Rants – Chewing Glass

Grayby Boomer

geezer The AARP cards are coming fast and furious now that I’m just a gray whisker shy of 55 years old. Being at the tail-end of the Baby Boomers, I must share in the responsibility for the ills that this generation has wrought on the world. No doubt, we’ll have a lot to answer for in the hereafter.

Now that we’re getting older, the world is facing a growing population of “Grayby Boomers” that refuses to die on schedule, thus leaving succeeding generations—I’m looking at you millennials, Gen X’ers, and Y’ers—to care for us when we’re all dribbling in nursing homes. So get off your butts and get a job!

Technology seems like something all the cool kids are doing. Pays well too! I should know, I used to do it. And not so long ago that I had to program with a wrench, thank you very much. But please, should you choose to get a job in technology, remember that what is “innovative” to you is probably a bloody nuisance to your elders.

Just because you can make your car talk to your refrigerator to let it know when you’re close to home so it can tell the microwave to cook dinner, doesn’t mean you should. Ever.

And for the love of Mike, will you please get over your fascination with touch-sensitive controls for everything! “What’s wrong with a switch, boy? You don’t need to go leaping straight for the haptic feedback like a bull at the gate!” [If you don’t get the Monty Python reference, then I really am old. Arrrgh!]

Feeble old buzzards like me, prefer things we can wrap our arthritic fingers around. We derive an almost unnatural joy and sensual pleasure from the feel of a good *click!* And while I may not be able to see the damn switch, I can at least feel the blasted thing! [Where did I put my glasses anyway?]

Yes, our generation will have to answer for our many sins: Vietnam, global warming, Disco, the Ford Pinto, Three’s Company. If you believe in karmic retribution, a la Homer Simpson being force-fed an infinite supply of donuts by his own personal demon, then one shudders to consider what we’re in for. So remember, it can happen to you too. Be wise and tread carefully.

I mean, I sure wouldn’t want to spend an eternity in hell, with my own personal air conditioner that can only be operated by a cellphone app using itty-bitty, closely-spaced, touch-sensitive, virtual buttons, labeled in a microscopic font, and requires a password 15 characters long with two caps, three numerals and a special character!!!!!! Would you?

Oh, and would you mind getting off my lawn? Thanks.

Look What I Found!

The other day while I was cleaning my sock drawer, I found this dusty old blog. Thought I’d take it out and see if it still worked.

Well, first it needed a new battery—ya know, one of those little, round watch batteries that look like spare change? So I go to the store, and they have fifty different kinds all with teensy little letters that I can’t read, even with my glasses. So after squinting at a few, I bought one that seemed right. It’s working now but who knows for how long.

Anyhoo, how ya doin’?

Say, didya see Bruce—I ain’t gonna call him Caitlyn—Jenner’s cover-photo for Vanity Fair?

Was a magazine ever more appropriately titled?

!!Trigger Warning!! The following contains explicit anti-transgender views. A special room with soft couch and soothing, waterfall sounds has been provided for your safety.

See, it’s girls, boys. Sorry, there’s no such thing as “cis,” except in the imagination of radical LGBT activists.

[Moderator’s Note: Please indicate agreement with Jazz Hands, disagreement with Down-twinkles so as not to cause anxiety on the part of the blogger or other audience members.]

Call me a hater if you like (you’d be wrong), but it seems very few people are willing to speak about things like this for fear of being branded a homophobe. While there are many people who have same-sex attraction for many and complicated reasons, this is something else altogether.

It’s a narcissistic effort to invert nature for the purpose of saying, “Pay attention to me! Please!”

I’m sorry for the evident turbulence afflicting MISTER Jenner’s soul, but this is what happens when we toss off as irrelevant the natural law built into our species by God, preferring our own ideas about how things “should be.” And let’s be honest, do you know anyone, yourself included, that you’d trust running the universe?

Made in the image and likeness of God, whether we like it or not, there are some things that we just can’t change no matter how far or how fast we run from them. The great struggle of life is coming to know oneself and how we relate to our Creator.

We, as lumps of clay, cannot say to the potter, “Why have you made me thus?” It is a question springing from fear and distrust. A question that assumes God has no great interest in us, or what we will become; that when it comes right down to it, He doesn’t give a happy rat’s ass about us anyway.

But thank that same God who, despite our calumnies against Him, never rejects us. Even when we go off the deep end.

Seems like a good place to sign off. The b ttery is alm st dea

I Would Have Blogged…

…but I died.

Well, at least the game was good.

The halftime show was incomprehensible and scary to this old-timer.

And the ads? They were generally abysmal, but the entire nation let out a simultaneous “WTF?” when the Nationwide dead kid ad aired.

Nationwide, doubling down on its utter tone-deafness, replied thusly to all us ignorant, apathetic, unfeeling slobs who just wanted to enjoy the last football game of the season:

We knew the ad would spur a variety of reactions. In fact, thousands of people visited MakeSafeHappen.com, a new website to help educate parents and caregivers with information and resources in an effort to make their homes safer and avoid a potential injury or death. Nationwide has been working with experts for more than 60 years to make homes safer. While some did not care for the ad, we hope it served to begin a dialogue to make safe happen for children everywhere.

