re stuck with it.
This is the day when people queue up for hours in the hope of getting something they don’t really need at a discount price they can’t really afford. And sometimes they lose their minds and fight and trample on each other for the dubious privilege.
Ah, the dumbing down of the dumb and the dumber!
When I say dumb and dumber don’t just think I am talking about the uneducated. Not in the least. Some of those for whom schooling was anathema have a lot more street savvy than most, something they have learned in what is sometimes known as the school of hard knocks – in other words, life!
I have learned that idiots come in all shapes and sizes and with all forms of learning and skills. There are smart football players and there are dumb ones. There are smart doctors and there are dumb ones. There are even smart academics and there are the well educated fools who may be exam passing machines but who haven’t the common sense to go to the local store and buy a loaf of bread.
A friend of mine, let’s call him Fred, was a guy like that. He had degrees by the yard, undergraduate, master’s degrees and even a PhD. I suppose I should have called him Dr Fred.
Academically he was brilliant. And a great teacher of academic subjects. He traveled the world and lectured in various schools and colleges to great acclaim.
But Fred hadn’t the common sense of a gnat when it came to commerce. All his life he bought things far too dear but always thought that he had bought them cheap. He was a car salesman’s dream customer, manna from heaven for a realtor, and bread and butter – and chocolate cake with icing – for any shopkeeper selling computing or electronic gear.
The reason Fred comes to mind today is that he was also one of the idiots who would queue up half the night for a sale bargain, particularly where rare books were concerned. Fred was an avid collector.
Every year our local University bookstore held a one day sale where most of their books were discounted by at least 10 or 20 percent, but where one in particular was discounted by a massive amount, at least by half and sometimes by even more.
One year Fred spotted a book he had been after that was in the sale. It had been reduced from $500 to little over $100 and Fred was determined to have it.
So he spent the night and day before the sale getting as much sleep as he could. Then he made a flask of coffee and a few sandwiches, got a sleeping bag and set off confidently about 3 am in the morning to go to the bookstore to camp out until it opened.
When he got to the store there was no one around, in fact nothing at all on the street, except for a large cardboard box sitting at the entrance to the shop. Fred quickly surmised that it was extra stock that had been delivered after hours for the sale.
He rolled out his sleeping bag, climbed inside it and settled down for the night. It was about this time of the year and cold, but not freezing or anything too extreme. He was comfortable enough.
The time passed slowly as it usually does at night when you aren’t able to get to sleep or when you are nervously anticipating some event that will happen in the morning. Four o’clock and five o’clock came and went, and at around six o’clock Fred ate his sandwiches and drank his coffee. He was very content. Just another couple of hours to go and the book would be his.
By seven-thirty it was just beginning to get light. Traffic had started to move along the main streets as people began to make their way to work. The side street where the bookshop was however was still deserted, apart from Fred and the big cardboard box.
And then about ten minutes before eight the staff of the bookstore started to arrive. They smiled at Fred as they walked past and opened the door of the store. They switched the lights on and closed the doors again. Fred knew that they would open them again soon, when they had got themselves organized. Just a few more minutes he thought. Fred stood up and rolled up his sleeping bag, ready to enter the store.
That was when he heard the alarm. It wasn’t very loud and at first Fred thought it was coming from another street nearby. It wasn’t. Then he thought it was coming from inside the bookstore, possibly part of their security system. But it wasn’t that either. And then, before he could think up any other possibilities the alarm stopped just as suddenly as it had started.
Then to Fred’s complete and utter amazement the flaps of the cardboard box flew open and a head came out. It was a young man and as he got to his feet and stretched his arms he looked over at Fred and said, “Morning. You here for the book sale too?”
It was a classic ‘WTF’ moment. But Fred was having trouble grasping what had just happened and he couldn’t get any words from his brain to his lips. So he just stood there, mouth slightly open, trying desperately to piece together what was happening in front of him.
“I’ve done this before,” the young man said cheerfully to Fred. “Best place to be on a cold night is inside a cardboard box. Those old homeless guys know a thing or two I can tell you.”
This time words started to come to Fred. “Were you… did you… have you been… were you in that thing all night?” he eventually spluttered the question out.
“Sure thing,” the young man replied. “Had to get that first edition of..” and he named the book that Fred had his heart set on. “There’s only the one copy, you know.”
Fred did know, boy did he know. But it never occurred to him that someone else might know the value of the book or that they might want it too. It never occurred to him to look at the cardboard box, even though he had been there beside it for most of the night. And it certainly never occurred to him that there might be somebody inside it!
“FFS!” Fred exclaimed, more to himself than anyone else. He didn’t say another word after that. He didn’t go into the bookstore either. He turned and walked away, still not entirely sure, I think, what had just happened.
As for me, you wont get me near a shop tomorrow, bargains or not. If you are going shopping then good luck, this might be what you are letting yourself in for.
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”Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
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As I’ve said before on this blog, I’m a doggie person, but I know that there are a lot of people out there who like cats. However, I don’t think any of them could have liked the cat that is the subject of this post.
It happed a few years ago when a colleague and myself were on a business trip that included a visit to a small town in West Virginia. It was a lovely little town, called Rednecksville (I won’t tell you it’s real name so as to protect the guilty), full of lovely, very friendly and hospitable people.
During the time we happened to be there they held a local fair come flea market where people from the town and the surrounding countryside would gather. Some set up stalls to sell their home crafted goods, others, like myself just went along to see what was on offer and perhaps buy a few trinkets as gifts.
But, whilst the experience itself was enjoyable, the items that were on sale left a whole lot to be desired. They were quite unbelievably crudely made.
