Archive for category Totally Useless Information
Original Sinners: The Immorality of Babies
Posted by Keith Spillett in Totally Useless Information on January 20, 2011
They Crawl Among Us
A new class of criminal is lurking in the shadows of organized society looking to take advantage of those who have been lulled into a false sense of complacency. The most effective criminals are often ones who can appear innocent. Their innocence gives an unsuspecting victim a feeling of security, and then, when their guard is down and they are at their most vulnerable, these criminals will strike. Babies are often thought to be the most innocent among us, but upon closer consideration, this façade of innocence quickly fades.
The other day I was walking around the local Target and a family shopping with an adorable little child who had to have been about a year and a half old sitting in a shopping cart. I immediately became fascinated with this family and began following them around the store. While they were in the toy aisle and the parents were distracted, I watching this “harmless” child reach out of the cart and grab a small toy car. He played with the toy car for the rest of his time in the store continuing to play with it as the parents moved through the checkout aisle and out of the store. This baby had just committed the crime of shoplifting. What disturbed me about this was the joyful, guilt free expression on the child’s face and the ease with which he pulled off this little heist. Many of you are apathetic to this sort of crime. You may wonder why it even matters. You may think that this sort of theft is a victimless crime. According to research done by the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office in Olympia Washington, shoplifting costs American businesses 16 billion dollars per year. Yet babies, who commit this type of felony with impunity, are rarely held accountable for their crimes.
Recently, I watched two babies fight over who was going to get to play with a Fisher Price Little People Happy Sounds Home. One of the babies pushed the other baby to the floor and snatched it up into its sinister little hands. If this had taken place on a street corner and it had been a mugger throwing an older woman to the ground and taking her bag, people would have been horrified and the mugger would have been jailed for several years. This baby, however, was merely put in timeout for 2 minutes. After this so-called punishment, the baby returned to the toy room to no doubt continue its violent, plundering ways.
By the standards of any civilized society, babies are immoral little creatures. Let’s measure the actions of most babies against the golden rule: do unto others as they would do to you. This is a maxim that has showed up in different forms in many major world religions. Babies are often willfully negligent of this idea. If you were to rip a toy out of a baby’s hand, it would scream and cry for mommy or daddy to make things right. Clearly, babies value possessions and feel as if their rights to property should be protected. But babies will clumsily grab an item that belongs to another child without a moment’s thought. When the size two Hello Kitty slipper is on the other foot, they feel no remorse or empathy.
If this argument sounds absurd to you, it shows how deeply you have been conned. They look back at us with those darling little eyes and make those cute little sounds and we are ready to forgive almost anything. But we must not be fooled. The impact of baby kleptomania is a massive drain on our economy. Baby on baby crime has reached near epidemic levels. The sociopathic, inconsiderate nature of babies is an issue that has strained our great nation to its breaking point. As a society, we must band together and take a stand against them…before it’s too late.
Down With CMOBD: A Survivor’s Story
Posted by Keith Spillett in Totally Useless Information on December 30, 2010
Digging my way out from mega despair
“You can watch them all day and never know why…”
-The Mighty Machines Theme Song
I’ve spent the last 43 hours and 12 minutes with a song from my son’s Thomas the Tank Engine video in my head. The song is called “Accidents Can Happen” and, needless to say, it’s not very good. They tell you about a lot of things before you have a child, but they never seem to mention the debilitating effects of children’s music on the functioning of your mind. There was a point in my life where I was able to have a normal flow of thought. That time is over. In less than four years, my mind has turned into a Ringling Brothers sideshow act.
There was a song on a Blues Clues DVD called “Bebop A”. My 2 year old daughter spent the entire car trip from New Jersey to Atlanta screaming “BEBOP A…HEY, HEY…BEBOP A…HEY HEY!!!” Once or twice is very cute. Heck, 50 or 60 times isn’t bad. But after a while, the stuff gets into your blood. You can’t go anywhere or do anything without thinking of it. It’s like graffiti on your cerebral cortex. You zone out for a minute and there it is. Over and over. When you lay down and close your eyes in a 30 dollar a night Motel 6 somewhere in Southern Virginia and you see Steve from Blues Clues staring at you with that smug, goofy look shouting “BEBOP A!!!!” you really get how far gone you are.
