I went to home depot today. Do you know what I saw? They are selling picnic tables, prebuilt, for $25. I couldn’t believe it. That seems like a really good price. Makes me wish I had a back yard to put one in, so I could go outside once a year and reminisce over that time I got a good deal on a picnic table at home depot.

I just want life to be less interesting. Just in general. I am NOT looking forward to the next 4 years. Just everyday, waking up to ANOTHER outragious, absurd, and infuriating tweet from an old man who just says things for attention but also holds power over the entire country, not to mention our military and nuclear codes. He might have a temper tantrum one day, and just nuke toronto. Just start WWIII with Canada on a whim.

I’m not saying that specifically will happen, but I’m also not NOT saying it will happen. You just never know whats next when a racist man being pulled by equal parts dementia and narcissism is pulling the strings with the emotional maturity of a fucking toddler.

You know what Biden said today? No, really, do you know what current sitting president Joe Biden said today? Me neither. I haven’t a clue what he said. I assume he may have ordered a sandwich on rye bread around noon. Just guessing. I very well could be 100% wrong. And that’s kind of the point. Biden is boring. That’s why I like I like Biden. There’s no drama.

That IS weird!

…that you voluntarily use facebook I mean.

Man…now you make me hopeful that Obama has seen the Game Grumps impression of Obama.

Hey, if he wants to watch star trek, and it makes him want to build a rocket, and fly around in space, and leave this planet, go for it!

Whatever gets him off my planet.

The actor? Well of coarse he would watch movies! He’s in the biz!

What if I’m both? I love Mike Tyson, and can’t stand the paul brothers.

I’m more worried about someone using AI to harvest the power of all these smart devices to record our daily lives in real time.

Like your samsung tv records what you watch, while you watch. Your samsung phone records gps of where you go, when you go, how often you go. The little voice assistant on android records your speech paterns, and is able to create a voice profile of you.

Your laptop/pc records what you do in real time, even with no software installed on your pc. Even if you use linux, because they’re logging this data outside your control via the link between you and your isp.

The grocery store records what you buy, when you buy it, how often you buy it.

And all these companies start mingling, and sharing data between them. Which as of 2019 is totally legal. They build personalized profiles on you, using AI to collect all the data from the various sources, and ties it all in to one profile. So even though best buy shouldn’t have any reason to know what day you got married, it knows because your wife registered 15 years ago at some bridal registry. Now best buy may not have any use for that info, but its part of your profile. And now everything in your life is documented, profiled, archived, and shared.

And it’s not crazy. Most of this has been happening for decades. The only part missing is the AI to gather these individual profiles, and tie them into one collective profile, and seek information out to add to it.

What’s your shoe size? AI adds data from that time you shopped at footlocker. What’s your phone number? That was added from AT&T. Where do you work? That was gathered from Verizon when you used your place of work to get a discount 2 years ago, and your daily GPS records confirm. What’s your mothers maiden name? That was added from a website you used this as a password recovery option on. Whats your pets names? This was taken from your vet.

All this info and data. Just out there seperately, and now AI can gather it, build a profile on everybody, track you in real time, and not have any oversight or responsibility because nobody is in charge of it. It’s just data shared around.

Meanwhile you wonder about cartoons.

I’m 41 now. But I can remember being 14 in 9th grade. And I was sitting next to a window in math class. The teacher was writing on the board a math equation and explaining how to solve it. I was looking out the window.

After 5 minutes of explaining the concepts of how to solve it, he noticed I hadn’t looked at the board once.

He decided to try to publicly humiliate me by asking me to solve, with the idea being I hadn’t been paying attention. So when he asked someone to solve, and then called my name, without even glancing at the board once, I said “52”. He was taken back, because it wasn’t even a moment of hesitation. I didn’t even glance once at the board.

He thought I was somehow cheating, and got angry. He yelled “How could you possibly know that??? Is someone outside that window helping you???” And comes to look out the window.

