Grim News

Everyone has “That Story” about “That Guy” who is more of an asshole than previously considered possible in the sometimes-rational universe that we live in.

I think we have finally settled the question “Who is the biggest asshole on the planet?“

Officer Robert Powell of Plano Texas, COME ON DOWN!

What kind of extraordinary douche bag stops a car in the Emergency Room parking lot of a hospital, then holds up a panicky family for 20 minutes while, according to nurses on the scene, the man’s mother is “blue coding for the third time”?  For those of you without a background in medical drama or comedy TV, “Code Blue” means that the patient (again, this man’s mother) is dying.  “Code Blue” is when George Clooney gets out the shock paddles and has a concerned look on his face as he screams “CLEAR!!!”

Now I might consider understanding the officer’s point of view if the suspect in question were drunk, drug addled, or waving a gun around.  We’re talking about a man, with his family, in the parking lot of the hospital.  Could a reasonable human being even consider the possibility that this family somehow poses a risk to public safety?

For Christ’s sake, even the other officer on the scene said “Hey, let him go!” but NOOOOOOOOOooo.  Officer Powell just HAD to have that insurance paperwork “rightthehellnow”.

“I can screw you over… your attitude sucks.”

This is what an officer says to a man who’s mother is dying?

What’s worse is that he did just that.  When the young man and his family finally made it upstairs to his mother’s room, she was gone. (Oh, and he was toting a fresh new traffic ticket, courtesy of Officer Douche Bag.)

The Dallas police department, when informed of the incident, formally apologized and dropped all charges against the young man, Ryan Moats.  An investigation is underway, but I’m not sure anyone in Internal Affairs wants to plumb to the bottom of the rabbit hole that is Officer Powell’s psyche.

I am normally not a big fan of professional athletes using their fame, fortune, and position to throw their weight around with the authorities, but as it happens, Mr. Moats is a running back for the Houston Texans.  It is my sincere hope that this young man uses every means at his disposal to ruin Officer Powell’s life as much as is humanly possible.  Powell shouldn’t be in charge of a stamp collection, much less have a badge and a gun.

Hey Powell.  it’s overblown, self-important bullies like you who give real cops a bad name.  If there is any justice in the world, you’ll be drinking from a brown paper bag in a few weeks and living on the street.  I’d rather have the cast of Reno 911 defending my streets than see you continue to hide behind a badge, you fucking coward.

Munchausen.

I’m not talking about the rather amusing movie by Terry Gilliam.  I’m talking about a mental disorder where a person fakes or induces illness in order to gain the sympathy of others.  In an age of attention whores, I suppose this represents the Mount Everest of attention-whoredom.  What makes this particularly vile is that the whore in question abuses the trust of their friends in order to gain that attention.  Any idiot can troll for their 15 minutes of fame on a forum or blog, but it takes an especially lame human being to betray the trust of friends in order to satisfy their need for sympathy and attention by claiming illness.

Cancer, to be specific.

“Mr. C” and I are well acquainted.  You see, God has, in what appears to be a rarity for Him, given me a crystal clear picture of what will happen if I start smoking.  Every member of my family who smoked is dead.  Specifically, they died from Lung Cancer.  Father.  Grandmother.  Grandfather.  All dead.  All dead from Lung Cancer.  The members of my family who didn’t smoke?  Well, the youngest of the ones who died did so in their 80′s. (ironically enough, smoke inhalation was involved)  I have one family member who has rivaled Keith Richards for heaviest lifetime drug consumption, but she’s still ticking along in her mid-80s.  Why?  The one drug she hasn’t touched (at least in my lifetime) is cigarrettes.

You can imagine that I’m a little sensitive when the word “Cancer” comes into play.

So when I hear that a friend is diagnosed with Cancer, and I hear that this person is saying their goodbyes.  I make it a point to show up.  I care.  I know, first hand, what it is like to comfort the dying.  I know what it’s like to say goodbye for the last time.  Saying “it sucks” is an insult to black holes everywhere.