There are three stages of CMOBD (Children’s Music on the Brain Disorder). The first is a general acceptance of the song. You hear the Clifford the Big Red Dog theme and you don’t think much about it. You go about your life pretty much unhindered. Occasionally, you notice that you are humming it, but you are nothing more than slightly amused that you remember it. This is the denial stage. Maybe you’ve been hooked before, but you think…not this time.
The second stage is where you start to lose control. It’s when the song starts to consume you. It runs through your mind constantly. Sometimes it’s just the chorus, sometimes it’s a just a phrase, but it starts to take over your life. You are driving a car. Suddenly, you realize you are headed in the wrong direction on a highway. You realize you were singing the awful Aaron Neville theme to The Little People. Something about how Aaron says “little people and we’ll always be friends”. Perfect. You are lost in it.
You are an air traffic controller and someone asks you “What runway should we land that DC-10 on?” You reply with a blank stare. You were thinking about the music at the beginning of Dinosaur Train. Hundreds of lives hang in the balance and you are thinking about dear old Mrs. Pteranodon. You have lost all orientation. You are a CMOBD zombie headed with a one-way ticket to destruction.
Then, there is the third stage. Complete withdrawal. Blinding rage. Utter confusion. You are angry at the world because they can’t hear what you hear. You don’t care whether they understand you or not. You know that there is no thought that is more important than the Teletubbies theme. You close your eyes and you begin to understand that the smiling baby inside of the sun is looking at you and only you. You crave Tubby toast. You start to feel angry that the Tubbies have spilled things again and forced the Noo-Noo into more backbreaking labor. You can no longer distinguish the world from your own personal CMOBD purgatory.
Many recover, but a relapse is never far away. A CMOBD sufferer need only here a few notes and the whole vicious cycle starts again. The confusion. The hysteria. The shame. There is no known cure for CMOBD but we as parents must be vigilant. I have spent three and a half long years suffering from repeated bouts of CMOBD, but I have not lost hope. I know that a brighter tomorrow is just around the corner. Won’t you be, won’t you be, won’t you be…my neighbor.
An Open Letter to the Beatles
Posted by Keith Spillett in Totally Useless Information on December 28, 2010
Crossing the street…or CROSSING THE LINE?!?!
Dear Paul, Ringo, John and The Other Guy,
I was driving my children to swimming lessons yesterday and your song “All You Need Is Love” came on the radio. I had never really listened to the words in this song, but as a concerned parent, I decided to try to listen to the words that my children were hearing. What I heard was truly shocking! I find the message in this song to be deeply troubling and, as a concerned parent, I beg you to do what you can to stop radio stations from playing this song.
I’m sure that you thought that you were just writing another silly love song and, I mean, what’s wrong with that? But, if you really think about the message in the song, I think you’ll come to understand why it disturbed me so much. Imagine for a second, that an impressionable child heard this song and took it seriously. Clearly, human beings need a good deal more than love to survive. They need food, shelter, clothes (preferably from a decent designer), and air. What if an impressionable child heard this song and decided to stop eating completely? His concerned parents would beg him to eat but he would not. What if, as he widdled away to the size of a twig, slowly starving to death and his concerned parents, now grief-stricken, asked him why he was doing this and he replied “Because the Beatles told me all I need is love”? Could you live with your selves?
What if, even worse, he just decided to stop breathing? He could die within a moment or two giving the concerned parents only a few seconds to react. What if his friends saw him stop breathing and thought that it was the “cool” thing to do? What if hundreds, thousands of children stopped breathing just to not be “square”? It could be an epidemic of epidemic proportions! Children, falling over dead in classrooms across America, with the words “All You Need Is Love” passing though their blue lips as they meet their maker. Is that what you want?
