Salutations, fellow denizens of the digital domain. You can call me KP, and this is my bar. If you haven't been here before, take a look around. There's really not much to see. That's because this is a blog, not the fucking Smithsonian. You want links? Apps? Games? That goddamned Foursquare QR code? Go back to iMasheep. Better yet, go fuck yourself. You notice I don't have the ubiquitous icons for Facebook and Twitter in my sidebar? There's a reason for that. And, before you say it, I'm aware of the irony of using a blog to rant about the excesses of frivolous technology. I'm just that avant garde. But you'll find more than just tirades about Tweeting here -- in fact, if you scroll down, you'll discover I think a lot of stuff is stupid. Don't agree with me? Think I'm an insensitive, arrogant, out-of-touch prick? You may be right. But I have a blog. And this is my bar.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

"A lot of people go to college for seven years."

Disease.  When you hear (or, in this case, read) this word, what comes to mind?

Ok, besides that.
Perhaps you think of the grim, cold confines of the terminal ward in a hospital.  How about the debilitating, trouser-shitting convulsions of a grand mal seizure?  Maybe you envision pox-ridden peasants being carted away by the wagonload during the Black Plague.  I know that's my favorite.  Regardless, the associations probably aren't all that great, and being sick is not something you aspire to.  To put it bluntly (my forte), disease is a bitch, just another way for God, Mother Nature, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, depending on your preferred delusion, to remind you, "Hey, bitch, you're mortal.  How do you like dem apples?"  So, why do so many people, Americans in particular, want to be diagnosed as ill?

What am I talking about?  Don't act like you don't know.  We have become a hypochondriac nation, obsessed with the idea that we simply must be suffering from a dozen-odd diseases and syndromes, despite the fact that we are one of the most medically advanced societies on the planet.  The average hour-long block of television programming contains roughly umpteen-million ads for various prescription medications, some for diseases so heinous the commercials actually refuse to say anything about those diseases.  I'm not kidding, I have literally seen ads that only say, "Ask your doctor about Fecalodin."  That's it.  No laundry list of symptoms, no mention of the malady itself, no clues in the ridiculously-sunny imagery of the advertisement.  Just the nagging seed of a fearful suspicion - Shit, what if I need Fecalodin, and don't even know it?  I don't want to have . . . whatever Fecalodin is meant to treat.  I'd better ask Dr. Chaparaka, he'll know, he comes from one of those brown countries where they have an ass-load of diseases.

The morbid fear/desire to be sick in the United States could probably be classified as a condition in its own right.  Hell, some Americans invent a new kind of crazy to be every day.

Yeah, you're a heat-seeking titanium cyclone of truth on a dinosaur.  That's what it is.
But those without enough celebrity clout to pull this off are forced to adopt real diseases, whether they have them or not.  Why does it itch behind your left ear?  What is that vague ache inside your head?  Why do you feel inferior and socially awkward when surrounded by prettier, more successful people?  There has to be a medically-valid reason, right?  Luckily, the pharmaceutical-media complex has an easy answer: you're all diseased!  It's pill-popping time!  However, I cannot blame the placebo peddlers, who are mostly just taking advantage of a situation, namely our society's fixation on its imagined illness.  I have read some serious research - which I will not cite here, because who the fuck are you, a special Senate commission? - which suggests that in First World Nations almost all real fears have evaporated as a result of us technologically eliminating the innumerable dangers we puny, soft, slow, weak homo sapiens once faced in the very scary prehistoric world.

Behold the pinnacle of evolution.  Good thing we killed off saber-toothed tigers a while ago.
Because we are hardwired to live in constant fear for our lives (that's called survival instinct), our uber-sized brains are having a hard time adapting to the cushy, Cheeto-fueled lifestyle we presently enjoy.  We actually seek out other things to fear, bogeymen our neurotic collective unconscious creates to fill the void once occupied by floods, woolly mammoths, thunderstorms, famines, packs of wild dogs, predatory super-ostriches, and more or less every other goddamn thing on the planet, because, let's face it, we were the real-world equivalent of Scrat the saber-tooth squirrel from the Ice Age movies, scurrying about frantically between a thousand and one things out to squash our very existence.

*Twitch*
Don't believe me?  Do you ever notice how these illnesses don't seem to affect Third World Nations?  When was the last time you heard about an epidemic of restless thumb syndrome or acute carrot allergy or chronic sleep disorder in Africa?  You know what they suffer from there?  Starving to death.  And AIDs.  And hippo attacks.  You know, real things.