So me, being a sarcastic, and now insulted teenager said “Yeah. I got a got man on the inside who’s bugged the room, running special ops surveillance of your teaching agenda. He’s using flag signals to feed me the answers. And when it’s time for gym class, you should see how he’s going to help me cheat running laps. It’s pretty elaborate. He works with the CIA.”

He storms over and sticks his head out the window. I THOUGHT it was implied that I was calling him an idiot for suggesting I was somehow cheating by looking outside. What he was looking for, I have no idea. Every student was losing their shit because they all got the joke. Somehow the teacher was on something else. Then he closes the window shades.

So he makes me stay for detention and calls my dad to school after the school day is over. School lets out at 2:30. My dad doesn’t leave work until 3pm. Which means he doesn’t get to my school until about 3:30. This whole time, him waiting an hour, furiously twitching waiting for my dad to get there. My dad walks in, and before he cal even say a word, not even hello, my teacher is like a chicken clucking it’s head off.

“MR (last name), YOUR SON IS BEING VERY DISRUPTIVE IN MY CLASS TODAY!!! DO YOU KNOW WHAT HE DID? DO YOOOUUU KNOOOWWW WHAT HE DIIIIIID???”

Keep in mind, it was the late 90s. Cell phones existed, but not even most adults had them yet. And no kids had them. So there would be no feasible way for me to contact a factory worker during the work day, or the drive over. It should have been well understood that I’d have not had contact with him.

And my dad was already annoyed by his tone. He says “Well sure I know what he did. I just got here, you haven’t told me anything, why WOULDN’T I know what’s going on?”

And that just pissed off my teacher more. He says “EARLIER TODAY I WAS TEACHING CLASS, AND I WROTE A FORMULA OUT IN CLASS!!! YOUR SON DIDN’T EVEN LOOK!!! THEN HE JUST LUCKY GUESSED AND GOT IT RIGHT!!! HE WAS LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW, AND SAID CIA AGENTS WERE HELPING HIM IN GYM CLASS!!! I HAD TO CLOSE THE BLINDS!!!”

So my dad, knowing I had to focus on multiple things at once, just said “What were you looking at?” And I said “a cat”. And he says “and did you guess his math equation?” I said “No. He explained the concept for five minutes. I understood the answer in 30 seconds. Then I was bored for 4 and a half minutes.”

Teacher is now back on his bullshit. He writes another, different problem on the board, using the same concepts. He asks me to solve.

So I go up to the board. What he didn’t know was I went to the computer lab instead of lunch. I wrote down this long elaborate calculus problem. Then spent the rest of the day memorising it. Not how to solve it. Just how to write it down. And what the answer was. It’s like an actor reciting lines about topics they have no clue about. They’ll sound right, because they are, but they as an individual will have no idea why.

So he’s just written down that similiar algebra problem. And I walk right past him, and start writing this beast out on the board next to it. I’m just writing from memory, and all the while secretly glancing at his board to solve in my head. I almost screwed up the memorization for a moment, because I was trying to do too much, but they didn’t notice.

So now I’ve written this long piece of shit math out, far beyond a 9th grade level, probably on a masters degree level. Then walked over to his math problem and write “22” as the answer.

Then I said “I’ve solved your equation. Can you solve mine?”

And he just stared and stared and stared. And eventually said “Mr (last name), I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

On my way out I wrote “48” under my memorized math problem. So that if he tried to solve it later, even if he fot help to do so, and got the right answer he’d see I already got it long before him.

On the way home my dad said “you have no idea what the answer was to the long math you wrote out, do you?” I said “I wrote 48.” And he said “ok, but you have no idea how to solve that on your own, do you?” And I said “Nope.”

I should just post a new topic there, just called AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

And the body of the message would be a picture of a clown, a picture of some fecies, and a gif of fire burning everything.

That’s the general vibe of todays politics.

It would have made more sense if they were of Japanese ancestry, but still an American citizen who grew up during WWII era.

Although, if that HAD been the case, they wouldn’t be posting here. Because they’d be dead.