Music has a major effect on the ideas of young people. Do you know what Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolf Hitler, and Ted Bundy have in common? As young men, they all listened to music. And look what suffering they caused!
I demand that you stop allowing this song to be played on radio stations everywhere. I also ask that you never fill our children’s souls with such blasphemous, anti-social ideas by playing this live. Until you agree to stop this madness, I and a group of like-minded concerned parents, plan to boycott love. We will not express love in words or actions. We even plan on starting all tennis games at 15 so that no person ever has love.
Yours truly,
A Concerned Parent
In Defense of Stupidity
Posted by Keith Spillett in Blithering Sports Fan Prattle, Totally Useless Information on December 11, 2010
Luke Scott Casually Discussing John Doe Number 2 and the role of the Lizardpeople in creating the Federal Reserve (borrowed from http://i393.photobucket.com/albums/pp13/cammielc)
A popular expression that tends to get used when people make asinine comments to a member of the media is “What were you thinking?” It is a common retort used to illustrate when someone has said something so utterly without merit that the reporter doesn’t feel the urge to mount a counter reply. Recently, Luke Scott, a muscle-headed, mouth-breathing Baltimore Oriole baseball player, who clearly cut many a history class in order to spend an additional hour in his school’s Chik Fil-A sponsored batting cage, made some monumentally dumb off the cuff remark about Barack Obama not being an American citizen. This sort of remark has faded a bit from its mid-2009 health care hysteria peak, but you still hear the occasional Manchurian candidate nonsense rearing its jingoistic head. I don’t expect Luke Scott to say anything worth listening to. What passes for discourse between athletes and reporters is the general ever flowing stream of “I’m going to go out there and do the best I can and, God willing, my teammates and I will get a win” type truisms that are taught to these folks in six hour cram session classes run by slime bucket agents who are looking to make their commodities more marketable to the slab of the American public that loves to hear the same thing over and over again.
I really could care less what Luke Scott has to say. What annoyed me was the glib, dismissive way that Yahoo writer Steve Henson rejected his remark in his recent free agency winners and losers column. Obviously Steve, we know what he was thinking. He was very clear about that in his statement. He was thinking that Obama was born in another country and, therefore, is an “illegitimate” President. The question seems to not be geared to mock what he was thinking, but his inability to know that when a reporter is around it is your job as an athlete to spout nothing but inoffensive, meaningless, Hallmark card style platitudes. Henson was really asking, “How could he not know that saying this would make him look ignorant? Doesn’t he know that it is his station in life to carry on this endless tradition of banal player interviews that we so love and revere? Why didn’t he just say something like “Obama will be fine if he gives this whole being born in the United States thing 110 percent”?
One of the unnamed right of passage exams that an athlete goes through on the way to householdnamedom is the “Can you say absolutely nothing of substance every time you are within 50 feet of a microphone” test. This is why listening to most athletes being interviewed is a highly painful endeavor. It’s as if the interviewer and the player a conspiring to cover up any human characteristics the athlete could possibly have. Occasionally, we are treated to colorful dimwits like Charles Barkley or Curt Schilling who say embarrassing “what the average guy is thinking” sorts of things, but mostly it’s just more of the “It was my childhood dream” sort of garbage. The Barkley/Schilling type stuff is awful for other reasons, but at least when I listen to it I know that their is a human being in there instead of a piece of equipment that runs a 4.3 40.
There is an upside to athletes feeling they have the ability to express themselves with some degree of freedom. For one, I now know that Luke Scott, once only known to me as the guy I might pick instead of Edwin Encarnacion in the 14th round of my AL keeper league draft, is a raving lunatic. Luke Scott has gone from 27 homeruns and 72 RBIs to a real human with definable features. I can like him or dislike him based on his ideas. Maybe there are a few Bill “Spaceman” Lee, Dock Ellis or Jim Bouton types who really have something unique to say. There is a real loss sports fans experience when athletes do not speak their minds. It is the loss of the chance to meet these players as human beings with real ideas and emotions. The ideas they have may be shameful, obnoxious, or ill informed but they remind us that we are living in a world of humans who feel, think and dream just like we do.