So we say our goodbyes, and in the process, I manage to wear another set of treads down my own personal version of “Memory Lane from Hell”.  I see the faces, I remember the last conversations, I feel it all over again.  Some people are sad, but I’m past that part.  I get into full-blown pissed-off-at-the-world-and-want-to-make-you-feel-my-pain mode.  I open the door to the darkest parts of my soul and let the demons run wild for a little while.  In non-dramatic parlance, I am not a very nice person when I go through this.

As bad as all of that sounds, it is nothing.  It is something I will gladly bear for a friend, because at that moment, my friend needs me.  Needs to know that someone is going to stand by them to the bitter end.  It is an act of love, and an act of faith to comfort the dying.  It is one of the things in life that allows a human being to unequivicably declare their friendship, their compassion, and their love for another human being.

It is also an act of trust.

In this case, a trust that was ultimately betrayed.  It seems that she is not as sick as she has let on.

I would like to say that I am going to be the bigger man and not vent any hatred or bitterness about this.  After all, in the long range scheme of things, what does it really matter?  I could take solace in the fact that someone who I called a friend is NOT dying.  I could “find the pony”.

There is an old story about a boy bounding downstairs on Christmas morning only to find the living room brimming over with horse manure. Undaunted, the boy exclaimed, “There must be a pony!” Wrapped within an unfailing youthful optimism, the boy could only see something good in what was an otherwise dire situation.

Instead, I’m going to let it out.  There is no reason for me to hold this in to make someone feel better who has abused my trust in this way.

You (and you know who “You” are) are dead to me already.  You’re not a person with thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams of their own.  You are an abstract.  You are an Internet-fucking-cliche, and know that as long as you continue to draw breath, whether it be for one minute, or one millennium, there will be someone on this Earth who feels nothing for you but contempt.

The great thing about contempt is that is eventually evolves into complete apathy.  Not the “oh gee, that’s a shame” apathy when you read a news report about some stranger dying in a horrible accident, but rather the “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire” kind of apathy.  If you were sentenced to the electric chair and I won the lottery to pull the switch on your pathetic self, I would be popping open a can of beer before you stopped shaking and looking for a ride to the nearest bar to celebrate my service to the community.

Don’t be confused.  I don’t hate you at all.  I hope you live a long life with only yourself as company.  I hope you get to walk down the same kind of memory lane that I do, and see the faces of the dead and dying as they leave you in this life, one-by-one.  I hope every step on that path feels like burning coals and that when your own time comes, that you face it knowing that everyone who ever cared about you has already moved on either physically or emotionally and that you die utterly alone.

On second thought, you aren’t that important to me.  I’m going to focus more on enjoying my own life.

Let’s get it out of the way, shall we?

Most of the commercials were “meh”.  Budweiser had the usual cute animal spots.  GoDaddy showed off their 12-year-old sense of humor. (and believe me.  I respect that.)  Doritos and the “Crystal Ball” spot had the best commercial…

What really got me was Cash4Gold.com.  Ok, it was funny to dig up Ed McMahon’s bones, and nice of them to give Stanley Burrell (aka MC Hammer) a ride from his day job at the car wash in order to pitch for C4G and remind us all of how old we have become since the last time either of them were relevant.  But c’mon.  “Mail us your vaulables in a clear plastic envelope and we’ll send you a check for how much we think your jewelry is worth”???  Seriously?  Mail them gold and silver and trust them to cut you a check for a fair amount.

Really?

I know this will come as a shock to most of you, but apparently this is one giant scam!

I recently came across an article called “Confessions of a Cash4Gold Employee“  The article itself is poorly written, which tells me that there is a better than average chance that it’s legit.  After all, if you were very smart, would you have gone to work for Cash4Gold.com in the first place?

I especially liked this example given.

“For ex: Sally Smith receives a check for $27.86 for a Rolex watch(which we don’t issue value for), a class ring, a ring with diamond chips, a pair of earrings with emeralds, as well as a few sterling silver pieces, and maybe a few items that were really of no value”

Ok… I appreciate that the economy sucks.  But seriously, anyone who sends a freakin’ ROLEX to these people deserves what they get.   The author goes on to describe how customer service routinely doubles or triples the amount of money given to people who call in to complain.  After all, paying an additional 50 bucks for the Rolex is still a net profit for the Cash4Gold folks.

