December 8, 2007

Paddington Bear ARRESTED

Prime Minister Brown is set to take on illegal immigration in the U.K. and has served notice by going after one of the most loved and well-known illegal immigrants in the U.K. - Paddington Bear.

"It's an outrage!" claimed Paddington from his home West London after his initial release pending further investigation. "I was a mere cub and was forced onto the boat by my auntie. I knew nothing of immigration papers or applications."

However, a neighbor in Notting Hill recalls a gleeful young Paddington bragging about beating the system. "He was constantly laughing at me and telling me to call the Border and Immigration Agency but that it would do no good. He said he knew someone on the inside and that I was simply a cranky curry to be tossed in the bin and thought of no more."

"I may be from darkest Peru," the angry bear stated early in the day from his holding cell, "but I know this is just a ploy to boost his polls. I don't understand why the government must persecute me in this way."

The Home Office had this to say: "We are taking a robust approach to tracking down people who have no right to be here and removing them from the UK."

However, Mr. Bear's family and friends claim this is all a dark plot to paint Mr. Bear as a terrorist. "We just don't understand why the government would make these claims! Certainly his fur is a sand tan colour, but he is Peruvian, not Middle Eastern. This is racial profiling at its absolute lowest form - because it's not even based on facts, just the appearance of a different ethnicity."

Long-time friend and companion, Pooh Bear of 100 Acre Woods, declared he overheard two bobbies claiming Paddington Bear quite obviously fit the profile of a suicide bearer. "I mean, indeed!" exclaimed Mr. Pooh Bear. "Everyone is quite well aware that the phrase is suicide bomber, not bearer. This is simply gross bearism in its most heinous form."

Mr. Bear has resided at 32 Windsor Gardens, Notting Hill, west London since his arrival in the U.K. some fifty years ago.

BBC article regarding the arrest here.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:59 AM | Comments (5) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Storytelling: She was, of course, supposed to be sleeping. | Stumble

November 7, 2007

Losers. Failure. Despair.

Quite a while back, I discovered a little website with some funny posters ... and, not being one of the great dissatisfied at the time, promptly forgot about it. I snickered my ass off in 2001 when they filed a trademark for :-( and "threatened" to sue some seven million email users for trademark infringement. I snickered harder when I realized that despite the obvious satire of the entire Despair site and definitely of the press release about the trademark, people took this stuff seriously.

I rediscovered the site in early 2006 when I was finally trying to adjust to the corporate world ... and fell in love. They are true motivational posters.

For example, my favourite one remains:

 

The story of this website is one of those, "Good lord, what the heck is wrong with me for not doing this myself" kind of deals. Essentially two brothers and a friend were working at a company who was jerking them around ... as companies are wont to do. They sat around making up "fake" motivational posters one day as they flipped through a "real" motivational poster catalog ... and the idea was born. When they got their "settlement" money from the buyout of the company they worked for, they took it, raised more capital ... and began to discover and create Despair.

So far as I can tell, they've spun off all of the customer disservice and fulfillment duties to a sister company, Amplifier, and Despair itself is just a handful of people. (One article said just one of the founders ... another said four people.)

Other favourites:

 

Today, of course, Despair has branched out a bit. You can pick your favourite DeMotivators and make a calendar out of them. You can get the pessimist's mug. DespairWear is taking off in a big way. And, of course, there's the book.

Enjoy! Check out more from www.despair.com.

Except you won't find this one over there ... what? you really didn't think after getting laid off I'd be able to resist, did you?

The truly funny thing? When I signed up for Despair's email list, every person in the marketing department was frustrated. We wanted to make cool, hip, edgy emailers like the beautiful sarcasm in the Wailing List emails. But, dealing with a product that really wasn't very cool, hip or edgy, we were destined to relative dullness.

And when I went to my high school reunion, someone brought up Despair. Turns out that I went to high school with two of the three founders. And one of them sat in front of me during Spanish class. He was a kinda quiet guy, into art and poetry. We had a lot of fun commiserating on the idiotic tendencies toward conformity in my high school. He found it amusing that I was in serious trouble at home because I refused to have my senior picture taken. You see, for our yearbook picture senior year, we all wore the exact same outfit. The guys had a suit/tux thing ... and the women had this weird black dress top with a seemingly feather boa. Okay, it was a bit nicer looking than a feather boa ... but still.

My senior class was full of rebels and non-conformists. And yet, every one I can think think of who insisted on individuality and not following the herd ... every single one of them had their senior pictures taken like that. So "Eric" found it amusing that despite all the people in common we knew, I was the only one stupid enough or stubborn enough to actually refuse to have my picture taken like that.

It's funny. I know a lot of people who can't remember their childhoods at all. Many who can't remember high school. But I can still picture "Eric" sitting in front of me during Spanish. There were perhaps 3 of us in the class who would cruise through the work with no effort, which left Eric and I with a lot of time to chat and pass notes. I can remember some intense conversations ... but not quite so much the specifics of what we talked about.

