Get Cynical

Another shot fired in the War of the Toilet Seat.

I have been told the exact same reason for all of this from every girl who has screamed at me for it and it has got to be one of the stupidest admissions that I have ever heard in my entire life.

“We don’t always look before we sit down, and sometimes at night we don’t even turn on the light.”

This is a deficiency. This admission, made almost with pride, says two things to me:

1. I make unwarranted assumptions.
2. I am militantly unaware of my environment.

So as a male, apparently I am expected to make up for this deficiency by making sure that the lid is always left in the correct position. In the interest of not falling into the toilet and/or urinating on myself, I always make sure to look before I sit down. I find the concept of “not looking” interesting. How exactly does one not see the condition of the toilet before sitting on it? The only solutions I have been able to come up with on my own (since females seem uninterested or unable to tell me) are these:

1. Women enter the bathroom with their eyes closed or while staring at the ceiling.
2. Women open the bathroom door and then proceed to back into the bathroom using their rear-end to locate the toilet.
3. Women only do bathroom business after daylight hours and are incapable of and/or unwilling to operate a light switch.
4. All women are very cleverly hiding the fact that they are born blind.
5. Toilets/toilet seats are diabolically engineered to be completely invisible to women.

Eating poisonous blowfish in Japan.

A Flickr Group Pool.

From Wikipedia:

In the first year of its foundation, Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan attracted considerable media attention by publicly performing a Satanic marriage of Judith Case and radical journalist John Raymond. The ceremony was photographed by Joe Rosenthal, who took the famous photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima during World War II.

Lucas’ Dickipedia entry is wonderfully snarky (and a terrific blog post filler on a slow day)

George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an Academy Award-nominated—the operative word being “nominated”—producer, director, screenwriter, and dick. He is both the creator and destroyer of the Star Wars saga, though it remains to be seen just how much he’ll ruin Indiana Jones before he dies. Nonetheless, with a net worth approaching 4 billion Galactic Standard Credits, Lucas is one of the American film industry’s most financially successful independent dicks.

Somehow the first Star Wars movie eventually became the fourth Star Wars movie, when, twenty years after the fact, Lucas began releasing new episodes and awkwardly inserting them at the beginning. Still, the entire Star Wars saga ranks as the most financially successful film series of all time. In this way, it suffers from what experts call “The Simpsons Effect,” in which a once groundbreaking creative enterprise gets merchandised within an inch of its life, thus forcing it to stick around long after it stops being good, if only for the lucrative Burger King tie-ins.

For his work on Star Wars, Lucas is credited with several major innovations in filmmaking, most importantly the use of digital effects to add one or two minor cosmetic adjustments to a film already several decades in the can—like slightly sweeter explosions, and blood dripping from the ice planet Hoth’s snow monster’s mouth—that justify releasing a whole new DVD collection every two years. He is also responsible for developing the ball-rattlingly loud modern sound systems found in many movie theaters.

From The Scientist:

The banana we eat today is not the one your grandparents ate. That one – known as the Gros Michel – was, by all accounts, bigger, tastier, and hardier than the variety we know and love, which is called the Cavendish. The unavailability of the Gros Michel is easily explained: it is virtually extinct.

Introduced to our hemisphere in the late 19th century, the Gros Michel was almost immediately hit by a blight that wiped it out by 1960. The Cavendish was adopted at the last minute by the big banana companies – Chiquita and Dole – because it was resistant to that blight, a fungus known as Panama disease. For the past fifty years, all has been quiet in the banana world. Until now.

(Eh, spoiler alert if you haven’t caught up to Season 4 of BSG…. But I didn’t really have to give a spoiler alert for that now did I?)

I’m almost caught up with the current season of Battlestar Galactica (I’m about two episodes behind) and the only reason why I’m not up to date is because watching an episode of Battlestar lately is comparable to sitting in a dentist chair with a tube sucking the spittle out of your mouth. When did this show become such a chore?

I was a latecomer to BSG and was finishing up Season 2 when Season 3 was almost over. I wrote a favorable post about BSG when people started commenting how bad Season 3 was. It’s not that I didn’t believe them at the time, it’s just that I couldn’t see how two stellar seasons could implode so quickly. Then I started getting season 3 disks from Netflix. At first, I liked the story behind the Cylon occupation of New Caprica. The problem was that the writers seemed to hit a huge block after the colonists were liberated and they didn’t seem to know exactly where to take the series. The result was you ended up with a lot of filler episodes revolving around union disputes and boxing. (Really, an episode about a union dispute? Next on SciFi network, a very special Battlestar Galactica episode about OSHA).

The biggest disappointment was the season cliffhanger when we find out that about half of the main cast are really cylons and then we’re setup for an old fashioned whodunnit as we try to find out who is the remaining cylon.

As for Season 4 I find the cylon civil war mildly entertaining and the whole Cara wherethefrackdidshegowhenshewasmissing keeping me guessing at the very least. The Baltar as a prophet storyline isn’t the least bit interesting and Apollo leaving the military to be a lawyer/government page to be a tedious diversion (Please, like we won’t see him in a viper anytime soon?)

BTW, a few geeky questions.
How many reporters do you need when the population is down to about 40,000? Every press conference has about 2 dozen reporters? There must be a television or newspaper for every 1,500 colonists.

Aren’t they running out of Raptors by now?

Has anybody ever seen Col. Tigh and John McCain in the same room together?

We have one who was captured and tortured by the enemy, married a younger blonde wife, and who happens to be a cylon.

Just like Col Tigh!

We are beginning to learn that to exchange a mistake for the truth — a superstition for a fact — to ascertain the real — is to progress.

Robert Green Ingersoll – “The Ghosts” (1877)