Steaming Turd

So, Microsoft’s DirectX is pretty much required for any sort of gameplaying whatsoever - in fact, it’s so required that there’s a redistributable version of it on nearly every piece of PC game software sold today. Yet Microsquish has gotten the great idea to require OS “validation” - meaning a check to make sure you haven’t ripped off Windows. This also means you have to use Intarweb Exploder to run the validation check and download DirectX from their website.

I say SCREW THAT. I’ve got the most up-to-date version of DirectX right here on my Oblivion disc, so I won’t have to debase myself by running IE. Er, among other reasons.

Fact: The Kurgan from Highlander is also Mr. Krabs from Spongebob Squarepants.

I clicked a link in another application to download a file today, and instead of opening in Firefox like it oughta, it opens it in IE. I figure, well, that’s annoying, but it’ll be done in a minute, no big deal, so I let it save to the desktop. On the download window in IE is a button that becomes active once the file is done downloading, labeled “Open Folder”. This is supposed to open an Explorer window in the directory the file got downloaded into. Firefox has something similar, where you can right-click a file in the Download Manager and pick “Open Containing Folder”.

Well, I click this button, it thinks for a second, and helpfully tells me, “The item you downloaded is on the Desktop” but refuses to open the Explorer window. Gee, thanks, except my desktop is obscured by other windows I don’t want to minimize, hence the reason I clicked the Open Containing Folder button in the first place.

Next time I’ll just cancel the download and copy/paste the URL into Firefox.

Scene: The city, near a street corner. A young woman walks down the street toward the corner, eating peanut butter by the heaping spoonful straight from the jar. A local shop obstructs her view of a young man walking down the cross street toward the same corner as he eats from a roll of Mentos, the Freshmaker.

The man and woman arrive at the street corner simultaneously. Not seeing each other, they collide, and the roll of Mentos slips neatly into the jar of peanut butter.

“You got Mentos in my peanut butter!!” the woman exclaims, her face aghast.

The young man says nothing. Instead, he pops a peanut butter-covered Mentos in his mouth and flashes her a smile that says, “Look. I’m eating Mentos. I win.”

She laughs, wags a finger at him, and gives him a look that says, “Touché, you crazy Dutchman, you!”

Mentos theme music plays. Cut to black.

I wish I had a picture of this, but I don’t. I saw it on TV news, and I don’t even remember which channel it was. So bear with me on the description.

Yesterday, the Minuteman Project started a caravan across the US, from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to protest the nation’s current policies on illegal immigration. One of the images captured from this caravan was that of a man driving a brightly-colored car, decorated with numerous American flags of various sizes, being obstructed from driving forward by another man standing immediately in front of his car and carrying a hand-drawn sign written in Spanish (what it said I don’t remember).

Now think about this: Which of these two people is resorting to breaking the law to get their point across?

Found this flyer inside my luggage after I got back from Wisconsin.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,194027,00.html

Yesterday was the big threatened illegal immigrant walkout, where illegals across the country claimed that their absence from work would injure the US economy enough that our need for them would be felt.

What actually ended up happening was that roughly 1 million out of the 12 million illegals in the US did leave work. Their absence had very little effect on most Americans, but severely impacted the owners of small businesses who gave the illegals jobs in the first place. Let this be a lesson to them that hiring illegals is not without negative consequences.

The walkout also revealed that certain larger companies make copious use of illegals in their employment scheme. For example, Tyson Foods, which had a run-in with the law several years back regarding, er, questionable hiring practices, was forced to shut down twelve out of their hundred or so plants; Perdue Farms shut down eight out of fourteen plants. McDonalds shut down several of their stores in certain states, including 29 Chipotle restaurants. In other words, now the legal American citizens frustrated with our porous borders can see which large businesses to target with their own boycotts.

The impact in Cleveland was apparently fairly small. There was a gathering of roughly 300 demonstrators in the Pubic Square, with many of them coming from non-Hispanic countries. The anti-American sentiment present in some rallies in the southwest US were absent from the gathering in Cleveland. A fair number of Hispanic students in schools across Northeast Ohio skipped class, and a few workers here and there didn’t report for work. The region’s Latino support groups notably opposed the walkout, which, combined with the small Hispanic population in the area, kept the effect of the day’s events rather muted.

Anyway, for the people who did leave work and protest in the streets, I hope you don’t mind if you find out later that you’ve sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind. When you protest angrily in the streets even though you come into the country illegally, leech off the US health care system, and don’t pay taxes, all you get is political backlash from actual voting American citizens tired of seeing you act like you’re due some sort of entitlement as a reward for dodging the system we have in place for bringing people into our country legally.