Don't panic just yet, because an all-new Bullet Sunday starts... now...
• A Simple Difference. I love advertising that really makes you think, and this ad from Australia is absolutely brilliant in getting its point across. Before watching, it may be helpful to know that Aussies use BBQ sauce the way Americans use ketchup. And Aussie tomato sauce is much like ketchup except not...
For an equivalent American context, the guy telling his dad he likes tomato sauce is the equivalent to going to Chicago and telling the hotdog vendor that you want ketchup on your dog.
• Dimensions Now that Disney Infinity has died, I am really, really hopeful that LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Marvel Super-Heroes will end up in LEGO Dimensions. The epicness of such a fusion would almost be too much for me to handle. Darth Vader driving the Batmobile? Spider-Man slinging through Adventure Time world? Catwoman meeting Black Panther? The possibilities... the possibilities...
Big fun awaits... if Disney will play ball.
• HeLa Can. Not. Wait. The book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was excellent. And while I've never liked Oprah as a talk show host, I've always loved her as an actor...
If you haven't read the book, it's worth a look.
• Ross! Be yourself. Unapologetically. Be like Ross and let the haters hate on... it's all they have...
Ross has got to be one of the nicest guys in Hollywood. Milo Yiannopoulos has got to be one of the biggest assholes on the planet. There is no contest here. None.
• ALARM! Why is the iPhone alarm system so shitty? Can't skip an alarm without turning it off. The alarm plays... FOREVER... instead of turning off after a few minutes. The snooze feature is absolute garbage because it's so inflexible. The list goes on and on. If you use your iPhone as a clock like I do, this is a daily frustration that drives me bonkers, especially on the weekends. Apple... you have BILLIONS of dollars. Why not take a fraction of that money and fix your shit?
And... aren't we all glad that's over?
I guess we're doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again.
Even in The Land of Couldn't Happen Here...
Good luck this time around, citizens of planet earth.
Don't despair over your impending march to Monday, because Bullet Sunday starts... now...
• HASTURD! What happens when a complete piece of shit holds political power?
Apparently they get away with being child-raping garbage. God bless America.
• Jack! And so it looks like John Krasinski has been cast as Jack Ryan in a new Amazon series based on John Clancy's books. In all honesty, I think he may end up being the best Jack Ryan yet. Baldwin wasn't physical enough. Ford was too old. Affleck not cerebral enough. Pine was just (surprisingly) plain bad. They all lacked something essential to the character. Krasinski, on the other hand, is the whole package. If they get the story right, I think he'll knock it out of the park. And if he can get his wife to make a guest appearance, so much the better! The only thing that gives me pause is that Carlton Cuse and Graham Richard are developing the series. Given the way they took an amazing concept and flushed it down the toilet with Lost, my confidence in them delivering with Jack Ryan is very low. Fingers crossed though.
• English! If you're into linguistics, here's a video for you...
Of course, there are dialects within dialects on both sides of the pond, but this is a pretty great encapsulation of the differences.
• Shame. This is the America we're building...
PEOPLE. JUST. WANT. TO. FUCKING. PEE! As they've been doing in bathrooms for centuries! And yet, here we are... people being terrified by asshole politicians taking a non-problem and blowing it up so as to distract from what's really going on...
Again, the people most responsible for doing heinous shit in public bathrooms... ARE ASSHOLE POLITICIANS, ASSHOLE RELIGIOUS NUTS, AND ASSHOLE CRIMINALS... not transgender persons! And if you buy into the lies, guess what, you're the problem!
• Pop! Amazing how I'm still discovering excellent 80's pop music that I somehow missed in the actual 80's. This time? A Good Heart by Feargal Sharkey...
And, just to show that I'm not above missing out on current pop music, I recently heard Cake by the Ocean by DNCE, which is awesome...
And, yes, that's a Jonas Brother on the mic there.
Alrighty then... the time has come to say goodbye to another edition of Bullet Sunday. Until next week...
Despite complaining about bad drivers like... ALL THE TIME... and getting angry a lot at people who choose to focus on texting or eating or video games or anything except driving when on the road... I'm usually able to let it go.
Not today, baby...
So there I was waiting to turn onto the street where my office is at. An old man was making his way across and I was waiting until he got all the way to the sidewalk so as not to scare him. And also... because it's the law! Any guesses as to what happened in this scenario?
The fact that I used the "c-word" when I absolutely abhor the "c-word" should be your first clue...
