Selective Racism

If "racist" terms offend you, I would recommend tuning out now.

Alright, now that the warning is out of the way, I can get on with my rant. This is another of my "why I hate people" rants. See, it started out yesterday when I went to see a movie. It was "The Departed", a movie about corrupt cops in Irish Boston. Original, I know. Pretty good movie anyways. So, being set in Irish Boston, dealing with organized crime, they start off right away talking about "guineas". For those of you who may not know, guinea is a derogatory term for an Italian. I laugh the first time I hear the term, and not a single other person in the audience seems to even notice it. Now at this point, I should mention the people sitting in front of me. In the row directly ahead of me is a black woman, and in the row ahead of her are two more black women. Nothing against them, it's just vital to the story. Alright so after a couple minutes of Jack Nicholson talking about guineas, he also uses the word "nigger". And oh boy was there a reaction to that one! The woman directly ahead of me said "I don't like this so much already," or something along those lines. A bit of hooting at the screen, general disgust at the use of the word. The movie goes on, lots more talk of guineas, he had to have used that term at least 20+ times throughout the movie. At one point, he also used the terms "mick" (Irish) and "chink" (Chinese); again, inciting laughter from me and no reaction from the rest of the audience. Then he says "nigger" again. More disgust and hooting from the rows ahead of me. Oh and did I mention the vacuum that was created by every white asshole in the theatre puckering each time that word was mentioned?

So let me get this straight. You can say "guinea", you can say "mick", you can say "chink" and nobody cares. They could have probably even gotten away with dago, wop and goombah without a hint of notice from the crowd. But as soon as you say "nigger", everybody is up in arms. This makes absolutely no sense to me.

Honestly, I don't really understand "racial slurs". They're only offensive if you take offense. I'm Irish, I call myself a mick and laugh about it. I'm white, I call myself cracker, whitebread, honkey and again I laugh about it. One of my best friends in high school was Chinese and Vietnamese. He got called to the principal's office one day because he was walking through the halls, chanting "I chink I can, I chink I can..." When he was in there, the principal told him that he couldn't use racial slurs. His reaction? "How can it be a racial slur? I AM a chink! A slanty-eye! A gook!" And he's right. It's not a slur, because he takes no offense.

Our society has turned into a bunch of coddled pussies. Hasn't anybody ever heard the old saying "Stick and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Get over it, people.

I fought the law...

...and I won? Irrefutable proof that The Dead Kennedys had it right with their version of the song.

I love the intarweb.

The terrorists have won.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/31/boston.bombscare/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/01/boston.bombscare/index.html

I give up. I used to have some glimmer of hope for humanity. That's all gone. My absolute favorite quote, from this additional article, reads:

"It is unconscionable that in this post-9/11 environment that Turner Broadcasting would do something like this in an urban setting," Boston Police Superintendent Ed Davis said.

Wait wait wait .... "post-9/11" environment?!?!?
Hold on, let me think for a second, do a bit of math here... They're talking about September 11, 2001... today is February 1, 2007... that makes it 5 years, 4 months, 20 days. Nearly 65 months. 1969 days. You get the point. A LONG FUCKING TIME! By the same right, this is a "post-WW2 environment", a "post-Great War environment"... hell a "post-Civil War environment!"

I don't really know where I'm going with this... but this crap makes me both very angry and very sad at the same time. It's just pathetic.

An interesting perspective

I just found this article on the brand new Windows Vista, and although the article has a lot of words without saying a whole lot, I like how this guy put it into perspective. It seems similar to how I might evaluate it.

I'm a bit anxious myself to get a look at Vista... but I don't know that I really want to make the switch yet. I'm also not sure I want to fork over that kind of cash right now, when I can still be perfectly happy on a free Fedora Core installation.

New website!

Yes, I've finally made my new website design live! Yay!

It's all new content, very much trimmed down from what I had before. I've removed my "news" page, as I just post here on my blog now. The programming section isn't up yet, as I'm working on some fancy new ways of displaying the code... but everything else was ready, so I decided to go ahead and turn it on!

Oh and I have a much better URL now, too: http://www.tarken.net/

Let me know what you think!

Happiness is...

...warm, freshly washed sheets, straight out of the dryer. I could just lay here smelling them all night. Mmmmm :)

Concert ticket bullshit

I'm rather annoyed right now.

I just went online to buy tickets for a Flogging Molly concert. That, in itself, is totally awesome. I'm Irish. They're Irish. It's on St. Patty's day. All good! Or, well, so it would seem.

So I go to the concert ticket page and proceed to order tickets for myself and my good buddy Don. $29 per ticket. Not too bad, considering it's Flogging Molly on St. Patty's day. Okay, I'm cool with that.

Then I get to the checkout page, and the charges begin to add up. Here is a breakdown of the costs, PER TICKET.
Ticket price: $29.00
Building Facility Charge: $3.00
Convenience Charge: $5.00
(What the HELL is so "convenient" about that?)
That adds up to $37.00 per ticket. A bit more ouch.

Then on top of all THAT, I have to pay an additional $2.50 to have the tickets delivered via "TicketFast". What is TicketFast, you might ask? Well, let me explain. It emails the tickets to you. So that you can print them out. It's an AUTOMATED SYSTEM to email the tickets to you. It costs them nothing to do. And yet, it costs $2.50.

Hahaha, and get this. As if all of that weren't enough, I get to the final page where I put in my credit card info, and there's a $3.35 "Order Processing Charge".

This all adds up to a grand total of $79.85, for 2 tickets to a concert. Tickets which started out at $29.00 each. That's $58.00 total. What the hell is this crap about?

The final crowning achievement of this horrible website is that they have time limits on each page. You find the tickets you want, you have 2 minutes to claim them. Creating an account on the site so that you can buy the tickets, you've got 1 minutes. Putting in all of your credit card information, you've got 3 minutes. What about people who type slow? What if you have to get up and take a piss? What if you get distracted in the middle of the order process? You have to start all over. From the beginning. That's what I call a piss poor user experience.

I definitely won't be using TicketMaster again.