I want to find out about A, but B is a lot more interesting!!!
You have selected B: The 'Message' On The Voyager Probe: or, The Real Reason For All Those Abductions.
One of the oddest splurges our space program ever invested in was the 'message to other worlds' attached to one of the Voyager probes. It was (brace yourself) a gold-plated LP, a record. On its side was a piece of modern art meant to be 'comprehensible' to any aliens that might discover it - a diagram of a hydrogen atom, some visual depictions of mathematical concepts, and a tasteful image of a naked man and woman, their hands raised in greeting. The LP itself had a selection of typical Earth sounds as well as a spoken message.
Now let's visualize two aliens. The first is Wing Commander Spinecrusher, a surveillance officer in the Space Empire of Space Evil. The other is Professor Lovebeads, chief of the Uplifting Primitives Office of the Space League of Generic Niceness. Our two hypothetical aliens have - with typical Star Trek disregard for the laws of probability - stumbled upon the Voyager probe at the same time and agreed to put aside their differences until analysis is complete.
W.C. Spinecrusher: I see laughably primitive electronics on the probe itself. The flashy golden disk is reminiscent of disco, which is a crime punishable by death among my people. That depiction of a hydrogen atom is so laughably inaccurate that it implies a grasp of physics barely adequate for cold fusion, let alone something advanced such as chariot racing. The beings are pictured unarmed and unarmored, which suggests that the conquest would really be too easy to be amusing. Your turn, hippie.
Prof. Lovebeads: The probe itself shows a real lack of respect for other species' personal space. Apparently these people never heard of astrodegradable materials or picking up after themselves. I find the implication that we're too stupid to grasp concepts like atoms and mathematics rather insulting, since we could infer their grasp of mathematics and particle physics from the very existence of the probe itself. Also, I can't believe they thought we were capable of deep space travel and yet were still using LP technology. Back to you, jerk.
W.C. Spinecrusher: My Evil Empire will quietly observe these naked people for a while to see if they are deliberately misleading us into a false sense of security. Then, of course, midnight abductions and personal indignities, just for the laughs.
Prof. Lovebeads: Our enlightened League is going to put a quarter-parsec quarantine zone around their system. They obviously haven't evolved past littering, public nudity, and spoken-word albums yet, so I see no point in even trying to uplift them. We'll stamp a few "stay the heck away from us" signs on their cornfields to let them know we're not interested. Good luck with the probing.
Your time is up. To continue to hear Rambling Rant, select from the following topics:
- A: Five Ways To Make Air Travel Even More Undignified And Uncomfortable
- B: Drafting People into Public Office: The Sane Choice
- C: Why Stop With Gunslingers?: The Space Marine PF Class! *DISALLOWED*
- D: Assault With A Deadly Cologne - Let's Make It A Crime
Thank you for using Rambling Rant: better than a TV for babysitting!
D!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, I agree with D, so no need to hear that one IMO.
I also agree with B, so no on that one for the same reason.
I have no desire to see "PF40K" ... ever ... good thing that one is disallowed. ;)
And I have no clue how you would make air travel more undignified and uncomfortable. Unless you shrank the seats. Or required people to "double up" in seats. So I am going with A!
I'm very curious about how air travel could be made worse. A:
A. Definitely A. Pyramids are awesome.
Edit. Oh. That choice is gone. Still A. Air travel.
(God BLAST this blinkin' machine and its firk! ding! blastin'! one-keystroke-away-from-erasing-your-entire-post format! Son of -! Well, I'll type out the rant shortly, I have to go howl at the sky for a bit -)
C
Why not have Space Marines!
D! Got a sensitive nose...
(Wow, that's a close contest. Since A and B are tied, but A got there first, I guess I'll do that one.)
You have selected A: Five Ways To Make Air Travel Even More Undignified And Uncomfortable.