On the other hand, we have our glittery, homogenized, sanitized world, where being diagnosed with a disease is actually becoming trendy.  It's part of what I call our culture of victimhood - a society-wide yearning to see ourselves as somehow disadvantaged, afflicted, or persecuted and thus special and deserving of others' attention and sympathy.  Where people once went out of their way conceal ailments such as manic depression (politically-corrected to bipolar disorder, then affective disorder, and probably soon basal alternating interemotive condition), they now proudly declare it to any and all who will listen, touting it like a badge of courage and endurance in a brutal, unfair world.

Hey, remember when Magic Johnson contracted HIV, and suddenly it was cool?  No?
I'm not knocking people who genuinely suffer from real diseases, mental or physical, but people who boast about it, or, worse yet, don't actually have the fucking disease.  And it's pretty hard to have a "disease" when it's basically made up.

Case in point?  So-called gluten allergies.  I have a sickness, too: I am sick to death of everybody and their inbred cousin claiming to be allergic to wheat gluten.  For those who haven't read an Internet health column in the past five years, gluten is a protein composite found in virtually all food products processed from wheat, rye, oats, barley, and related species.  You know, the staple crops on which human civilization is based, so, in other words, it's been part of our diet for a long time in one form or another.  Little did we know, we were actually eating poison the whole time.

Actually Satan's grist of death.
Since I work at a restaurant, I am more aware of this fad than most.  And, yes, it is a fad, I am calling it.  It's oddly, perversely popular to be gluten allergic/intolerant.  Until approximately 2006, I had never heard of people having a serious problem with wheat gluten.  Then, all of a sudden, it was the phobia de jour, the buzzword in dietary science, the favorite subject of superficial "health blogs" on every quack-medical website.  It is approaching the level of a public health scare as more and more people jump on the Gluten=Doom Bandwagon.  On a regular basis, I now have septuagenarians requesting the gluten-free menu.  So, my question is, what did you do before gluten sensitivity was "discovered" a few years ago?  Never eat out?  Live in agonizing pain as your defective digestive system rebelled against the tiniest presence of gluten in your food?  I have even had customers tell me which gluten products they can and cannot stomach.  "Oh, your flour-rolled tortilla chips are just fine, I eat them all the time, but I have to have the gluten-free menu for my meal."  Really?  Your allergy is that selective?  It has reached the point that I am not sure people even understand why they are avoiding this shit.  I suspect they think it's some new, healthier diet propounded by holistic, mind-crystal-wielding hippie healers or savvy, ultra-fit organic dietitians.

I am well-aware that there is a real illness called celiac disease, which renders the person incapable of properly digesting wheat gluten.  Sucks to your assmar, Piggy.  Fact is, that ailment afflicts less than 5% of the population.  So what are the odds I just happen to encounter three of those poor souls in the same restaurant, on the same day, during the same shift?  Do the math.  If you buy those numbers, I have a basement full of chimpanzees randomly cranking out Hamlet on typewriters, and I'll sell them to you for a cool million.  And as for gluten "intolerance," it is so vaguely defined scientifically that anyone who has ever had a slightly unpleasant experience sometime within 24 hours of eating gluten, including but not limited to poor judgement resulting in a regretted one-night stand, could conceivably claim it was an adverse reaction.  In reality, this could just as easily be chalked up to a logical fallacy like slippery slope, cause/effect confusion, questionable cause, or being a total dumbfuck.

As per usual, I am going to blame TV and the Internet for this phenomenon, since they are the repeat offenders when it comes to virally spreading bullshit in its many and varied forms.  Softcore medical dramas like Grey's Anatomy, House, or Royal Pains and the digital vector for rumor and pseudoscience that is the Worldwide Web have combined to convince every Tom, Dick, and retard Harry that he is professionally qualified to diagnose medical conditions with flair and cocksure confidence, typically within an hour-long time slot.

Pretty much the same as a PhD.
Though these outlets regularly take potshots at each other for instilling laymen (read: morons) with a false sense of intelligence, the TV shows scoffing at WebMD while online doctor-pundits deride and warn against primetime programming, the truth is they both achieve the same effect: your average civil servant or gas station clerk thinks s/he can claim to know they are bipolar, ADHD, gluten intolerant, etc.  The surrounding miasma of media coverage reaffirms this as TV stations, websites, and newspapers, hungry for viewership in a vapid atmosphere of consumers with a fruit fly's attention-span, rush to cash in on the latest thing, giving the public exactly what they want: another reason to piss and moan, "Woe is me!"  Well, get over it.  I may not be Greg House, but I can flippantly diagnose a dipshit with all the alacrity and caustic wit he displays, no PhD required.


