Perception

We would all prefer to think that we see the world as it is.  We would like to think that our own viewpoint makes sense.  We would like to think that our eyes would never lie to us.  Yeah, we'd like that, wouldn't we?

I was on my way home from work Monday night when it occurred to me that I was going to be able to watch the national championship game on television.  I hadn't given the game much thought until that point, as the matchup was entirely uninteresting to me.  But I had a quick day at work, so why not?  My brother and I headed to Brann's in Northville and watched the most boring championship game in the history of major college sports.  That fiasco was difficult to watch.  I'm not kidding.

Upon arriving at the bar, we were greeted by a young lady who informed us that either she or Sarah would be taking care of us.  Given that we're both heterosexual males, we then did what heterosexual males do - judgment.  We noted that the young lady's face wasn't exactly model material, but the money for her new boobs had been well spent.  Then Sarah arrived and had those crazy nutjob eyes that I tend to enjoy from time to time and we forgot about the first girl.

Yesterday I rolled out of bed at 2pm and felt like getting some lunch.  I had purchased a Groupon for a little bar in Livonia some time ago and I needed to use it, so that seemed like a good place to go and have a bite to eat.  Once again I took my brother along to try the place out.  After we had lunch and a pitcher of beer, we quickly realized that we had nothing better to do.  So we went to Mixx in Novi to have a couple more beers before calling it a day.

I had been to this particular bar in Novi once before and found the 'talent' to be quite outstanding.  Tight-fitting shirts, very short shorts... you get the picture.  It was shift change time when we arrived, so the young lady who poured our first round of drinks was gone shortly thereafter.  We saw two other girls arriving and getting ready at the far end of the bar.  My brother noticed quickly that one of them was the same girl who had greeted us at Brann's before the football game on Monday.  I'll be damned.

As the afternoon wore on, we noticed that Motor City Trivia was going to be played at 9pm.  We've tried our hand at the trivia game at Aubree's in Northville a few times.  What we generally find is that my little brother doesn't know much of anything and I don't know anything about television shows.  Quite a few of the questions seem to revolve around television for some reason.  Plus there is always at least one table with nine or ten hardcore trivia geeks.  So we always lose.  At a new venue though... maybe things could be different.

We decided to stick around and see what was what.  There wound up being five teams in the contest.  We won both rounds.  Kickass.

As we were drinking and chatting and otherwise relaxing, we once again turned to that time-honored pastime of heterosexual males - judgment.  Through the course of the evening, that young lady became quite a bit more attractive somehow.  Now we're all familiar with the old 'beer goggles' routine and such, and that certainly explains part of what was going on.  The uniform was another helpful factor.  It was far more revealing than her uniform at Brann's had been.  Better to show off the silicone investment and whatnot.  Best part though - her name is Anya and she's from Russia.  Yep.  That helps.  I'm not sure why but it just does.

It's all about perception.  I happen to think Russian girls are awesome, so she became more attractive to me without actually becoming more attractive.  Plus she's actually a pretty cool chick, as it turns out.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that now I understand how Alabama fans could enjoy that butt ugly football game on Monday night.  To those people the Crimson Tide are their sexy Russians, but to the rest of us the Tide looked more like this. 

And LSU looked like... I don't know man...

Merry Christmas to all of you, plus a few thoughts about time

As tends to be the case, I went to my parents' house for Christmas dinner this year.  My brothers and I give gifts to my sister's kids and my sister's kids give gifts to the three of us.  (We stopped exchanging gifts among the adult portion of the family a few years back.  Great move, as it turns out.)  So the evening went fairly well.  Mom made lasagna.  Madasyn and Darek got some new toys.  Joe, Jake, and Nick got some new trinkets from Santa's Secret Shop at Raupp Elementary.  We drank a little whiskey and shared a few laughs, all the while knowing that the whole point is to spend time with family and appreciate the gift that all mankind received from the original Christmas.

We also place a traditional phone call to my grandmother.  This would be my father's mother, for the genealogists among you.  My mother and father were married shortly before I was born.  Then came my sister a few years later.  Then there was an unpleasant divorce, followed by my father skipping town to avoid paying child support.  The world was quite a bit different in the early 80's, I suppose.  In the modern world the states have treaties to deal with this sort of thing, but there was a time when a fella could settle in Arizona and avoid paying for his kids in Michigan.

Despite whatever shortcomings my biological father may have possessed, his mother has always been a different sort of character.  A better sort of character, in my estimation.  After my mother remarried and my two little brothers came into the world, my grandmother simply had two more grandsons.  Of course they weren't related to her in any way, but who cares, right?  In point of fact, Jake and Nick have probably had more contact with her than I have over the years.  In any case though, they were her grandchildren and anyone who said otherwise could go straight to Hell.