I think I grasp the airlines' logic: when they realized that higher profits required reducing comfort, they decided that reducing comfort would always raise profits! But despite great strides in the field of aviation discomfortology, I have a few suggestions to make things more 'profitable' yet.
1. The seats. The seats currently in use were designed (possibly by the Antichrist) so that they seem comfortable when you sit down but slowly sprout ridges, lumps and barbs over the next three minutes. This is three minutes wasted! The chairs should instead be bare steel and look like the interior of a waffle iron. Better yet, see #4.
2. The recirculated air. Is the pilot having to breathe this garbage? Because it tastes like it just came out of somebody's lungs. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement! They should be injecting animal dander and allergenic pollen into it. Every passenger with allergies will become a congested, snorting, teary-eyed, swollen mass of annoying noises and far-flying mucus - thus neatly spiking the discomfort level of the remaining passengers.
3. The security checkpoint. Although it's true that many people are rendered horribly uncomfortable there, some aren't! Those are wasted opportunities. What I say is, everybody who doesn't have to undergo the full procedure should be made to run stair-laps with all their luggage until the security officer has had enough laughs and goes on break.
4. Leg-room. There is adequate leg-room for a dwarf who happens to be paralyzed from the waist down. This is wasted space! All passengers should be wrapped up in sandpaper like a mummy and then shoved into stacked Porta-Tubes, which would be much like the medieval 'crow's cages' as seen in the movie Willow, except not as roomy. In addition to saving space, this would finally allow the flight attendants to kick the heads of passengers who deserve it.
5. The screaming baby. Due to flight delays or other unforeseen circumstances, sometimes a flight takes off without a screaming baby aboard. This is a terrible injustice. It would be far too expensive to hire women with colicky triplets to stand by in case a flight is in need: it would be more efficient to record the triplets and loop the tape. On a side note, only hire deaf flight attendants, since otherwise they will swiftly enter a homicidal rage and may endanger profits.
I feel that once these changes are implemented, our society will finally come to its senses, burn down all the airports, and use a more convenient and comfortable form of mass transit, such as pogo sticks.
Your time is up. To continue to hear Rambling Rant, select from the following:
- A: Isn't It About Time For the U.S. To Declare War On Another Noun?
- B: Look Out, al-Qaeda - Here Come The Pink Berets! 'Oh, Be Nice!'
- C: I Want To Run A Lawful Neutral Barbarian! *DISALLOWED*
- D: Electronic Voting Machines: Easier Than Jim Crow Laws, But Essentially The Same
Thank you for using Rambling Rant: the bull - and we do mean bull - in the china shop of injustice!
D! No no A! No, wait, B! Err ... D!!!!
B has me curious as well. Let's hear it!
They've all got potential, but I'm casting my vote for D.
You have selected D: Electronic Voting Machines: Easier Than Jim Crow Laws, But Essentially The Same
Now in olden days, if you didn't want certain folks* to vote, you had to go to great lengths. Lounging just outside the poll booth with a club, gently suggesting that they not do so, or - if you were one of the many states with a corrupted official - you had to push local regulations through that - while carefully not denying any federally-required right - did a lot to make that right inconvenient and uncomfortable. Only a real determined dedication to keeping certain folks* in their place would justify so much effort, but somehow somebody's always willing to put in that work.
Mechanical voting machines presented vast new opportunities for unwanted votes to "disappear". Aside from direct methods (such as "misplacing" boxes full of punch-keyed voting records, or allowing the right kind of voter to vote for "my mother who's home sick"), it became popular to use poor (or no) maintenance methods on those elaborate contraptions. Any voting district with 60% of the right kind of voters got brand-new replacement machines, while districts full of those other folks* would somehow wind up inheriting the old machines - undermaintained or poorly repaired. Oh, well! No doubt those folks* whose votes were lost or miscounted were voting exactly evenly on both sides of everything anyway, so we can just put it down to signal loss and "move on."**
Of course, now they're trying to install electronic voting devices, which have the advantage of losing or misreporting votes thousands of times faster than the old mechanical jobs. Efficient! And best of all, they don't leave any of that annoying 'physical proof' when they've invalidated, miscounted or just plain changed your vote. Out of the way, citizen, let the next guy participate in democracy, you've had your turn we're closed go home! Seems a bit odd to switch to electronics for our elections in a world where you and I have to buy a brand-new anti-computer-piracy software package every few months. But don't worry - most of those electronic voting machines are constructed by companies that have absolutely neutral political views! We're so lucky.
