What a Long, Strange Journey it has Been

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!!!

That’s right folks the Frobozz Magic Rambling Company is officially one year old today. (Does this mean I get presents? – Ed.) No.

But what it does mean is very special edition of the Ramblings. That’s right, it’s the dreaded Flashback Episode. A lot of crazy stuff happened in the last year, so let’s look back on all the memories, and see what came from them.

The FMRC started off with a posting on those Inept Democrats and how they’re probably going to nominate Hillary come 2008. Well, a year later Hillary’s still the front runner (God help us), and I’m officially a Democrat, albeit a self-loathing one. Personally I’m still praying the Dems regain their senses and nominate former Virginia Governor Mark Warner.

A month later we were talking about Jesus and the Christ family. In the time since then a semi-decent movie in which Tom Hanks had a bad haircut came out and talked about Jesus and the Christ family. To date that movie has grossed close to three-quarters of a billion dollars worldwide. Meanwhile the FMRC has grossed three cents and a Starburst wrapper. Life isn’t fair. To be serious about The DaVinci Code for a second though, it was pretty good, but here’s what I don’t like. Movies/books like that, dealing with the Catholic Church and a bunch of conspiracies to cover up the “truth about Christ” are frustrating. Because they distract people from the actual issues with Christianity and make anybody who points out interesting viewpoints look like a crackpot by association. We should be discussing alternate views on Jesus (i.e. other Gospels or different interpretations of the Bible) and DaVinci Code makes that hard to do, because it just makes it all too over-the-top.

Come September I was bitching about the Michigan Student Section for football games. In case you’re curious: the Student Section continues to suck.

Days later I said that “Up” should be the default position of all toilet seats and that “if you're paying so little attention that you put your ass in toilet water, than you deserve it. Plain and simple. And I'm not saying it could never happen to me, I'm just saying that if it did, I'd have to say "Yeah, yeah, I'm a dumbass, I should probably look at where I put my bare ass before I put it there." And then I'd wipe myself off and complete the shit I was apparently going to take.”

Well, just a few days ago I sat down on the toilet, distracted by the newspaper, only to end up with an ass covered in toilet water. So I am, apparently, a daft twit. Big surprise there.

Next I posted on how Sport is Sport, the first of a few homage posts, this one a la Scoop Jackson. Just for the record, Sport continues to be Sport, and the women in my life still don’t get it.

Come October, just past my 21st birthday, I admitted on the blog that I was a virgin. Well, that has since ceased to be true. So that’s nice. I still won’t be talking about my sexual exploits, for obvious reasons, but let me recheck in with something I said in the infamous sex post. I still say you don’t forfeit the game just because your quarterback gets injured (check the post if the metaphor isn’t sinking in with you). However, I realize now that there can be intricacies at work here. That said, if she wants you to send in the second stringers and finish the job, you better damn well find somebody to hand the ball off.

In November I lamented how hard it is to be a fan, and this fall, it’s just going to get harder. Come October, not only will I have Michigan games to watch, not only will I have a Fantasy Football Championship to repeat in, not only will Detroit Pistons Basketball be starting up, but I’ll also have to mix in a DETROIT TIGERS WORLD SERIES. Motherfucker. I may have to drop out of college.

Come Christmas, and a very special posting, I made an offhand comment that people often think I am Jewish, but that I was in fact raised Catholic. Since then I have found that I may in fact be 1/8 Jewish, but we aren’t really sure. Apparently a great-grandpa may have been born Jewish in Russia, but never properly raised Jewish since being Jewish in communist Russia was a no-no. So this puts years of urges to dance the Horah in perspective.

In February, I said that a monkey with autism would make a better GM than Isaiah Thomas. Thus far no NBA teams have taken me and Koko up on our offer to test the theory, but Isaiah hasn’t done much to disprove it. At this point, I’m going to take the next step past saying that Isaiah is the worst GM ever in Sports history, and say that he is in fact the single worst executive EVER. In anything. Sports, business, politics, whatever. Caligula was a better executive than Zeke. And while we’re on the Knicks, a quick comment on what they need to do: WHATEVER IS NECESSARY TO GET LEBRON ON THEIR TEAM. I don’t care if it means getting rid of the next draft pick you have (which is, I believe, in the late 2030s). I don’t care if you have to trade Channing Frye. I don’t care if you lose 80 games a year until then. I don’t care if you have to hire an assassin to kill Stephon Marbury to get out of that contract. It doesn’t matter. Do it.