There was a guy with what I think were supposed to bird nesting boxes and/or feeders, but they looked more like an old plank of wood with a bit of drain pipe nailed to it. (It looked like that because that’s what it was, lol)
Other stalls were selling home made jewelry in what you could only call primitive style.
And yet more had bits of metal junk.
Surprisingly one of the junk stalls seemed to be doing good business, selling big rusty nuts and bolts and bits of chain and so forth. On second thoughts perhaps not so surprisingly since this was a largely rural community and new uses can always be found for stuff like that.
I smiled quietly to myself as I wondered if the bird box guy had been a customer of this stall the last time they had the fair.
At another stall a woman was selling some stuffed toys/animals she had very obviously made herself. None of them were good, but some were just downright awful.
For some reason best known to himself my colleague chose to buy a stuffed cat for his wife. He was getting on in years and had been married a long time, but in all those years he never had any idea about women or what they would like – and that was especially so in regard to his wife, although in his defense I have to say that she didn’t seem to like anything he did very much.
To my utter amazement he choose the most unusual stuffed cat I have ever seen. It wasn’t that it looked ugly as such, or that it was badly made. This thing looked pure evil. And no matter where you would be standing it always seemed to be looking right at you, or through you.
It was terrible, horrendous, occultish. If Steven King had been there he’d have written a book about it for sure. If Vincent Price had been holding it in some horror movie set it might have looked more acceptable. Or if we had been in Haiti, I could have understood it if it was supposed to be some voodoo ritual piece. But this was right in the middle of good old evangelical Christian Bible Belt America. This was no place for the cat from hell.
“What do you think?” he asked, proudly showing me his new purchase.
“I hate it!” I told him in no uncertain terms. “What the hell did you buy that thing for?”
He seemed rather miffed.
He must have been more miffed when he got it home. Needless to say his wife hated it. Wouldn’t give it house room at all. And I’m sure she made her feelings very clear to him, as she usually did about almost everything.
So he gave it to his daughter.
She hated it. Didn’t want it near her house either.
So he gave it to his daughter-in-law.
She hated it. She was actually scared out of her wits by it.
So he gave it to his grand-daughter.
She hated it. Started to cry, I believe.
So he put in the trunk of the car and brought it to his office the next day.
His secretary hated it, too. Wouldn’t have it near the office.
So back in the trunk it went.
Eventually he must have got to hate it too because it disappeared never to be seen again.
And the weirdest bit of all….
I photographed him with it when he bought it and I would have attached it to this blog post except for one thing – the photo is nowhere to be found!
That was one weird cat!
“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
I know an architect.
Nothing very unusual in that.
Except for one thing, this one is blind.
He hasn’t been blind all his life but from his late teens, when he was training to be an architect, he started to lose his sight due to an inherited disease and eventually it went altogether.
To his credit he hasn’t let it stop him leading as full a life as possible. Although there have been good and bad results.
For example, he insists on helping around the house but on one occasion he picked up a kitten along with the dirty clothes and promptly dumped all in the washing machine. Both the clothes and the kitten were clean at the end of the washing cycle, but the unfortunate kitten was also dead.
He also tells a story about doing some shopping at a time when his sight was almost gone, but not quite. He was in a local pharmacy and queued up at the counter waiting to hand over his prescription. He waited and waited, but the pharmacy assistant kept ignoring him. He could hear other people getting served, but never him. He waited and he waited and he waited some more, but nothing. The girl behind the counter just kept ignoring him.
Finally his patience just ran out. He was angry. He thought he was being deliberately ignored because of his disability and that other ‘seeing’ customers were being allowed to jump the queue. He spoke to the assistant who was standing right in front of him. She didn’t respond. Then he spoke louder. Still no reaction. Then he started to give forth some abuse which included a good bit of strong language. The other customers in the pharmacy all stopped what they were doing and watched what was going on.
People were a little embarrassed. Nobody intervened except for one gentleman, who walked up to my friend, put his hand on his shoulder and said quietly buy firmly, “Come over here son, and this other person will attend to your order.”
He found out later that he had been patiently queuing up in front of one of those body and head mannequins that was sitting on the counter and which the pharmacy was using to display a ladies wig, and had been hurling his abuse and angst at it and not to a real person at all.
A few incidents like that aside, he has coped quite well. He has compensated for his lack of sight by developing an extremely good memory and equally good recall. I think that proves that the more you use your brain the better it works.
What a pity so many people these hardly use theirs at all!
For a lot of years his way of designing houses was very laborious. He would plan the whole thing out in his head and then give verbal instructions to his son who would dutifully draft out a sketch of the proposed building. It was slow and tedious for the recipient of the instructions, although he reveled in the task himself – a little bit too much and too long for most people’s liking if truth be told. I know because I was the unfortunate recipient of the drafting instructions on a couple of occasions.
And then a possible solution hit me like a brick.
A Lego brick actually.
I bought a few large base sheets and he got himself some small Lego bricks and from then on he was able to draft his own floorplans, and to scale using each little brick as equivalent to one foot or whatever. It worked well for him and gave him a bit more freedom to plan and re-plan without involving anyone else in the process. I don’t know whether he still uses it or not, but I kind of hope so.
Now, what sparked this blog post in my head wasn’t him at all. It was a video that I watched recently. It’s not about architects either, but it is about someone who is blind. And it is also about the power of words which as a blogger and writer I appreciate, as I’m sure many of you do too.
It’s a nice video.
I hope you enjoy it.
“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
Stupid people do have some things in common with ordinary people. For one thing they like to shop and try out stuff in the stores.
Isn’t it great for the rest of us that they either cannot read, or cannot understand what they read.
This short video clip is from Germany. Enjoy!
fasab 