I wish I could say that I can relate, but I can't.  It's a foreign concept to me, but I'm glad because she's a wonderful person.  My brothers are fortunate to have her in their lives.  After I was divorced from my ex-wife, I wanted nothing to do with her or her family.  There's absolutely zero chance that I would knock up some other broad and then the ex-wife's parents would see the offspring as their grandchildren.  But that's the way it went for ole Grandma Tigue.  My stepfather even takes his turn when the annual phone call occurs and the phone gets passed around.  She loves him as a son-in-law, even though he's... whatever... the dude who married her son's ex-wife.

So anyhow, she and I were chatting about things that have gone on during the past year.  Work, life, etc.  Since I'm heading to Ireland next autumn, she took some time to share her thougts about what I'll see and what I should do.  Then the philosophical part about time came around.  She said that, as she has gotten older, the little memories have become more prominent.  It seems like just yesterday that the three girls - Robin (my sister), Lauren, and Andrea - were sitting by her Christmas tree and opening their gifts.  We haven't spent Christmas together as a family in at least twenty years, but she remembers those days as vividly as ever.

During our conversation, it occurred to me that she's exactly right.  The older you get, the more time becomes a negotiable quantity.  When you're young and it's all in front of you, you remember the things that happened last week or last month.  Somewhere along the way you start to remember the things that happened last year or the year before.  Eventually you end up remembering the things that happened ten or twenty years ago.

I'm not nearly as advanced in years as my grandmother, but I'm seeing the same pattern that she described.  The last few years of my life - whatever.  But I remember quite disctinctly the Christmas mornings when Jake and Nick would come into my room at 6am and tell me that Santa had been to the house.  We would walk upstairs and look in the living room, then wait for Mom and Dad to come out and join us.  Nobody cared about the mundane details of life.  There was no thought of politics or finance or anything like that.  There was just a family gathered around a tree, enjoying the moment.

Now we enjoy those moments through my niece and nephew, but my siblings and I have grown to forget how simple the world can really be.  We each have our own brand of bullshit to endure, but for one day each year we can leave it all behind.  For one day, time can stop.  If I could write the script for the future, I would insert more of those occasions where we can all stop and appreciate the little moments.  I'll bet quite a few of you would do the same.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Things I Get a Kick Out Of - Volume Four

Volume Four - Ambushing the UPS Guy

Nah, he doesn't look like that.  He's actually kinda tubby for a dude that hops in and out of a truck all day.  He has a scruffy blond beard and beady little eyes.  Sort of like a young Santa Claus before all his hair turns white or whatever.  I just happen to like that chair in the background of this picture.  (Admit it - you didn't notice the chair.)

Anyhow, on to the topic of the UPS guy.  I don't get a ton of packages delivered, but I do receive my fair share.  Recently I had to buy a new bluetooth headset to use while I'm working.  New rules coming down from the feds.  Who'dathunkit?  What's funny to me is that the truck drivers of the country are far more qualified to hold a phone and still drive, given that they get a lot of practice.  Now they're facing a ban but the rest of you jagoffs out there can still yap away on your phones and cause accidents as much as you like.  If handheld phones are a safety risk, then ban them in all vehicles.  Morons.

So anyhow, my old bluetooth headset fell in the toilet one night.  It wasn't securely fastened to my ear and it started to slip as I was brushing my teeth.  When I reached up to stop it from falling off my ear, I knocked it right off my ear.  Nice big bathroom... plenty of safe landing areas available... right into the toilet.  By the time I got it out, the thing was toasted.  I meant to buy another one at the time but just never got around to it.  Until this week.

My UPS guy is an odd fella.  On the occasions when I've been home to receive a delivery, I've noticed that he rings the doorbell once and then runs like a bat out of hell.  His truck is usually already around the corner from my condo by the time I hit the front door.  The FedEx guy waits for me to answer the door.  The mailman waits for me to answer the door.  The UPS guy just rings and goes.

I received an e-mail yesterday indicating that my new headset would be delivered today, via UPS.  Game on, mofos.  From my living room upstairs, I can see parts of the road that encircles my condo complex.  Basically there is a ring of buildings surrounding a pond, then a road surrounding the ring of buildings.  Between the buildings, in a few spots, I can see cars passing by if I happen to look at the right time.  I know, from receiving previous packages and from reviewing the tracking notices for other packages that were delivered in my absence, that the UPS guy usually shows up between 1pm and 2pm.