*You know... them.
** An actual quote after the 2000 presidential election, spoken by somebody who stood to gain a lot if people took his advice.
Your time is up. To continue to hear Rambling Rant, select from the following:
- A: If The Instructions on Shampoo Said 'Drink Me', There'd Be More Room For the Rest Of Us
- B: A Thousand Prestige Classes We Should Totally Have In PF *DISALLOWED*
- C: Give Chickens The Vote
- D: Our Presidential Elections Scare The Bejeezus Out Of Other Countries (Especially Countries Friendly To Us)
Thank you for using Rambling Rant: irrelevant sequipedalian prolixity!
I'm actually a fan of evms that support fingerprinting technology. But that's a story for another time. D, if you would be so good.
Freehold DM wrote: I'm actually a fan of evms that support fingerprinting technology. But that's a story for another time. D, if you would be so good. I'm in support of ones that don't have internet connections and are easily hackable (why do they all have internet connections that can easily be hacked remotely?)
|
1 person marked this as a favorite.
|
Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
I think C and D are related...D!
D... was at least anxious the last time.;).
but.... I want to the hear B
You have selected D: Our Presidential Elections Scare The Bejeezus Out Of Other Countries (Especially Countries Friendly To Us)
The other day as I was sitting in a corner cafe in Mexico, I noticed that the front page of a local newspaper had the Legion of Doom glowering out at me in full color. On closer inspection, it turned out to be the Republican presidential candidates photographed from a very unflattering angle. Sometimes you freeze-frame your DVD player and one of your favorite actors is stuck in a pose that makes him/her look like he's about to eat a kitten, right? These were those kind of photos.
And as I struggled through the article beneath those demonic faces (my Spanish is barely functional), I was reminded of a realization I'd had several years back: America is scary. I mean, I was sitting in Mexico, not Iran - these guys have built their economy around our need for cheap migrant labor and tropical beaches. They're our friends (although 'our abused spouse too intimidated to break it off and get their life back' is a more accurate description, historically speaking.) And they're absolutely terrified of what might happen every election year.
Think about it from the P.o.V. of your average dictatorship, theocracy, or other long-running regime. If countries were people, those other guys would be hard-cases. Hardened criminals, probably, but at least they'd be sane. But America, which suffers an internal spasm every four years that utterly alters our foreign and domestic policy - I don't know if that's more like multiple-personality schizophrenia, epilepsy or a little of both - but I do know I wouldn't want an epileptic with multiple personalities to have the unquestioned military supremacy (not to mention thousands of weapons of mass destruction) that we do. It wasn't so bad in olden days (meaning 1999), because the U.S. had the political sense to do its dirty work through client states and conveniently-timed "revolutions" like all the other big boys do. But now...
And "friendly countries" are far more intimidated by us than our actual enemies. I mean, North Korea suffers from being our enemy, but at least when they wake up each morning they can be sure America is still their enemy. Our allies, on the other hand, never know when we're going to put on our hat of self-righteousness +4 and announce that we're severing trade relations with them, and also going to firebomb them, because they present a threat to... oh, let's say the American domestic ice-cream industry. (Sound stupid? Anybody in their fifties can remember a time when America's foreign policy people were singing Saddam Hussain's praises. And up until 1940 or so, we were very complimentary about Hitler's anti-Communist policies...) Being one of America's little sidekicks doesn't make you safe from America, and it sure doesn't make you safe from America's enemies. Talk about a revolting predicament!
