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March 29, 2012 11:38 +0000  |  Stupid People 0

"...and that's why I don't believe that there is life on other planets" he said, "the conditions for the existence of water are just too difficult to find in the universe. Now let's talk about facts, not science fiction."

Mr. Loewen was the crotchety old man of my high school, and our introduction to physics from grades 8-10. He was desperately boring, doing his very best to suck the excitement and wonder out of the sciences and very successful in his quest. On more than a few occasions he literally told me to "stop asking stupid questions" when I was only trying to understand some of the more interesting riddles about the universe. His attitude pushed me out of physics, and contributed heavily to my abandonment of the sciences in general, and to this day, I still think of him from time to time whenever I read something like this.

Suck it, Loewen.

April 08, 2011 11:12 +0000  |  Money Stupid People 2

In an effort to furnish my soon-to-be new home, I hit up Ikea and had a rather negative experience. I wrote them an email and thought that I'd share it here.

I wanted to give you money, a lot of money in fact, but your staff have made it clear that you don't want it.

I've just moved to the Netherlands and find myself in need of furnishings for my new apartment. I need to fill my new home with everything from a bed, to a couch to knives and forks and so I thought it best to go to Ikea. I thought that I would share my customer experience with you.

I went to your website, which despite having the ability to display English on the Canadian site, was clearly unable to show me anything other than Dutch when on the Netherlands site. Despite this problem, I managed to spend an hour or two using Google Translate to build up a list of roughly €1500 worth of stuff to fill my new home... only to find out that in 2011, not only is your website monolingual, it also doesn't actually sell anything. I was instead directed to bring a printed copy to your store in Amsterdam Zuidoost.

But I thought: "Who am I to judge the way people do things in this country? Maybe that's just how they do things here". And so, with this in mind, I emailed the list to my smartphone, left work early, and headed over to the nearest Ikea.

But after navigating the store and finding the customer service area, your resoundingly unhelpful representative there informed me that in order for me to give you my money and get what I need, I must spend another hour or so wandering through your store, hauling heavy objects off shelves and dragging them through the checkout. Apparently, having €1500 and a list of things I'd like to purchase from you handed to a customer service representative is not enough to actually do business at Ikea.

I ask you: why do you even have a website? Why do you bother with this impression of customer service when you clearly have no interest in providing any? More importantly, why don't you want my money?

It's sad really, Ikea was my natural choice as a new arrival in this country, but you've gone out of your way to make it impossible to pay for your products.

January 26, 2009 19:44 +0000  |  Stupid People Suburbia 6

You may have already heard, or you may just have seen it, but for those who don't know what I'm talking about, I'm sporting a brand new shiner today. That's right, I've got a black eye -- though strictly speaking there's nothing all that black about it. It's more of a purplish red, and it's not so much a whole "eye" as it's a long ugly line under my left eye accompanying a scratch on my nose and a swollen temple and jaw.

Now, in an effort to save myself from the long list of repetitive Q&A sessions, I'm just going to recount it all here. In fact, if you ask me about in person, I'll just redirect you here or even make up a more exotic story since I'm already tired of re-telling the whole thing.

Now, to begin: Langley is a shithole. Yep, that's an excellent start to all of this.

So after work on Friday, I headed out to the aforementioned shithole by way of SkyTrain and then the 502 bus from Surrey Central to Langley Centre. As I approached the heavily fogged-in bus loop, I called Chris to let him know that I'd be there in five and then hopped off when we pulled in.

Not seeing Chris yet (turns out, he was in the parking lot, wondering where I was), I walked out toward the street corner where I was passed by a couple of really hyper, giggly girls running toward the bus. One of them chucked an empty chip bag into the air and I (in a friendly way) slowed them down with "hey there, you just tossed your garbage in the street". "I don't care!" she yelled and continued down the street with her friend. I leaned down, picked up the bag and tossed it into the can (3ft away) and in a similarly friendly tone yelled "fuck you too!" -- I felt it only appropriate, but clearly, not the smartest move in a near deserted bus stop in a shithole town swallowed by fog.

I then continued onto the corner where I waited a few minutes and was soon re-approached by the same coked-out girls. The litterbug was irate with my choice of language, despite her own consistent use of it. She began slapping, kicking, the typical flailing coked-out girl stuff. Then she grabbed my $300 glasses, bending them and yelling at me so I grabbed them back. No, I didn't hit her, but in her messed up little head, my pushing her away and grabbing my glasses constituted as such. She and her friend then started yelling about how I'd hit her etc.

