My Sick Mind

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. - Carl Sagan I'm hearing a lot of whining about the current state of energy prices and their related articles like food and anything that has to be moved like airplanes and fat people. Gasoline is close to $3.90 a gallon here and I still see a lot of people driving like mental patients on holiday and single people in vehicles that could carry a soccer team. I wonder what it will take to get people to change their wasteful lifestyle, then I realize that we're a "morbidly obese" society and nothing that made us that way got us to change, so I suppose it's going to be business as usual and we'l...

For those of you who may not know (or care), I think Mariah Carey is the hottest woman on the planet. The fact that she cannot throw a baseball (in 4-inch heels, no less) does nothing to change my opinion of her.

BOSTON - Dunkin' Donuts has pulled an online advertisement featuring Rachael Ray after complaints that a fringed black-and-white scarf that the celebrity chef wore in the ad offers symbolic support for Muslim extremism and terrorism. The coffee and baked goods chain said the ad that began appearing online May 7 was pulled over the past weekend because "the possibility of misperception detracted from its original intention to promote our iced coffee ." Seriously. Sometimes, I think people have too much time on their hands and too much influence. Rachel Ray - security threat. Critics, including conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, complained that the scarf wrapped around her looked like a kaffiyeh, the traditional Arab headdress. Critics who fueled online complaints about the ad in blogs say such scarves have come to symbolize Muslim extremism and terrorism . Michelle Malkin. You remember her . She's the nut that made Absolut pull its ad because she thought i...

Schadenfreude is enjoyment taken from the misfortune of someone else. German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno defined it as "the largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate " . The Chinese call it xìngzāi lèhuò, or 幸災樂禍 - an old idiom that directly translates to " enjoying other's calamity and laughing at other's misfortune ". Yesterday , we discussed (well, I discussed) the opportunity in power tools brought about by the newfound gas-siphoning habit. Now, we will discuss ( I will discuss) another opportunity to take advantage of the coming apocalypse. Spam. It's more than junk e-mail. Hormel foods . What? What's a Hormel, you may ask. Hormel makes Spam, a breakfast treat enjoyed by millions of people who don't otherwise care about what they're putting into their body. So, why not take advantage of others' hardships and make some dough on that pasty meat-f...

I check every morning when I go to the parking lot to get in my car to go to work. Since I live in a condo, and my place is on the opposite side of the parking lot (thanks, ex-wife) it's impossible to know if someone has been fiddling with my car while I sleep. So far, I've not noticed that there is anything missing. The soaring price of crude oil has turned gas tanks into a cache of valuable booty, and repair shops have replaced several tanks punctured or drilled by thieves thirsting for the nearly $4-a-gallon fuel inside. "That's the new fad," said Dale Forton, the co-owner of Dearborn Auto Tech in Detroit. "I'd never seen it before gas got up this high." While gas station drive-off's and siphoning are far more common methods of stealing gas, reports of tank and line puncturing are starting to trickle into police departments and repair shops across the country. "Gas is liquid gold these days, and has been for the last year-and-a-half,...

"The new Indiana Jones movie opened this weekend. Indy's not much of a treasure hunter anymore. In the new movie, he goes out to his mailbox to look for his stimulus check." - David Letterman I know you’re dying to know, so the official mileage count from Monday’s bike ride was 76 miles. To put it in perspective (if that’s possible) it’s roughly the distance between Columbus and Dayton, Ohio or from Baltimore, Maryland to Wilmington, Delaware. Of course, that means I’d be stuck in Dayton or Wilmington, which would make the return trip both agonizing and necessary. I know you already think I’m a little nutty, so I don’t feel the need to explain. I suppose misery loves company, as do bike riders. We had a 5-man group pushing and pulling each other along. It was a nice ride through some of southern New Jersey’s farmland, most of which is downwind from the nuclear plant. It was my longest ride of the season, and the first in some warm weather. The temperature got into the ...

I know most of you are feeling this gasoline price thing much more than we "lucky" people here in New Jersey, but even at 3.759 bicycle transport is a good idea. I thought it was a good idea last year when the price was 2-something, so I'm not a good person to ask. For part 3 of Holiday Photo Weekend, I'll take you on a tiny tour of my corner of the world that we call West Deptford Township. That's the sign at the local WAWA, which isn't actually in West Deptford. It's in Woodbury Heights, which probably doesn't mean a lot more to you than West Deptford, but if you lived here, you'd know the difference. Today's jaunt was one of my regular trips, to the fitness center in town called River Winds. It's a 6-mile ride from home. It's about 7 years old, and you have to be a township resident to join. The fee is about $16 a month which makes it hard to beat, fitness-center-wise. There are also athletic fields that the local youth leagues us...