Got your guess?
THAT'S RIGHT! The asshole decided to not wait until the old man reached the sidewalk... hell, she barely waited for him to clear the lane... instead she gunned it so she could cut in front of me (WHEN I HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY, MIND YOU!), cutting me off and scaring the shit out of the old man.
What a fucking cuntwaffle.
Things like this? Impossible for me to let go.
If I had a gun and didn't believe in non-violence as a precept, I would have run her down and shot her in the face.
IN THE FACE!
And so, yeah... road rage. I get that. And, in this case, totally justifiable on my part, I think.
On a side-note... anybody have any guesses as to why the old man crossed the road?
Double your Bullet Sunday, double your fun! Because a Very Special SHOPPING Make-Up Edition of Bullet Sunday starts... now...
• SUNDAY? I wasn't able to get a Bullet Sunday together for the 21st, so that had to be made up yesterday. Then this last Sunday got bumped to today. At which point I think I'm caught up with Bullet Sundays again. At least so far as I can be given how far behind I am getting my entries posted. My internet situation at home is dire, with the cable-based service dropping constantly while I wait to see if I can get fiber installed. I may just bag it and stick with shitty cable... assuming they can ever get it to work consistently.
• FREE? I no think that word means what you think it means...
It's not that their free shipping and handling cost me $45... it's that it's so "free" that they actually said "free" twice! Maybe they're hoping to say "free" so much that you won't bother looking at the actual cost? I dunno. But this is probably the best attempt at bad marketing I've seen in quite a while.
• BARGAIN? And then there's Amazon, who should really know better given how massive they are, but still makes goofy marketing blunders all the time. Like this twofer price structure which is pretty much genius... if you're looking at the fact that you get "free" Prime shipping for $13.75?
Sign me up! If I buy three does the price go up again?
• LOBBYIST! The problem with living in the wilds of Redneckistan is that your shopping options are limited. Most of the time this problem is solved via Amazon and their Prime 2-Day shipping, but what if I don't have two days? What if even ONE day is too late? That means making a lot of phone calls to a lot of stores and running around from one end of the valley to the other trying to track down what you MUST HAVE IMMEDIATELY. In my case, that was plain silver foil wrapping paper. Nobody had it. Nobody. Not any drug stores. Not any card & gift stores. Not the party store. Not Shopko. Not Target. Not the art store. Not the craft store. Nobody. Except, of course, Hobby Lobby.
The fucking assholes whom I swore I would never give a single dime of my money.
But what else can I do? Drive three hours to Seattle then three hours back for my emergency project that's due right now?
Nope. I bit the bullet and shopped at the only option I had after exhausting every other possibility. Knowing full well that my money would be used to further their heinous agenda of forcing their religious beliefs on their employees, choosing allowed methods of birth control for their insurance coverage, supporting bigotry, and being overall assholes towards anybody who doesn't hold the same beliefs as they do.
Luckily a Facebook Friend came to my rescue when I was lamenting about having to shop at Hobby Lobby... they suggested I make a donation in Hobby Lobby's name to Planned Parenthood in the amount of what I had to purchased. Genius!
I don't feel any better about giving money to Hobby Lobby, but I sure feel a lot better about (hopefully) offsetting some of the damage that comes from shopping there.
• PETCO! Since adopting two kittens, I spend a lot of time shopping for kitty food, kitty toys, kitty litter, and everything else kitty-related. My favorite store to shop at? Peptic! I love the selection. The prices are decent. And the staff is generally cool. But they're nearly a half-hour away, and I don't have time to make the trip as often as I need to. So the solution is easy, right? Just shop at Petco online! Except... no. Their website is complete shit. I tried to shop on Valentine's Day because they had a coupon code that could save me some money... except when it came time to check out, EVERY ONE OF THE EIGHT ITEMS I HAD IN MY CART were conveniently "out of stock" and they wouldn't let me place an order. Haven't they ever heard of a backorder? And, of course, everything was back in stock the next day when the coupon expired. But that's not even the worst of it. Every time I try to shop at Petco.com, I always have all the items in my cart disappear at least once. Sometimes when I've tried, I've had my cart turn up empty so often I just give up. How in the hell do they expect people to shop with Petco when their online shopping experience is bordering on useless? It's hard to fathom how a company this big could afford to piss people off like this in a day and age where most stuff they buy is online, but here you have it. Guess I'd better work an hour into my schedule to drive to the local shop in person. Again.