Thursday, July 7, 2011

Random, unrelated observations

I don't feel like organizing my thoughts into a particular order or tying them together with a theme today.  Live with it.  Instead, I'm just going to follow an ad hoc train of thought, a form of blog stand-up comedy, if you will.

Except Mr.  Pibb.  It's pretty much identical.
I am fairly well-convinced advertising agencies make a bid on a project, close their doors, discuss the product for five minutes while mocking the unfathomable idiocy of it and its producers (Shakeweight, anyone?), then get drunk and/or stoned out of their minds for three months straight.  Twenty minutes before the deadline, the team throws together a PowerPoint and bullshits some "marketing research" statistics.  Presto!  "Here's your new ad campaign.  That will be $750,000, please."

Anyone could do this.  As a matter of fact, I have an idea of my own.  I stumbled across this product while shopping for lye a few days ago:

Hell, yeah.
This is clearly the HNIC of laundry soap, the dolomite of detergents.  Pastels and flowers on the bottle?  Fuck that shit, queer-boy.  And who better to shill this product than the snake-fighting, lightsaber-wielding Bad Motherfucker himself, Mr. Samuel L. Jackson?

"Woolite Extra Dark Care.  Keep it black, motherfucker."
Tell me you wouldn't buy that shit.  It should come with brass knuckles and a chronic blunt.  Another good slogan would be "Once you go black, you never go back."

On the subject of brand-loyalty . . .

Where exactly are you from?
If you can't quite make it out, this vehicle on a Michigan road has a Detroit Pistons sticker, two Denver Broncos stickers, and a Texas license plate.  Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaking of state-specific matters . . .

It was Wear Your Striped Shirt Day.
I encountered this poster at my local State Department office.  At a passing glance, there's nothing overtly wrong with it.  But, when you're standing in line longer than you would at a Harry Potter premiere, you get the opportunity to observe a lot about your surroundings.  Take a closer look:

Is this poster censored?
No, it's not.  Actually, it has been "updated," the specific year (2009) whited out by a crafty editor.  This is how low our education budget is - we can't afford new signage to tell parents when to enroll their children for educational tuition assistance.  And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the pictures were recycled from an even earlier time.  Little Johnny Bowlcut is probably writing his graduate thesis by now, or would be, if his parents had known when to sign him up for financial aid.  Apparently, we changed the old maxim from Children are our future to Children - Eh, Screw 'Em.

Then again, we may not have a future at all . . .

Be afraid.
WTF? Seriously, what the fuck is this thing? What is its purpose, besides inducing involuntary defecation in all who behold it? Take a closer look and note the scale of this metal monstrosity. That's a road leading up to it. I just saw Transformers 3, and I'm pretty sure I caught a glimpse of this mean bastard cutting up the Hancock Building like a gingerbread house. Or, then again, maybe not . . . because this would be the thing's disguised mode. This is what it looks like when it wants to keep a low profile. I seem to recall a Decepticon named “Buzz Saw” . . . and he was nothing like this.*  Imagine this sinister thing's unveiled Cybertronian form. In the words of Shia LeBoef . . .

"Optimus!!!"
*He actually turned into a giant wasp or hornet. Because that's super-inconspicuous and totally stealth.  "Hey, is that . . . oh, no, wait it's not a giant, alien killbot, it's just a stinging insect the size of a Cadillac.  No worries!"

And if you wanted more proof the world is approaching its much-deserved end . . .

There is no God.
I can only hope this is in fact a test of sorts, a cruel-but-necessary trap to eliminate the dumbest echelons of our society.  If you so much as attempt to shell out $19.99 for this DVD, you will be black-bagged, drug out back, thrown against the wall, and executed via firing squad.  No questions asked.  At least in a perfect world.

Likewise if you wear this.
While we're on the subject of people who should die . . .

No shit.
I am so tired of this "phenomenon."  Seriously.  I can't even muster an obvious preeteen-sex-fantasy-staking-gay-sparkle joke.

And the icing on the cake . . .

Also available: syringes of lard.
It's like the restaurant industry isn't even trying to pretend that they aren't trying to kill us.  "Go ahead, fatty, order it.  C'mon, tons-of-fun, you know you want to.  That inkling of disgust is being overridden by your compulsive eating disorder as we speak. Do it, before the FDA makes it illegal."

Oh, and one more thing . . .

Because traditional Italian cuisine just screams hobbit.