The very next day I posted on the greatest event of the last year. Vice President Dick Cheney shooting a man in the face. It was amazing. It was spectacular. It made my life. I can die happy, now that the Vice President of the United States of America has shot a man. And where did he shoot the man? In the face. He shot him in the face. Total number of times since then that a Vice President of a major world power has shot a man in the face on accident: 0. Total number of times I’ve thought about Vice President Dick Cheney shooting a man in the face and giggled to myself: 3,492 and counting.

In April, there was the infamous Duke lacrosse scandal. Since then, the news on this has abated a great deal, however, just this week Collin Finnerty (one of the three accused of the rape) was convicted of another assault charge he had previously been facing. Here’s (as Steve Colbert would say) All You Need to Know: Finnerty’s lawyer was named Steven J. McCool. Holy crap, that’s the best name ever. How do judges take him seriously in court? “Mr. McCool could you please approach…hee hee, Mr. McCool…what a silly name…tee hee.”

And finally, there was everyone’s favorite post: Craig's list. So, for the last time, here’s the best “casual encounter” I’ve seen posted on Craig's list recently:

I'm not sure if there is a name for this, but I've seen videos about it...

You know how a guy is very sensitive after orgasm... What I want to try is where the cock/head is continuously stroked during that time.
I really have no idea why. And I can't do it on myself, it's just too sensitive.
There's just something about it that really intrigues me.
I'm quite certain I'd need to be restrained in some fashion so as not to be able to get out from your grasp.
I want to see how long I can take it.

Send me an email of why you'd like to try it with me and we can go from there.
Please no smokers or BBW. Both are so not attractive.
And I would prefer no one over 40 unless you can convince me otherwise.

Thanks for your time!

As always, I’m amused by a request like “no smokers” in this context, but my favorite part of this post is the last line. Between the courtesy and the exclamation point it sounds more like the conclusion to church newsletter than a bizarre sex post.

So there you have it. Frobozz Magic Rambling Company is one year old. I hope I’ve brought you a few laughs over the last year, or at the very least killed some time at work for you. And hopefully I’ll be back to posting more regularly once August rolls around.

Inevitable Doom

As we are all of course aware, the inevitable downfall of Western Civilization will eventually be attributed to a single defining moment: the invention of AIM. AIM is destroying the youth of today in any number of ways. Corrupting their grammar, their ability to spell, and decaying their minds with an ocean of sappy livejournal-type profile tidbits.

But AIM has recently released a new and more dangerous type of havoc. AOL is now (and I believe it is intentional) trying to destroy children's abilities to recognize even the simplest of facial expressions. For those who don't know how important that skill is, it's one of the bedrocks of our ability to be a social creature. With a future generation of citizens unable to determine their respective moods through visual clues we'll be forced back down the evolutionary ladder. The only reasonable alternative: sniffing one another's asses.

Why does AOL want us all to sniff each other's asses? I don't know. Maybe they have a weird ass smelling fetish. Maybe their asses smell particularly pleasant, and they believe a social hierarchy built upon ass-sniffing will allow them to gain complete world dominance. I can't say.

But I can tell you how AOL is doing this: through the addition of the point-and-click Emoticon menu on AIM.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to let someone know you were happy while on AIM you had to either (a) actually tell them you were happy (the nerve) or (b) carefully craft an artistically brilliant semi-likeness of a smile, like such : ) . Similarly, being cross might be shown through a bent brow as in >: (

But today's kids have no need for such crude, as AIM now provides emoticons you can simply click on and embed in your messages.

Now, I'm not an old curmudgeon who's going to begrudge the youth of today their conveniences and carefree lifestyle (well I am an old curmudgeon, but I choose not to begrudge this particular development). I appreciate the color and life of the new emoticons. But what I do take offense to is the naming of these emoticons, and the obvious misrepresentations they are of human emotions. (Also AIM now calls them "smileys" which I find annoying since only a handful are of smiling faces).

Take for example the emoticon that AIM calls "Undecided". This emotion is represented by the following image


And I think it's pretty clear that this doesn't bear any resemblance to the facial expression taken on by someone who is undecided over an issue. Clearly, this is the face of someone who is constipated. Which is similar to being undecided, except far more painful. So now, thanks to AIM, we're going to have a generation of children who think that constipated people are merely on the fence about where to go for dinner.