Enter the equally coked-out roid-monkey boyfriends. "Fucking Langley" I mumbled to myself. Much punching ensued, no amount of reasoning on my part was working, not that expected it to. For my part, I didn't fight back and instead opted to spend most of my time trying to block and insist that I'd not hit anyone. My thinking being that presently, they were taking turns punching me in the face, but if I landed even one good punch I'd be facing both of them, along with whatever other fabulous new joys awaited me in the fog.

Chris had decided to start driving around in the soup looking for me as he couldn't find me in the parking lot, and pulled up just in time to see them leaving -- they'd decided that they'd done enough damage. Thankfully, Chris hadn't seen the whole incident (or the blood on my face due to the dark in the car) or he'd most likely have wanted to go back and return the favour. Instead, I had to ask him if he had anything with which to clean myself up in his car as I was dripping on my jacket, and at that point, too much time had passed to be able to find them again.

At the time, I chose not to call the police because, as messed up as it may sound, I didn't want the run the risk that they'd believe the crazy chick when she insists that I hit her. With the kinds of things I want to do with my life, a record for assault and battery didn't seem like a good idea. Looking back on it all now though, I regret not calling them at the time because it's likely that I was not their last target for the evening. It's too late now though, I couldn't describe them any better than "coked out fuckers" if I wanted to.

In retrospect, I keep going over the whole incident in my mind thinking about what I could have done differently. Like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure novels, I see myself asking for the return of my glasses, or punching out one of the guys, or more importantly, not yelling (even nicely) at the girls int he first place. I honestly don't see how it could have gone any differently though. Sure, it's possible that had I said nothing, I would have avoided all of this mess, and that probably would have been the better option, but it's just as likely that these kids, fuct out of their trees as they were, would have attacked me for any other reason. However in future, while I won't stop yelling at people who litter, I will be more discerning with my selection of who is worthy of a good bitch-out.

For the rest of my stay in Shithole, Chris and Trish were really kind. They ordered pizza and Chris even endured Mama Mia for my sake (sorry Mom, not as good as I'd hoped). They helped patch me up and drove me to King George station in the morning. So yeah. Langley is a horrible, horrible place, but the friends I have there are awesome.

July 30, 2008 01:45 +0000  |  Stupid People 1

I found this little animated gif on Lara's blog, the avatar icon for a user calling herself naughtydolphin and thought that it was so awesome that I should post it here.

naughtydolphin

November 22, 2007 08:43 +0000  |  Politics Protests Stupid People Transit 5

Maybe it was the feeling of seclusion, being trapped in the suburbs 'till I can find a job and place to live downtown, or maybe it was a desperate need to get back into my activist boots after a paltry two month sabbatical, but my reasons for attending the Keep Transit Public rally were more than just my belief in the cause.

Protest poster

Let's get the details in first: Vancouver has a convoluted (but still partially responsible to the public) board that manages the transit infrastructure (trains, buses and roads) in and around the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD). This board suffers from a lot of the same issues that Toronto runs into in that it's mostly made up of the mayors of all the cities & towns inside the GVRD, so no one can agree where to spend the money. The burbs want more roads and buses, the urban centres want more trains, narrow roads. Nothing gets done and a lot of money is spent. People are mad.

So the BC government, in it's usual cowardice, had decided to abdicate even more of its responsibility and redesign the system to use a hybrid multi-mayor board with a bunch of unelected, unaccountable private business groups who can apparently be trusted to "see the big picture" and not wreck the city for their own interests.

At best, this kind of plan is either stupid or naive. At worst, it's a bunch of rich capitalist politicians scrubbing the backs of their rich friends... and Vancouver will be stuck with the result.

So I went to the protest. I didn't expect much to come of it of course because we are sitting with a majority government and the Liberals here will get whatever they please. It was much like any other small rally (<100 people) but for some reason, it would appear that the wingnuts were the only ones yelling. One moron was shouting "this is Fascist" every few minutes -- though he clearly knew nothing about Fascism. The speakers were their usual overplayed selves (as appears to be the norm with most rallies) and in my own observations of the crowd, I found myself asking a scary question: "It's been 6years... have I become a moderate already?".

I had to check myself to be sure that my ideals were still there: yep, all good, I was just surrounded by wingnuts.