And that's more than enough shopping for this week. See you next Sunday.
And so... I'm home.
At last.
And my bag is here with me.
No thanks to United Airlines... the fucking assholes.
Never, ever, fly with United.
"One Million Moms" is an action group created by "The American Family Association"... an organization dedicated to bringing "traditional moral values" back to the media. At first blush, this is not such a bad idea... over-sexualization of the media has reached epic proportions, inundating young kids with sexual content and adult situations at earlier and earlier ages. And while I think it's the job of parents to regulate what their kids are exposed to... not society... I certainly sympathize with the struggle to do so, and think advocating for media being more careful about what gets dumped on children 24/7 is not a bad thing.
Unfortunately the people at the AFA's soccer mom offshoot, "One Million Moms," are a bunch of bigoted, racist, homophobic assholes, and one of their more popular activities is ruthlessly persecuting gays via campaigns of hatred anytime homosexuality is portrayed as "normal" or seen in a positive light.
An example... they called for a boycott of JC Penney because they dared to have Ellen DeGeneres as a spokesperson: "Funny that JC Penney thinks hiring an open homosexual spokesperson will help their business when most of their customers are traditional families. By jumping on the pro-gay bandwagon, JC Penney is attempting to gain a new target market and in the process will lose customers with traditional values that have been faithful to them over all these years."
What the fuck?
You'd think JC Penney had aired an ad where Ellen was eating out her wife Portia de Rossi while spread-eagle on top of JC Penney Home bed linens or something.
But, no... One Million Moms just hated the idea that JC Penney would dare to allow a homosexual to be on television. Not that a kid would ever know that Ellen was gay from watching one of her ads...
No. The only damage done to kids by this commercial is when their parents make a big fucking deal over it for no damn reason at all.
You'd think as more and more people point out what fucking assholes they are, that One Million Moms would have mellowed a bit over the years.
Not a chance.
If anything, they've only become even bigger homophobic assholes.
Earlier this month One Million Moms went ape-shit because American Girl magazine had a story that featured an 11-year-old girl... along with her two dads. They condemned the story as "sin" and called for a boycott of the publication just because families like this exist.
Like I said, fucking assholes.
But the family in question has a fantastic response...
One Million Moms can go suck a bag of dicks. How dare they attack a family which is built around providing a loving home to kids in foster care? What have they done to help foster kids?
Nothing.
Instead all they've done is make it so that kids lucky enough to have two dads that love them (not to mention a home to live in) are looked down upon by zombified homophobes.
Congratulations, assholes. Way to protect kids.
Guess your mission only applies to the right kids.
Want to know if you're doing good in the world? Having One Million Bigoted Douchebags calling for people to boycott you is a pretty good sign.
I'm not opposed to advertising on the web. Stuff has to get paid for somehow, and ads are a part of the game.
The problem is that they have quickly become an obstruction to content. No longer are they satisfied with being a minor nuisance... instead they beat the shit out of you and have become a major problem.
Take YouTube for example.
At first the ads were dismissive. Click here to skip.
Then they became delayed-dismissive. You can skip this ad in 15 seconds.
Then ads became mandatory and non-dismissive... but mercifully short. 20 seconds or so.
But now? Mandatory. Non-dismissive. And pushing three minutes long...
Needless to say, this fucking sucks.
Not only do I find myself hating YouTube... but also the advertisers that are subjecting me to this insane amount of obstruction. I don't care how cool of a product you're pushing... if you spend three minutes keeping me from content that lasts four minutes, I hate your guts and am not buying your shit.
Even worse?
Many times YouTube doesn't even tell you that you're watching an ad any more. The time-bar turns yellow instead of red and that's all the notice you get.
It's worse than television ads.
And I'm watching a fraction of the YouTube videos I used to because of it.
Congratulations, Google. You've fucked over and ruined yet another part of the internet.
I know that Subway is trying to reinvent their image with their latest round of commercials, but all I can think about each time their stinky sandwiches appear on my television is YOU WERE TOLD BACK IN 2008 THAT JARED WAS A PIECE OF SHIT CHILD-TROLLING PERVERT AND DID NOTHING. NOTHING, BECAUSE IT WAS FINANCIALLY LUCRATIVE TO DO NOTHING. NOTHING AT ALL!
Photo by Getty Images (??? Couldn't find a photo credit, but the filename had "Getty" in it)
FUCK SUBWAY AND THEIR SHITTY SANDWICHES!
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