…I’m just now realizing that enough time has passed that statement doesn’t have the same impact it should. I’m not talking about old age. I’m talking about how the united states would gather AMERICAN CITIZENS who have comitted no crimes whatsoever, send them to camps, and have them mass killed/arrested. Everybody talks about Hitlers camps, nobody talks about America doing the EXACT SAME THING, ROUGHLY AT THE SAME TIME!!!

Oh, me? No, I’m not of Japanese ancestry. I just like calling out Americas bullshit, because so many people like to think it’s some high and mighty better than thou place which can do no wrong. It was founded by slave holders who claimed all men are created equally. It was then held for about 150 years before women were seen as anything more than property who weren’t allowed to vote. It routinely throughout history told it’s citizens what it means to be normal, and a real American. Anything else was considered unpatriotic, and unpatriotic people were the enemy. Do the McCarthy years sound firmiliar?

And now, we stand on the doorstep of a new presidency, of a man who self identifies as a fascist dictator, who has held public admiration for places like North Korea, and Russia, for their leaders ability to go unchecked. It would be one thing if this were a sneaky coup. Some one individual somehow someway snuck his way into power which is so often the case with dictators throughout history. But no. This was chosen. This was the American electoral collage giving him a landslide win, AND getting the popular vote. America wants this. America wants to go down this same path that we have gone down many times before, and each generation eventually comes to the conclusion that it’s bad.

And no group is immune. You can’t say “This is only white men who voted for him”. No, this is men, women, whites, blacks, latinos, arabs, asains, everybody. This is EVERYBODY. We have chosen a road of fascism. We have told the world “THIS is what America is.”

And for that, no. I will not consider myself a patriot who stands for the values and beliefs of this country, when those beliefs are that we all should bow down and accept our place in life.

FUCK

THAT.

…I feel like I want to counterpoint, but I got nothin. My brain instead want to combine Apollo 13, and that movie where Tom Hanks is stuck on an island talking to a beach ball.

But also, I want it to be a liscensed Gilligan’s Island parody. I want it to be like he’s stuck on the island for an hour before he finds Gilligan. Then he realizes there’s 7 other people who’ve been watching him this whole time. They were like “Oh, we’re not going near that guy. He’s fucking NUTS! You see that? He cut his hand, just to make a handprint on that volleyball in his own BLOOD. Now he talks to it, and argues with it, and has sex with it…this dude is nuts.”

And he comes running up like “HEYGUYSYAGOTTAHELPMEI’MANASTRONAUTWHOFELLFROMTHESKYANDMYOTHERTWOASTRONAUTCOPILOTSDIEDINTHECRASHANDNOWIVEBEENEATINGBAMBOOANDTALKINGTOAVOLLEYBALLFORSIXWEEKSBECAUSEITSLONELYHERE!!!”

And Gilligan would be like “Did you catch that, skipper?”

And the skipper would say “No Gilligan. I didn’t. I don’t speak crazy!”

And Gilligan would say "He said…

HEY GUYS YA GOTTA HELP ME I’M AN ASTRONAUT WHO FELL FROM THE SKY AND MY OTHER TWO ASTRONAUT COPILOTS DIED IN THE CRASH AND NOW IVE BEEN EATING BAMBOO AND TALKING TO A VOLLEYBALL FOR SIX WEEKS BECAUSE IT’S LONELY HERE."

And skipper would hit Gilligan with his hat and say “That’s not what he said, Gilligan! How would you ever understand him???”

And Tom Hanks would say “No, he got it right. Word for word actually.”

And the Gilligan would say “See skipper??? I understood!”

And skipper would roll his eyes and say “Oh, yes. I forgot. YOU speak crazy…”

Then the professor would pop out of a bush, and say “Oh, hey guys. Just wanted you to know I’ve invented a fully automated sex robot from nothing but coconuts and fish.”

While Mr Howel is hurrily running across screen like “Dibs!!!”