Don't get me wrong, their hearts are definitely in the right place. Bill 43 is a terrible plan and sure to do all the wrong things (though probably a few right things as well) in this province. I just didn't feel like they were being effective and that's the opposite of what I want.

October 19, 2007 00:28 +0000  |  Italy 'Round-the-World Stupid People Travel 9

I've had a most disturbing experience just now and thought that I would share.

I'm here in Rome at an ok hostel where I've had occasion to meet a number of really interesting people. In the few nights I've been here, I've met two nice girls from Ohio, four cool guys from Australia, three friendly Germans and a family of four (two girls and their parents) from Melbourne. However, I also met someone else, and this is where our story begins.

His name is Tim and he's from Kamloops, British Columbia.

At first, it was cool to be able to share some of the same background with a fellow traveller. We sat around the common room with the Australian family and chatted about all sorts of fun stuff like politics, the environment, our occupations etc. But as the night wore on, more and more alcohol was brought to the table and I slowly came to remember one of the things I was fleeing from when I left BC: stupid-ass drunks.

To put things into some perspective, I should mention that at the Canada Day celebrations on Grouse Mountain, it is tradition to have to lie to the partiers and tell them that they are out of alcohol as the evening wears on. This is because BC'ers tend to lack that bone in their heads that tells them when they've had enough to drink and without propper corralling, they've been known to get out of hand. The idea for some it would seem, is that everything is always better when hammered, and you're only hammered when you have trouble standing.

Now Tim wasn't too fargone, but I suspect that had he been able to afford more Yeager, he'd have been well on his way. I noticed the signs though early on: his respect of personal space disappeared, his voice got louder and louder, and his insistence on being the centre of attention was punctuated by yelling across the room. It brought me back to 6years ago, living in BC, having to deal with this seemingly consistent malfunction and having no idea how to make these people get the fuck away from me... So I got the hell away from them instead... 4349.9km away to be exact.

...and now I'm going back. Jesus Christ, what have I done?

August 24, 2007 22:27 +0000  |  Stupid People War 2

I really want to comment on this highway renaming business. For those who haven't heard, a bunch of people have created a petition to rename a portion of highway 401 to "Highway of Heroes" to commemorate the men & women who've died overseas who's flag-draped coffins make the procession down that very stretch of asphalt when their bodies return home.

Maybe I'm being irrational, but this kind of thing makes me absolutely furious. For starters, the term "hero" is thrown around far too much and (at least in my opinion) should not be assigned to just anyone who dies in the line of duty.

These soldiers are Our Honoured Dead, people who died because they chose to fight for Canada and Canada sent them into a warzone. That's both respectable and honourable, even remarkable... but is this heroism? No. This sort of renaming campaign just supports a propaganda machine that works to convince people that war is glorious, even righteous -- a lie so far from the truth it makes me ill.

And if that doesn't piss you off, how 'bout the thought that of all the things in this country we could attribute to our soldiers, we choose a stretch of grey pavement. What a terrible way to honour these people.

May 22, 2007 16:05 +0000  |  Stupid People 4

Just when I think the world is going to hell because of apathy on the environment or international relations, you read about some dumb-ass people that prove that the species is fucked regardless.

April 02, 2007 18:08 +0000  |  Stupid People 8

Taking the dog for a 'walk'
Photo courtesy of MSN's Week in Pictures.

I am in awe. I am completely dumb-struck by the ass-backwardness of this photograph. I will instead leave it to the driver to explain himself:

Levester Johnson takes his dog, Armani, an Italian Cane Carso, out for a morning jog on Monday, March 26, in Akron, Ohio. "I was lazy this morning" said Johnson. "I'm on the way to the gym myself. I wanted to make sure [Armani] got in a workout before I left."

That's it. I'm out. This whole "saving the world" thing obviously was a bad idea from the start. Any species this lazy deserves to be erased from history.

March 22, 2007 20:07 +0000  |  Stupid People War 1

Careful, they're not the same thing.

I sifted about YouTube today and found two interesting clips I thought I'd share. The first clip is called Young Americans, a multi-part series shot and produced by troops on the ground in Iraq. The small part I've seen so far looks like a pretty raw look at what it's like over there.

The second part is considerably more light hearted, but unfortunately related. A news crew from New Zeland (I think, it might be Australia) hit the streets of an American city with some simple questions about the world. Stuff like: "Who's Fidel Castro?", "Which country should America invade next?" and "How many sides are there on a triangle?"

You should be surprised at the results, but sadly, you probably won't be.