Odd how small the world can be. And how excellent it is that a guy I used to worry about on a regular basis for the despair that he seemed to have back then ... how excellent is it that he has turned that "characteristic" (for lack of a better word) into such a wonderful business.

Posted by Red Monkey at 10:06 AM | Comments (4) | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Stumble

September 7, 2007

WHY?

Scout does not understand why I must torture her. She is a cute, sweet li'l girl of a tiny li'l puppy dog. WHY would I want to torture her until she must hide far far away, tucked into a nice cuddly safe spot?

 

 

Poor little thing. All tucked in, shivering, abandoned and alone. Her little toys too far away to cuddle with and too scared to go get them and comfort herself.

And why? What torture did I invoke?

I vacuumed the dining room and kitchen ... and was nowhere near where she was at all.

I'm just mean that way, I guess.

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:26 AM | Comments (3) | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Stumble

September 3, 2007

Still Busy ...

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:36 AM | Comments (4) | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Stumble

August 28, 2007

Very Very Very Busy

Without any warning from Nautilus/Bowflex at all ... eight boxes of THIS came today.

I'll be busy putting it together for a few days. And after that? I'll be busy becoming svelte and shit.

Oh, and then next week the drawing table should be here. I'm gonna be real tired for a while.

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:42 PM | Comments (3) | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Stumble

August 24, 2007

64

I love computers. I have ever since I saw the Commodore-64 in junior high. There was a thrill of discovery for everything we did. I never knew what I would find on one of those 5 1/4" diskettes.

My dad got into computers back in the day of full room, punch card, ridiculous tubes and all. The thought of a tiny little computer at home which could hold a whole 64 KB of memory (and had no hard drive!) was irresistible to him. He and his buddies swapped computer programs, eventually cracking or writing tools for each other to use to beat the copyrights on the few programs they actually purchased.

As a result, we NEVER had the directions to any of the programs we had -- and there was no W3 to go look things up on just yet. So for me, everything about computers involved discovery. Not only did I usually not know what was on a disk, but how to play the game or use the word processor was a process of explorations. I still remember a game called Bugaboo that we never did really figure out beyond making the little guy hop. When I first played the game, I did my usual: hit every key once until I found out the controls for that game. You died a lot trying to brute force your way through the controls of a game like that, but that was all right. It was part of the adventure. And adventure is rarely as much fun with a clear map as without.

Of course, using that method to figure out the word processor was a lot more tedious and involved figuring out how to access the help menu and then lots of tedious handwriting of directions. Then the directions were typed into the computer and then printed out so the whole family could use them. It was kind of a wacky process.

Flash forward to today when I've got a little flash USB drive that holds 64 Megs of info. 64 MBs of info. That little C-64 seems pretty silly to me now. It couldn't do a whole lot. And what it could do it took forever to do.

But I learned to open up a program and start digging around in it. I learned a little bit about how computers think. That little machine was one of the best teachers I ever had.

I think of my students over the last nine years. I moved from teaching in a "traditional" classroom (desk chairs, a podium and chalkboards) to teaching in a net-worked computer classroom. I was the only instructor at Notre Dame to move my writing class into the computer classroom. Why'd I do it?

I watched first-year students struggle so much with their computers. They couldn't figure out how to do automated page numbers. I had one student who didn't know you could tell the word processor to double-space your paper. That student had been manually hitting return at the end of every line and another return to make the paper looked double-spaced. They knew they hit the save button, but they couldn't find the file unless they opened up Word and used the "Recent Files" list. Learning to use the university webmail program to attach a file gave some of them conniptions.

But the Dean of First Year Studies, who has very recently retired, I believe, insisted that "these kids grew up with computers, they don't need a computer class." Never mind the student, who at the height of the 3.5" floppy disk, tried to put his disk in upside down and backwards; never mind the student who picked up her mouse and placed it on the computer screen and wanted to know why the cursor wouldn't move; never mind the graduate student who couldn't find the "My Computer" icon on his plain and nearly empty desktop.

I felt sorry for my students, truth be told. So many of them struggled with their computers and their minimal computer skills. I'd spend a day showing them the basic ins and outs of Word - changing fonts, font size, color, centering, doing page numbers and indents. All sorts of basic word processing skills. I didn't even get into adding pictures or graphs or integrating with Excel. If we had enough time in a semester and they requested it, I'd even show them some rudimentary HTML.

But mostly, I wanted to teach them to play with their computers as much as I wanted them to play with their writing. I wanted them to explore both. I think those who did begin exploring really got something out of the class. Those who thought I was a jerk for trying to do stuff that "so obviously wasn't about writing," well, they didn't get much out of the class. I never stopped trying to reach those kids, though.

Think what we could accomplish if we could just explore and play a little bit more.

Thank goodness for that Commodore-64. Easily the best $500 my Dad ever spent on anything.

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:36 PM | Comments (0) | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Stumble