If I’m that kid, when I go to school today I’m telling my teacher, “No, I didn’t get my book report done…cuz I died.”

Just Stop It!

There is a never-ending supply of stuff in the news that causes me to break out in a nasty, swelling rash, but this stands on its own. Here’s a key excerpt [emphasis mine]:

Angelina Jolie’s entire family recently stepped out on the red carpet to support their mother’s new movie, Unbroken. The couple’s oldest biological child, who was assigned female at birth, joined brothers Maddox and Pax wearing sharp suits and short haircuts.

Pitt and Jolie have been fairly open over the years about Shiloh’s interest in all things considered masculine. In an interview with Oprah in 2008, Brad Pitt discussed how Shiloh wanted to be called John.

The eight-year-old’s family fully supports their decision to self-identify — from an affinity for suits and ties to shorter hair to the name change.

In my day, such girls were called “tomboys.” It’s perfectly natural for some girls to dig the same stuff little boys do; that’s what makes ’em cool. However, when their hippy-dippy, gender-bending, draw-no-lines parents start using the child to advance a clearly anti-human (yeah, I went there) agenda, then I gotta yell.

We can have a discussion about people who have a same-sex attraction. There are lots of reasons for it and many ways to cope with it but, and let me say this very clearly, GENDER IS NOT SOMETHING ONE CAN CHOOSE.

Give the kid a a copy of Grey’s Anatomy, tell her to go to the bathroom, drop trou, and check for herself. You are a boy or you are a girl, dammit!

Playing silly games with terms like “gender-assignation” is just another signpost on society’s road to hell. We are already too comfortable with choosing who is a valid human being and who is not, as evidenced by the abortion of over 700,000 infants in 2011, and that’s only counting legal abortions—as if legality has anything to do with murder. And let’s not forget the growing euthanasia rights movement.

It’s all part of the same disease. The same one the first human being suffered from: I know better than the God who made me.

Just stop.

Eaten Alive Update

Regular readers will remember my rant about Discovery Channel’s descent into the sewers of prime-time TV with their 2-hour special, Eaten Alive.

Since I couldn’t bring myself to watch, being otherwise occupied by my nightly lint- gathering forays, I consulted the all-knowing Internet after the fact instead. If you didn’t see it, you didn’t miss anything.

Seems our host, naturalist Paul Rosalie, attired in his specially designed snake-proof suit and reeking of pig blood, did manage to get the giant snake to constrict him. Then he had second thoughts as he started to die.

Predictably, the web blew-up in the aftermath heaping scorn on Discover Channel for ripping them off. Carnival audiences—excuse me—Discovery Channel audiences demand a payoff for a month and a half of hype.

One angry viewer commented on Twitter:

2 hours of my life I can’t get back and Paul didn’t even get eaten alive.

The producers, as well as the host, may rightly be castigated for failing to deliver on the premise of their special. However, one critical member of the cast is being left out of the discussion entirely: the snake.

It took some doing, but I was eventually able to land an exclusive interview with Ms. Ana Conda of Brazil… Continue reading “Eaten Alive Update”

Shake It Off

Taylor Swift is a charming young lady, but if I hear this damn song once more, I’m going to tear the ears off seventeen bunnies and use them as tinder to burn down her house…

Ok, not really, but c’mon.

This female news anchor clearly feels the same way. Either that, or she can’t stand her partner. You be the judge:

Why is it so hard to get rid of an earworm?

Continue reading “Shake It Off”

May I Go Off About Something?

Why am I asking? It’s my blog.

Since it’s Election Day, I think we coddled Americans could use a reminder that the rest of the world isn’t like Pleasant Valley, USA. When we chose not to think about it, turn the channel, fail to pray, or vote, we cede more territory to that evil.

We—and by “we,” I mean the civilized world—are facing a battle for existence whether we want to admit it or not. That battle has its focus in radical Islam, aided and abetted by the rise of moral relativism, selfishness, and apathy among the “civilized.”

The worst degradations man is capable of come from benighted hearts hardened not by devotion to the true God, but the idol of religious legalism and intolerance, a warped religion devoted to a god made in man’s image. Is it strange that when man worships himself, the creature instead of the Creator, he will eventually become a beast?

This is the world they wish to impose on us.

How can I fight against this? 1) Pray. God hears you. 2) Vote. Elect men and women who share your vision for a strong country built on God-given truth, common decency, and freedom for all its citizens.

You know what I hate?

Stairs.

Oh, I used to like stairs. When I was just a small ball of dough, not the over-risen loaf I am now, my brother and I used to play a favorite game on the stairs.

He’d stand at the top by the kitchen and I’d take the bottom by the rec-room and utility room. I’d run back and forth between them while he tried to pick me off with yarn balls we stole from our mother’s knitting basket.

I would dodge as best I could, then return fire. We’d carry on until Mom yelled at us. Then there ensued a mad scramble for the balls of yarn, which we would then hide in order to launch an ambush later. Well, after Mom cooled down that is.

Continue reading “You know what I hate?”