But it gets worst. Look at the emoticon AIM calls "Money-Mouth"



Here the actual emotion that is clearly being displayed is "Self-loathing and frustration with myself over having sewn my lips together again, with a hint of hoping someone will call the hospital for me, as I can't speak through these stitches." I think we've all been in that situation a few times, and I know it's going to piss me off when it happens to me next and some confused kid thinks I'm merely being "money-mouth". (And while I'm on this...what the fuck does money-mouth mean anyway? Is it a play on 'put your money where you mouth is'? Is it slang for spoiled? When is this emoticon used by anyone?)

Another misrepresentation is the "kissing" emoticon:


Even the most naive of observers should be able to tell that this emoticon is actually saying "Sucky-sucky five dollar, me love you long time."

AIM strikes at the heart of our civilization with the "Yelling" emoticon, trying to throw off our medical community:


This is obviously a man saying "Help me doctor, I've contracted a rare disease that is slowly turning me into a Japanese Anime character. I fear that if you don't act quickly, everytime I speak my mouth will take up half of my face." And I dread to think of a day when doctors cannot recognize this emotion for the horrible fate that it is, but think only that they are being yelled at for no apparent reason.

Even the less insidious misrepresentations are still drastically off. "Laughing", for example is similar to laughing, but only if you happen to be the Joker from the Batman comics.

And while "surprised"

does indeed seem to indicate surprise, to me it doesn't say "I'm surprised by what you just said" as much as it says "I'm surprised by the fact that I just unexpectedly received an enema."

There is, of course one more misrepresentation, but I believe it to be an honest mistake. This is the "Lips-are-sealed" emoticon:


This emoticon rather obviously made it into our batch by mistake. It should have been in the AIM given to the Predator Species. I believe the emotion represented by this particular Predator Emoticon is "My your acid blood smells lovely, would you like to hunt the Governors of California and Minnesota with me?"

My Generation is Smarter than Yours

I was watching Quiz Show the other day (great movie, if you haven’t seen it, turn off your computer, drive to Blockbuster, rent it, watch it, marvel in the glory that is Rob Morrow’s accent). Anyway, I was watching Quiz Show, when, for the first time in God knows how many viewings, I noted that one of the characters discussed the “crisis of education in this country”.

I found this interesting, given how much that phrase is thrown around about the modern day education system, and how often my generation is called stupid in comparison to past generations.

That line, combined with some guy being on the Colbert report making some very good points about this issue, has reaffirmed my previous belief: that anyone who thinks my generation is dumber than previous ones is out of their fucking mind.

It’s just bizarre to me that people think my generation isn’t as bright as my parents' and so forth, and I’m going to take a post explaining why it’s bullshit.

One of the things they always throw around to say my generation is retarded are these stats about how we don’t know simple things. The most popular of these is the “3 out of 4 young adults can’t find blank on a map/globe.”

Which is about the stupidest fucking argument I’ve ever heard in my life. First off, you’ll notice these polls never include information on how many people from other age groups can find whatever on the map. Without which, the data MEANS NOTHING. Without a comparison set of data for some other age group, what am I possibly supposed to conclude from the fact that (according to the National-Geographic-Roper Study) six in 10 young Americans ages 18 to 24 cannot find Iraq on a map of the Middle East?

Because frankly I doubt that more than 4 out of 10 adults can find Iraq on a map of the Middle East. I’m not sure my father could pick Iraq out of a map that included only Iraq and Iran.

Even giving me data about kids from other countries would tell me something. It wouldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, that Americans are less well informed about world affairs than non-Americans, but at least the poll would then SUPPORT A CONCLUSION OF SOME SORT. As is, it literally says nothing. It means nothing. No inferences can be drawn from this report. I am befuddled as to why the people who conducted this survey did not feel a need to have it be useful.

But even if I were to grant that 60% is a high number of young adults to not be able to locate Iraq on a map (which I cannot grant since I have NOTHING TO COMPARE IT TO…Jesus Fucking Christ, didn’t these people have to take a stats class or something in college? I swear to God…okay deep breaths…deep breaths).

