Les Bonnes Choses

You might have guessed there people in the park playing games in the dark. From what I could piece together, however, the scenario involved some kind of candy factory tour.

I was standing with a group looking over a railing into a huge vat containing tons of colourful jellybean-like candies. Arnold Schwarzenegger was some kind of health czar and either touring with the group, or else was just a disembodied voice. His comment on the candies below:

You think those candies are awesome because there are thousands of flavours. But they're not! They're thousands of LIES!

Weird things happen in public washrooms. Though I have never witnessed any of the really weird things that might go on, I have nonetheless recently been party to some odd McDonald's washroom events along Michigan's highways.

First off, I feel sufficiently self-conscious about this to want to note upfront that I am not a particular fan of the McDonalds franchise. I do, however, appreciate that these restaurants are both ubiquitous (frequently located near gas stations near highway exits) and, importantly, well-maintained. I don't think anyone wants to face the dilemma of either entering a washroom where it looks like someone exploded or risk exploding oneself.

So that explains how I found myself in McDonald's washrooms twice in recent weeks. As for what transpired:

The first story to relate will require me to set the scene. My modesty will require that you not imagine the scene too vividly. Suffice it to say, the scenario begins with me alone in the men's room using the facilities en plein air. The door opened, and a boy of about ten years entered the washroom. He saw me, and walked up beside me and said, "you're probably wondering how my shirt got ripped..."

His guess about what I was wondering at that moment couldn't possibly have been farther off the mark.

The second event occurred yesterday in Capac, MI., which is one of the last gas stations along the highway before you get to the Bluewater Bridge. The McDonald's washroom there is properly part of the gas station, and thus doesn't have that swanky McDonald's decor, nor is it particularly large. But it is at least decently well-maintained, so it has that going for it at least. Because of it's small size (Max. Occupancy: 2), one is likely to be alone in the washroom. It is thus surprising to hear another voice in the washroom.

Normally, when I hear talking in the washroom coming from a stall, it's a dad with a child.

Now you see where this is going.

There was no child. Instead, I was hearing a telemarketer who canvasses to raise money to "support the troops". How do I know? Because he was carrying out a conversation on his cell phone from a stall in a gas station bathroom. He was quite proud of his debating skills.

"...so I asked, do you support our troops? ... uh huh. Yeah, so then I said, 'Well, do you pay taxes? Did you know that your taxes go to pay for our troops?'"

It was like peeing into the twilight zone.

The part of me that can't abide stupidity wanted to yell over the door that meeting one's legal tax obligation has nothing to do with whether or not one supports a standing military because citizens have no direct say over how their individual tax dollars are allocated. But that part of me was overruled by the part of me that observed nothing can be gained by arguing with a guy placing phone calls from the crapper.

In the end, I felt the best way to voice my objection and perhaps alert the other end of the conversation to the true nature of the phone call was to wash my hands and use the air dryer. Speaking of which, I hope nobody asks that idiot to borrow his phone. That's just gross.

A friend of mine shared a link on facebook, presumably having endorsed a criminal justice petition named Tori's Law, named after Tori Stafford, a young girl who lived in a town about 30 minutes from where I grew up. The details of her murder are horrible, and I understand the outrage that people feel. One of her abductors is in prison, having plead guilty to the crime. The other is currently on trial. Anyways, the first comment on the petition reads,

We are all humans, if you decide to take another humans life, then you don't deserve to live yours.

I assume you keep coming back because you have come to appreciate my out-of-the-box thinking. This evening I stood in the kitchen, mop in hand, on hold with the telephone banking people when I got to thinking about alternative financing arrangements. By alternative, I mean using something other than a major financial institution. I am also excluding from consideration the prospect of hitting your parents up for money.

Warning: if you believe in moral absolutism, please select another link from your bookmarks and click it. Yeah, that one there -- the one with the cats.

Still here? Okay, first, to forewarn you, I don't care what you believe in. I don't have a say in it, because I wasn't there. And, frankly, the thing about religion is that it's based on faith, and therefore no set of beliefs is any more justifiable than any others, objectively speaking.

Did you know you run the risk of an overachieving Mormon changing your beliefs behind your back? No, I'm not talking about Mitt Romney's election machine managing to win over so many Republican voters. At worst, that sort of hoodwinking will persuade just enough independent voters to wreck eight years of your life, and that's nothing compared to eternity. Apparently the Mormons have been running around baptising people in absentia. Dead people, even. This is, of course, an outrage to the millions of holocaust victims who had a date with the Patriarchs and found themselves instead talking with some guy named Peter, who naturally did not have a reservation under their names. That's awkward, and so the Mormons have agreed to stop. Or at least, stop making it so obvious.

This sort of thing isn't just a spiritual problem, either. Dungeon Masters have long have had to wrestle with the problem of what happens when Paladins from different pantheons fight each other. I mean, does their protection from evil aura still work?

The offensiveness of the proxy baptisms is obvious to me. What I don't get here is why it's a serious spiritual problem. Either these baptisms are done under divine authority, or they're not. If a Supreme Being is acknowledging the baptisms, then the baptised should be thankful they escaped eternal damnation. If not, then why are we concerned with the declarations of a bunch of crackpots in Utah? Furthermore:

But the practice offends members of many other religions, especially Jews, who have expressed outrage at attempts to alter the religion of Holocaust victims because they were killed based on their beliefs.

Tada! All it took was a little bit of asshattery to bring me to the keyboard again.

Today I'm going to talk about something that was covered in one of my intro-psych classes that I probably zoned out on: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Go ahead. Check out the link in a new window. The stuff at the bottom: that's less negotiable than the stuff at the top. In other words, if you die before reaching Nirvana, that's maybe not so bad compared to, say, living the last few years of your life with CF and being unable to breathe. Note the second tier from the bottom: your immediate survival doesn't hinge on these things, but they come in a close second, and impact that lower tier in many important ways. Note also that just about every item in this second tier is a hot-button political topic. That's actually quite interesting. If you're at all interested in pursuing politics, you should probably make a mental note about that.

Anyways, I always thought the small-c conservative side was all about reducing the size of government. That is, unless, you're talking about a needlessly expensive and onerously invasive program that, if nothing else, at least gives the impression that the reigning party has got your back on at least one of these second tier items.

A quote from the linked article:

"In the U.S., interceptions have become a business model, so there are cases where large telecommunications companies have set up entire branches where 200 employees sit in a room, and all they do is assist law enforcement with interception and monitor requests, but they make money on every request that comes in."

In other words, he says, the government is paying private companies to spy. 

An experiment gone satisfactorily well. I had my fats and proteins at lunch today when I had leftover chili con carne from last night, so I was fine to spare an animal at dinner. I happened to have a bunch of potatoes, and a bunch of carrots. My first thought was the potato soup I always make, but decided against it because I always make it, which got me googling carrot soup. I found a Rachel Ray recipe for curried carrot soup, and I found a recipe for potato and carrot soup. So I blended them, just like I blend my soup

I sauteed half a yellow onion in olive oil in my pressure cooker, then added 4 shredded carrots and 2 shredded potatoes and sauteed that as well. When the onions were translucent and starting to caramelize, I added about 4 cups of chicken broth, some unknown amount of curry, salt and ground coriander. Did you know coriander is in the carrot family? I don't know how I knew that, but it's true, I just checked it out. That's probably why the taste worked out.

So anyways, my soup has probably cooled sufficiently to eat it, so I'm going to stop writing about my dinner and eat it.