My grandmother died last year at the age of 103. I’m 41. I can remember being a kid, before she became too old to maintain the house she raised 4 kids in. It was a BIG house. It had a HUGE backyard, that as a kid I didn’t have any appriciation for how massive that place was. Now, today, I remember the 80s, and think “wait…was my grandpa rich before he died?” I was 5 when he died, but he picked out the house in the 1960s, that she then lived alone in after he died. All her children were adults with their own children by then.

The end result is, she said to my grandpa “I don’t care what you do inside the house. I don’t care how you decorate. I don’t care what furniture you buy. I just want a comfortable bed, and that backyard is MINE.” My grandpa, who HATED maintaining the outdoors, readily agreed to this. It meant she would do the yardwork that men of the time were mostly expected to do. While he got the house to himself (mostly). She used the backyard to grow a garden. A big garden. Lived in the city, but you’d swear this was a farmland with no animals.

Everytime I’d go over to her house as a kid, I’d run to the garden and pick off beans. These long pod style green beans. And these other green beans which were more narrow.

I’d eat them right where they were growing. And every time my dad would be like “HEY!!! THAT’S NOT YOUR GARDEN!!! YOU CAN’T JUST EAT THINGS FROM THE GARDEN!!! I’M YOUR DAD!!! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME!!!”

And every time, my Grandma, who was not a yeller, and not an angry person would yell back at my dad “HEY! THAT IS MY GARDEN!!! AND I SAY HE CAN EAT AS MUCH HEALTHY FRUITS AND VEGITABLES AS HE WANTS!!! I’M YOUR MOM!!! YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME!!!”

It was more in a mocking him sense, for being so angry over something so stupid. Oh no, a growing boy wants to eat healthy vegitables! What a tragedy! His logic being that I have to ask permission before eating other peoples food. Which in most contexts makes sense.

Until you realize, my grandma was like 120lbs, and she was growing like 60lbs of food in her garden. She wasn’t shy of saying that every neighborhood kid (which was a lot of kids) and all her grandkids, and her own adult kids were free to eat as much as they wanted, take as much as they wanted home. She enjoyed growing the food, but harvesting it was a chore. Plus, it was meant for all of us anyways, so if we grabed it straight from the vine, that was just free harvesting labor that she didn’t have to do, with the food going to the same place anyways.

When you ate food off her vine, you knew you were at grams house. Most people miss their childhood because they miss a tv show, or a friend group they had, or the freedom of not having bills and responsibility. I miss that garden, and helping my grandma harvest. I was 5 years old, running around, picking beans, and listening to grandma tell her stories of how she met my grandpa, and what life in the 60s was like. Which for the time would be like me today explaining what 2004 was like. The 60s seems like such a culturally distant time ago, but at the time she was talking about this, it was just 20 years prior. I’m getting nostolgic for the 80s, and the 60s, a decade I wasn’t even alive for, because I can vividly remember her telling me what life was like during the civil rights movements of the late 60s. She talked about what my dad was like when he was a kid. She wasn’t afraid to take the piss out of my dad by embarassing him to his son. All while we picked beans, and strawberries, and berries, and her favorite tomatoes.

She LOVED tomatoes. Loved loved loved them. She used to say “I know everyones welcome to my garden, but I might have to start growing more tomatoes, or placing restrictions on them. I don’t know WHAT I’d do if everybody wanted my tomatoes! I can’t get enough of them!”

Which was her polite way of basically doing the whole garden of eden thing, except instead of an apple, she was saying “don’t fucking touch my tomatoes!!!” Which nobody did. Also, nobody was naked.

Then in the mid 90s, she eventually had to admit she could no longer upkeep a 6 bedroom house, and a yard that was meant for kids to play in, when she had no kids. By then I was a teenager, and while I could have played in the sense of sports, my days of egg hunting on easter, and running around in capes, and jumping on trees was behind me. My aunt always said "You know, she held off on selling that house, so you could grow up first. It wouldn’t be fair that all her grandkids EXCEPT you got to enjoy the garden, and that yard (I’m the youngest). Then as time went on, eventually she began complaining about tomatoes around the year 2010. She’d say “Is it too late to go get my garden back? These things are tasteless, and not at all juicy. What am I supposed to do with a dry flavorless red bulb? Can it even be called a tomato??? I’m just going to call it worthless.”