Robitussin Turns Me Into a Vengeful Idiot and Other Unpleasant 3 AM Realities
Posted by Keith Spillett in Existential Rambings, Totally Useless Information on December 10, 2010
A Pretty Accurate Representation of My Mood on Sunday Night/Monday Morning (borrowed from popartmachine.com)
I ain’t feelin’ no sweet mystery of life nonsense this evening. I have a miserable cold. My throat hurts, I’m tired and I feel like I fought a 50-foot killer sea urchin all day. I have nothing to add to your life but complaints; I am going to blog anyway. Being sick is awful.
The other night I tried to get rid of this thing by sucking down some Robitussin. How on earth the FDA approved this substance is beyond me. The stuff never makes me feel better, but it does always fill me with angst and white-hot rage. I took the recommended dosage and went to bed. Immediately I fell into hours of hellish dreaming. I had one dream where everything was normal except everyone I saw had tremendous goiters protruding from their necks. Just an average Saturday, I went to the supermarket….goiters everywhere…..I went to the bank….GOITERS….I got home….GOITERS on everyone. Nobody noticed except me. It was basically what would have happened if Ken Kesey wrote a Twilight Zone episode. You have been transported to a strange land where everything is the same, except everyone has goiters.
I woke up from that one sweating. It was 2:58 in the morning and I was staring at the ceiling. Being a basketball coach, I am familiar with this drill. Usually I lay there muttering to myself about how I should have gone to a 1-3-1 zone in the second half of a game from 5 years ago. This evening was different. I kept thinking about orange juice. For some reason, the idea of oranges being squeezed and put in bottles was making me insanely angry. Why do they do it? Who came up with the idea? Usually, I can distance myself from this sort of thing and laugh a bit, but I was full on committed to the grave injustice that was orange juice. Then, I started thinking about raisins. Ridiculous little things! Absurd!
I bolted upright in bed. My wife is familiar with these sorts of moments and has learned to not engage me at 3 AM. Nothing I say makes any sense at that time, but with a head full of Robitussin I was bound to start yelling at her because she didn’t know the two Senators from the state of Nebraska. I started pacing around the room looking for something to read. I found the most boring thing I could lay my hands; a nightmarish volume I found in the quarter bin years back on how the commodities market works. The plan was to bore the demons out of my body. The next thing I know I am sitting out in my car waiting for the thing to heat up with the first Suffocation album, a wonderful piece of music known as “Effigy of the Forgotten”, blaring as loud as my blown out Saturn speakers could blast it. (A side note…I am convinced that there cannot be a more bizarre vision then watching a 35 year old father of two sitting alone in a beat up car at 3 AM on a Monday morning blaring death metal and singing along at the top of his lungs)
Suddenly, I’m in a Dunkin’ Donuts. The guy behind the counter has that “please don’t hassle me” look that any rational person would have working a nightshift would have when a wild-eyed lunatic walked in with malice in his eyes.
“Boston Creme donut,” I mumbled.
“We’re out.”
Wrong answer. “What do you mean!!!!? How are you out!!!! What are you talking about? This is a donut shop, man!”
“We don’t put those out until 4 AM.”
“Really?!?!!? really?!??!!? REALLY!!!!!!”
The poor guy was clearly feeling under the counter for the shotgun at that point.
“We have old fashions.”
“No!”
“Bear claws.”
“No!”
“Blueberry”
“NO! NO! NO!!!!”
“Sour cream”
“Ehhhhhh. Give me two.”
I slunked away a defeated man. I sat there for an hour reading the same three pages on soybean futures over and over not understanding a word. The book might as well have been upside down. Every five minutes or so I got up and looked at the section of the rack where Boston Cream donuts were usually kept and there was nothing. I didn’t even want one anymore, I just felt like there should be some sense of completion, some end to this absurd journey.
I went home. I lay there for a while longer staring at the ceiling fan. It got light. It goes on.
The Tyranny of Tradition 