October 30, 2006
Oh the Power!
Over the weekend the landlord of the office park where I work installed a speed bump. A fact of which I was appraised on Friday but which failed to become a part of my reality until 9:00 AM this morning at 10 MPH. Due to a confluence of factors including lack of light, a peculiar preoccupation with Snow White, and a lost iPod I managed to remind myself of the same new speed bump at about the same speed later on. It's quite an experience. I may have chipped a tooth.
My deeply moving story of personal hardship aside I think the speed bump is symbolic of common problem. People with a little bit of power like to exert that power for no other reason than to prove they have power. This innate human tendency is the only reason I can think of that our parking lot needs a speed bump. I am not aware of any accidents in the parking lot. I am not aware of anybody traveling through the lot at dangerous speeds. Nobody has yet struck a pedestrian in the lot, even I have managed to forebear despite my great desire to drive over somebody. Yet somehow somebody came up with this speed bump idea. The speed bump will control the speed of everybody entering the parking lot, eventually. The only reason that sort of control is needed is to make somebody feel like they are asserting authority over others.
Petty people abusing power is hardly new. As long as there has been bureaucracy there have been midlevel functionaries playing the system entirely for their personal gratification. It an unfortunate truth that people with a very little bit of power will tend to use that power over and over again in the most obnoxious ways possible. A fact that is quite obvious to anybody who has ever had to deal with a DMV supervisor.
The upshot of all of this is that I must now acknowledge the power of a maniacal (pencil maybe) landlord. Every time I slow for that speed bump I'm not really helping anybody, I'm just briefly bowing and scraping for the benefit of somebody's ego. Not that I'm bitter. I just wish I could put in speed bumps.
Posted by DjDuk at 11:44 AM | Comments (2020) | TrackBack
October 26, 2006
Rube would be proud!
Posted by Ripley at 11:32 AM | Comments (337) | TrackBack
October 19, 2006
LoTR Videos
In my endless trawling of YouTube I came across three fun LoTR videos. Take a look:
How Lord of the Rings Should Have Ended
Lords of the Rhyme
Brokeback Hobbiton
Posted by Ripley at 03:29 PM | Comments (594) | TrackBack
October 10, 2006
Eastenders
The Eastenders is a British soap opera. Set in the east end of London it features a wide cast of characters who act out there daylily lives dealing with one crisis after another. Like any good soap opera there is no end to the unrealistic chaos such as…affairs resulting in illegitimate children, drug abuse, teenage car theft, and co-ownership of a bar with someone you hate and can’t fire. (Yes this is actuality a major plot point)
Normally I would look at soap operas the same way I view a small rock on the ground, It’s just something that’s there, if you ignore it, it won’t bother you. But this one is special, it’s funny!
The story all began when I came home from a hard day at work (ok maybe that’s a lie but I do “work”) I turned on the TV and there it is, Eastenders. I was about to change when one of the characters said something and I could not help but make a smart ass remark about it. Then about 5 min later my smart ass remark came true, this continued though out the show. At this point I was hooked. Now every Monday I sit and MST3K the show to death. It’s hard not to do, for one thing the cast of about 30 people all eat, sleep, work and (hopefully) die in about a 4 block distance from each other. Another thing, there is this pub that some of the characters own, a scenes will take place there at 6:00AM and the place it packed! Living in London must be so depressing that you must – at all hours – be drunk off your ass. Everyone in the show is always in one of about 8 different places. There are 3 houses, 2 bars, 1 car dealership, 1 store, and 1 car repair shop. That’s it, these people never go anywhere else! Of the 30 people I would guess that about 15 of them just don’t have a home, they must go from the bar to the store and back for the rest of there lives.
Sometime if you have nothing better to do you should check it out and make fun of it. It’s on from 8-9:00PM on channel 12. I don’t have to worry about when it might be on in a different city because the only 4 people who look at this site are in the same city. If by some chance one of the millions of other people on the internet finds there way to this page and is bored enough to have read this far please check your local listing for show times and channel.
Posted by Bailey at 02:03 PM | Comments (3)
October 09, 2006
Lost - the Anti Time Stretcher
1:00 PM DJ Duk: I'm think Lost deserves a post as a sort of anti-Maison I thing.
1:01 PM Ripley: Anti- what?
1:01 PM DJ Duk: Maison Ikkoku
1:37 PM Ripley: Why is Lost the Anti-Maison?
1:42 PM DJ Duk: Maison I stretches time Lost compresses it.
1:42 PM DJ Duk: With lost its one of those, I put in disk one, I start watching, I watch for 12 minutes and somehow lose 20 hours
1:42 PM DJ Duk: or as I like to call it, Sunday
Posted by Ripley at 01:50 PM | Comments (889) | TrackBack
October 06, 2006
3 Dollar Pencil
So there I was, sitting down at school to do some homework before my class started in 2 hours. I got out my math book, my note book and started looking for my pencil. "Oh no" I thought “it must have fallen out at home" (a fact witch I confirmed latter that day). At this point I had to make some decisions about what to do next. I could just ignore the home work, but then I would get a bad grade, so that’s out. So from somewhere I had to come up with a pencil. My options were like this:
- Find one and steal it
- Ask a friend for one
- Go to the book store and buy one
I briefly looked under the tables I was sitting at to see if someone had lost a pencil that I could grab, but no luck.
Asking a friend is hard because I don’t have any at school. I haven’t said more then 2 words to anyone in either of my classes, except the teacher. So making a friend right then and there just for the possibility of a free pencil seemed kind of low...even for me.
So it was off to the store and here is where we get to the reason for this post...
I understood going in that it was a sellers market. There is not a convenience store near the school so they know they have you. I walked into the store and over to the pins and pencils and started looking. There was not a single normal pencil (think the yellow #2 type) they were all the maniacal kind. Now that ok by me, I like them but not at the prices they were asking. $3.50 let me say that again THREE DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENCE for a stupid pencil. I look and looked for a cheaper pencil but there was just none to be found, the price only went up from there! It’s at this point my mind wondered back to the 1st options I was thinking about, theft. But in the end I caved to “The Man” and paid them there $3.50 for the pencil…but I’m still angry about it.
Posted by Bailey at 09:58 AM | Comments (8)