Of course, since the “refiner’s kit” they send you is insured for a maximum value of 100 dollars, it is easier for them just to say “It got lost in transit” and have the insurance company pay you off.  Predictably enough, this is apparently a common practice at C4G as well.

Don’t be a sucker, kids…

I found this little nugget in an article written by Owen Thomas over at Valleywag.

It seems that LiveJournal might be going the way of the carrier pigeon.  Their parent company, Sup, a Moscow-based company, has laid off 20 of LJ’s 28 employees with no warning or severance and blamed it all on a “downturn in the economy”.

The article goes on to talk about other social networking sites that may be going out of business in the near future, but I’d like to take a look at a larger concept.

How do websites justify the ridiculous amounts of money that they “earn”?

Advertising?  Seriously, do you know anyone who has ever clicked an ad banner?  I have a hard time finding someone who doesn’t have ad blocking software integrated with their browser.  I don’t blame web companies for cashing in on this phenomenon.   If someone offered me a million bucks per year to put ads all over my website, I’d do it too.  What I’m wondering is why companies pay incredible sums of money to advertise on the web or on TV.  Ad revenue is the driving force behind things like

• The Tostito’s Fiesta Bowl (ok, EVERY bowl game)
• The BCS in general
• 2.6 million dollars for a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl
• News Corp. (Fox) paying 580 million dollars for Myspace
  
• Google
• Stadium Naming Rights

I understand advertising.  I understand the business need to get your name out to the public in order to increase interest in your product.  However, the dollar amounts here are far beyond the point of getting any kind of reasonable return on investment.

Citigroup paid 400 million dollars for naming rights at the New York Mets’ new stadium. Wait a minute.  Do you mean the same Citigroup that recently took billions of dollars in bailout money from the Federal government?  The same folks who are begging for dollars from Uncle Sugar are spending 400 million bucks to name a baseball stadium?  (the same baseball stadium that was paid for by taxpayer dollars?)  The same Citigroup that paid millions to have their name attached to the annual Rose Bowl game?

I have a special message for all of you Madison Avenue types out there.  We don’t watch 99% of the commercials that you throw out there.  Thanks to the two greatest inventions of all time, the TiVO and the remote control, we either fast forward through commercials when we are watching a recorded show, or flip channels to something else while commercials are running on live TV.  You’re paying millions of dollars for ad time that viewers spend going to the restroom, making a sandwich, walking the dog, changing the channel, or outright fast-forwarding past.  Web advertisers?  If your ad is seen by a million users (and that is a seriously optimistic case, given ad blocking software), let’s say that you get a click-through rate of 1% (according to this article, the actual click-through rate was 0.5% back in 1998)  That leaves us with 10,000 people who clicked your ad.  Of that, let’s say that 10% of those users actually buy your widget. (The number in the article is 12%)  That’s 1,000 sales or a 0.1% rate of success for your advertising.

So, using that number as our basis, let’s look at a Super Bowl ad.   Last year, the Super Bowl was viewed by a record audience of 97.5 million people.  If we use the figure of 3 million dollars for airtime and tack on another couple of million for other costs (actors, filming, ad exec salary, etc) we have a nice round figure of 5 million dollars.  0.1% of 97.5 million is 97,500 people who purchased your good or service because of your Super Bowl ad.  Let’s round that up to an even 100,000 people.  5 million dollars for 100,000 sales comes out to 50 bucks per “widget”.   Do you know anyone who would pay 50 bucks for a case of Budweiser?  Pepsi?  Tostitos?  Pizza Hut?

Pets dot-freakin-com?

If I were an advertiser, I would focus my efforts on being “easy-to-find”.  I’d make focus on an online presence and make sure that if someone searched the web for “widgets” that my company would be one of the first one’s found.  To that end, I can understand how Google makes a ton of money.  Search engines are ideal for advertising because people are looking for you.  Paying a ton of money to expose your company to an indifferent (at best) audience is not a good investment.

Oh, and for the record, I still have no freakin’ clue what insight.com is or why they have their own bowl game, and I have absolutely no desire to find out.

I caught the tail end of this on XM’s Liquid Metal channel tonight and I laughed so damned hard that I just had to find this online and share it with you all.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Austrian Death Machine with one of the world’s best loved Christmas carols.