Your time is up. To continue to hear Rambling Rant, select from the following:
- A: Can We Use The Moon As A Landfill?
- B: Scott Adams' Brilliant Solution To All Our Energy Crisis Problems
- C: Crazy People - Once Wisely Ignored, Now A 'Market Segment'
- D: I Can Use The D&D Alignment Descriptions To Prove That Saving Puppies = Evil and Punching Nuns = Good *DISALLOWED*
Thank you for using Rambling Rant - A First Amendment Production!
Darkjoy wrote: Lincoln Hills wrote:
Your time is up. To continue to hear Rambling Rant, select from the following topics:
- A: Giant Floating Garbage Islands of the Pacific
- B: Uranium Mine Runoff Contaminating Midwestern Water Tables
- C: Electronic Voting Machine Fraud
- D: D&D Fourth Edition *DISALLOWED*
Thank you for using Rambling Rant!
I vote A The ocean's ginormous! There's absolutely no way we could hurt it!
Hard choices all, um lets press C and see what becomes of it.
Down with the moon!
A, please.
C, please.
And as a foreigner, I can tell you than this last rant is absolutely spot on. Since his benighted idiotness Bush Jr reign, US elections ARE followed with trepidation over here, as we came to realize that some Neo-Con and/or far right bible-thumping candidates are absolute nutcases (from our pacifist cheese-eating monkeys point of view, of course).
I think its broken. *pushes C*
*presses A*
Maybe Abe is taking a nap?
|
1 person marked this as a favorite.
|
C
C
C
<hmmm maybe we should be pressing 0 for an operator ...>
Darned defective free services! I want my money's worth!
*shakes fist*
We're sorry. Due to unexpected hardware failure Rambling Rant has been temporarily offline. We apologize for the delay (without at any point stipulating legal or financial liability.) Rambling Rant will resume after a brief compilation period. Thank you!
TOZ wrote: Did I do that? No, CJ did.
JMD031 wrote: TOZ wrote: Did I do that? No, CJ did. Damnit. I just kept hitting A
Just as you were saying bad things about your government... Coincidence? I think not! Down with NSA!
You have selected C: Crazy People - Once Wisely Ignored, Now A 'Market Segment'
In olden times the wild-eyed crank who announced that ammonia salts would cure the flux was allowed to poison himself in peace, but nobody went around selling him ammonia salts. Every village had its idiot (many were multiply blessed in that regard), but their opinions carried absolutely no weight, thus allowing society to get on with vanquishing disease, combating hunger and exploiting native populations without interference.
But now we have... market segmentation and market research. When you want somebody to give you their money (or vote), their sanity simply isn't a consideration. If 1 percent of the population wants to set itself on fire, somebody out there will be selling them kerosene. And thanks to the internet, tiny populations of cranks are able to link up with others suffering from the same delusion and lobby for recognition as the Hair Eaters of America or whatever, and delude themselves that a statistically insignificant number of fellow ravers is actually "a strong and growing movement" that had better be acknowledged by our companies/government "or else." It's actually quite sad, but not half as sad as the fact that marketing requires that any fringe group, no matter how lunatic, must be... pandered to. Kiss their un-inoculated babies, pet their savage dog, and shake hands (ignoring their special protective Stranger-Touching Radiation Suit) while you try to get what you want from them.
Twain once summed it up - "The problem ain't that there are too many fools: the problem is that the lightning ain't distributed right."
Your time is up. To continue to hear Rambling Rant, select from the following:
- A: Plutonium Blues (actually Plutonium Luminous Greens)
- B: A Brilliant Plan To Improve Televised Golf And Pro Wrestling By 500% Each
- C: Do You Seriously Think Other Posters Giving Up Trying To Reason With You Is A Sign That You're Winning? *DISALLOWED*
- D: Commies Were Great For Science!
Thank you for using Rambling Rant: now go play outside, you kids!
|