Okay. I’m better. Even if I could say that was a high number, let me ask you this: WHO GIVES A FLYING FUCK? When is this going to come up in my life time? At what point is a future employer likely to throw a map on my desk (one without the names of the countries for some inexplicable reason) and demand that I locate Afghanistan (Which 88% of young adults couldn’t do…hint: look for the smoldering hole on the map).

Guess what? Not going to be an issue. Not being able to find Australia on a globe will never affect my life. If I go to the airport and get on the plane with the big sign that says AUSTRALIA, it will take me there. It is highly unlikely the pilot will ask me for directions.

And if you do need to find Afghanistan on a map (God knows why), that’s why maps have the names of the countries written right on them. So we don’t all have to memorize which one is Jordan and which one is Syria.

So please cut the “It’s a travesty, how can young people not locate Bangladesh while blindfolded in a dark room, and surrounded by midgets” because that DOESN’T MEAN A GODDAMN THING.

(Lot of caps-locking going on in this post…very emotional issue for me…sorry).

Furthermore, please cut the bullshit comparisons to other countries. First of all, a lot of those countries (i.e. Japan) only allow their best students to continue on in the educational systems, so of course they test higher than our kids. If you only tested me, I’d kick the shit out of the rest of the planet, I can say with a fair level of confidence. But that’s not a very good measure of a country's education system. And even given that we are slipping in comparison to the rest of the world, that’s a whole lot more about the rest of the world not sucking like it used to, and not about your buddies being Einstein, Granddad.

So why do I think my generation is smarter than yours, old people? A lot of reasons. First, high schools are offering more and more AP level classes, suggesting that the advanced kids are learning faster than they used to. Second, kids today manage to learn (in my opinion) pretty much everything your generation learned, while at the same time doing a whole lot extra (i.e. computers, larger music/art programs, more extracurricular activities, etc.)

But frankly, those aren’t the big reasons. The big reason is that my generation is capable of doing more than one thing at a time. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but people older than about 27 or so, are incapable of concentrating on more than one thing. If the TV is on, they cannot have a conversation with you. It’s impossible for them.

Why? They didn’t play video games growing up. And this is the big difference for my generation. We all grew up playing with computers and Nintendo and whatnot. And for all the garbage old people spew about how video games are rotting our minds, what they’re actually doing is making us way smarter.

Bear with me on this. What a video game is (in the most basic of terms) is a collection of sensory inputs and puzzles. Those puzzles may or may not be logic-based, they may merely require you to push buttons in some specific sequence in order to throw a proper attack combo, but regardless that’s a puzzle. It’s something you have to learn to do, while reacting to the environment of the game.

Further, video games (unlike many of the games our parents grew up playing) get harder as you play them (unless they suck or you cheat). Video Games are designed to be just hard enough that they are constantly challenging, without ever being so hard that you give up. And as you improve they continually push you along to get better and better at what you’re doing.

Now you might protest that you are getting better at that skill, but in the case of CounterStrike, that skill is to shoot people. And here’s a crucial point that you may or may not believe: that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what the “goal” of the game is. Especially since those goals are just a dummy set of variables for the same basic set of inputs: reacting through pushing buttons to do X in a limited amount of time to event Y taking place.

It doesn’t really matter what event Y is or what X is caused by pushing the buttons. Regardless, you are training your mind to make quick decisions in response to sensory inputs. And (this is the crux of that crucial point) anytime you use your brain that’s a good thing. It doesn’t matter what skill you’re training it with, it’s always benefiting you.

Now, are some games even more beneficial than others? Yes. Obviously. And here’s another key point: those games are among the most popular.

The most wildly successful computer game ever is the Sims. A game that teaches you to interact socially with others. The Civilization games are also incredibly successful. These are games that teach you history, teach you politics, teach you strategy, resources management, and God knows what else. The MYST games were huge. Tetris is one of the best selling video games of all time, and it’s basically the spatial reasoning portion of that skills test they made me take in high school.

So not only are video games helping us to increase the quickness of our reflexes and decision making processes, not only do they teach us to mentally multi-task, not only do they constantly push us to our mental limits, but they actually often teach us real-honest-to-God knowledge and skills.

So shut the fuck up about how smart you and your buddies were pops, cause my generation will mop the floor with your ass.

Now if you want to challenge us to some sort of fitness competition, feel free to walk away with that trophy right now.