I guess I took a while to get to the point of the point of the tomato in this story, but I’m never going to appologize for rambling on and on about my hero in life. I’ll ramble on and on about her to people who never met her, when I’M 90 years old. I’ll seem crazy, and it’ll just seem like old man rambling crazy talk about tomatoes, and pickling jars, and tree forts, and easter egg hunts with 1000 easter eggs for a group of 20 kids.

I’ll seem crazy, but oh well. That’s fine. I miss her, and I miss that time. That’s the biggest part I miss about my childhood. Seeing her happy with a tomato in her hand, and a big straw hat on sunny days, yelling at my dad to calm the fuck down. Nicest woman in the world. Loved you with all her heart. She’d help you with her last dollar if you were in need. But she wouldn’t take shit. When my dad tried to bully control of the conversation, she took him down a peg everytime. And because everyone, him included, respected her, she could do it at any time. The strongest person in the room doesn’t need to yell. They can control an entire room with a whisper. Make you shut up, just so you can hear them by quieting the room, and making you follow their lead. Yelling just proves you have no control of any situation. Gram taught me that everytime my dad would yell, and she would calm him down to a whisper without so much as raising her tone. THAT’S what being a strong person is. Being kind by nature, but tough by force.

Actually, they DID do the math wrong once…landed in the Ocean on earth. They just had to say “Ok…lets go back home.”

Tom Hanks was in a movie about it that got a LOT of facts wrong.

Step 1 - burn the house down with gasoline.

There is no step 2.

Now whenever you cook, no matter what you do, no matter how badly you fail, it’ll never be as bad as the time yoj caused a house fire, which resulted in several houses catching fire.

burns that pile of tinder you call a home go the ground

…no no no no…you’re making it even MORE complicated!!!

screams wildly into pillows

Well at least they’re showering. I was on the bus earlier today. Some of them could USE a shower thought!

The civil war was fought over slavery. We have legalized slavery baked into our constitution. We’re not fighting the civil war. We lost. Well…I guess that depends on which side of “we” you’re on.

I always say that if aliens understand all human languages, then I don’t blame them for not wanting to come here.

Now, this part is partially coincidence. It’s just when technology lined up with history, but do you know the very first human broadcast sent out into space? Adolph Hitler declairing that earth is the property of the nazi party, and all who reside on earth are nazi followers.

Now, I assume that aliens living on another planet cannot speak or understand the German language. But let’s say I’m wrong. We’re already comitting ourselves to accepting that intelligent life exists out there, and is observing our daily activity from at least the 1930s. Is it really too much of a stretch to say they also understand what they’re watching? Ok, cool. That would mean the first voice they hear is a nazi rant, from hitler, declairing humans to be intollerant of any inferior life beyond blonde hair, blue eyed german nazis.

If I’m an alien from outer space, my first thought would be “What the god damn hell man??? This guy’s a human, surrounded by other humans, and he’s so angry that other humans exist, that he’s mass slaughtering them in gas chambers. And he does this by claiming his color people are better than the other color people, even though most of them are mostly the same color! There is ZERO chance that I show up with my green skin, and 47 eyeballs, and get accepted by the humans.”

Then, as they watched our species grow, they witnessed how we percieve the concept of outer space aliens to be. The end result in every movie is “The aliens have invaded earth. The humans have used rockets to blow up and kill the aliens.”

At no point in human history has an outer space alien been depicted as someone that people would warmly embrace, and could live a comfortable life in safety. Even E.T was a movie about the alien being hunted by the government. Same thing with Rodger from American Dad.

So what logical reason would aliens have, to EVER come to earth??? We’re the ghetto of the universe. Because of humans.