I went upstairs at 1pm and began my stakeout.  Fortunately for me, the dude arrived shortly thereafter.  I'm not sure that I would have had the patience to wait all the way until 2pm.  I spotted the brown truck coming around the north side of the road.  I headed downstairs.  I awaited the doorbell.  No doorbell.  Apparently I wasn't the only one getting a package delivered today.  Go figure.

Then the moment came.  I heard the truck's brakes squeal.  I looked out the peephole in my front door.  I saw the UPS guy walk up the stairs to my door.  I saw him set down the box before ringing the bell, just the way he plans his quick escape.  Why bother holding onto the box when he has no intention of handing me the box, right?  I saw him reach to his left and press the button.  As soon as the bell rang, I swung the door open and scared the shit out of that little bastard.  He was in the process of turning to run back to his truck.  When he heard the door open, he started to turn back and look.  But his momentum was already taking him toward the steps.  In a moment of awkward confusion, the dude almost took a tumble.  He stayed upright though.  And he looked silly.  I laughed at him and grabbed my package.

Ambush - successful.

SOPA, Stop IP, and so forth...

It appears that our Republican babysitters in Congress, with the assistance of our Democrat babysitters in Congress, are ready to pass the two bills mentioned in the title of this post.  They're going to stamp out online piracy and save $100 billion for the American economy every year.  Except they're full of shit.  Even if one accepts the premise that online piracy costs American companies this much money, it's an illogical leap of faith to assume that the same amount is lost from the economy.

For example, it's entirely conceivable that a given internet user who downloads an illegal copy of a movie was not inclined to purchase the movie in the first place.  His motivation for watching the movie may well have been the fact that he found a way to obtain it for free.  Net cost to the economy - zero.

Perhaps a different internet user would have paid to see the movie though.  Surely his illegal download represents a loss to the economy, right?  Maybe, but I doubt it.  Once he spent the ten bucks or whatever it costs to see a movie he would have had ten bucks less to spend on something else.  His illegal download would represent a loss to the movie company, but the net cost to the economy would be close to zero in most cases.

So they may as well drop the canard about money being lost to foreign countries and call the act what it is - an effort to protect companies who write big checks to people in high places.  This is not an unworthy cause, by the way.  Property rights are a fundamental building block of the American system and intellectual property is every bit as legitimate as physical property.  If piracy is a problem for American businesses, then the government has a duty to provide laws and remedies for those businesses.  They're going about it like morons though, as they tend to do.

Theft is an act committed by one party against another.  It should be handled as a matter between those two parties and nobody else.  Providing a way for websites to be shut down for speculative reasons is a disaster for those of us who think of 'freedom' as more than a catchy slogan.  Many of you probably either weren't reading my blog at the time or simply don't recall every load that I've hauled, but I recall very specifically a Christmas trip through Wyoming almost four years ago.  Yep, I drove through Meeteetse and I was reminded of Beavis.  So I found a clip and posted it.  Apparently this was a copyright violation though, as I was told a few days later.

Herein we see an example similar to that of my first hypothetical downloader.  I didn't cost the American economy a single cent and I didn't cost the owner of the material a single cent.  Posting that clip didn't keep me from buying the movie.  I already had the DVD and I never intended to buy it again.  If anything, maybe my post planted a seed of thought in someone else's mind to go and buy it.  Free advertising, if you will.  But Paramount saw things differently and made YouTube remove the video.  Apparently some people in Congress think that YouTube was complicit in piracy as a result of my actions.  Let's just say I disagree.

As I think back on the 1,300+ posts that I've made here, I seem to recall posting a lot of photos, videos, links and other assorted material.  Quite frankly I have no idea whether any of it was copyrighted or not.  I don't have a legal department working on that stuff because I really don't think it matters.  This blog is not a money-making venture and I'm not a significant writer, so I assume that nobody actually cares what I post here.  What if they did care though?  By virtue of hosting my blog with what may be infringing content on some of the pages, should the whole Blogger.com platform be considered a rogue site?  Apparently some people in Congress think so.  Let's just say I disagree.

Just when you think it's safe to go in the water and trust that the Goddamned Republicans have gotten the message, they go and remind you of what they really are - the other side of the Democrat coin.  After three years of unintended (and/or intended in some cases) consequences resulting from every big government idea that the Democrats could throw at us, one would think that the "conservative" party would have learned something.  Nope.  Screwing with the internet would lead to an endless cascade of unintended consequences and apparently these jagoffs are ready to charge right ahead.  Not all of them, incidentally, but enough of them.

Some British dude can explain concisely in twenty minutes what our own elected representatives here in the states are unable to comprehend.  Funny, ain't it?