Web 2.0: Reasons? What?

Web 2.0. All about div layouts, valid XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets. There really isn’t a situation in writing/upkeeping a website where someone would not come around to tell you that your website is out of standard. And while these people are in for a just cause, their reasoning is the dumbest crap I’ve heard since the Vista adverts.

• Make your website faster
  Wow! I can upgrade my website loading times from 0.0054 seconds to 0.0021 seconds!! Attention, Web 2.0 format kids: Normal viewers do not calculate milliseconds, and websites should not be made as if they did. It’s great that you have a Firefox plug-in to time, track and graph your loading times, but nobody cares. Sorry.Although all the 3 people on the planet that still use a dial-up will thank you on behalf of their modems for writing more standard code. Indent ‘n’ win!
• Lower hosting bills
  At the point where hosting bills is the main concern in picking a layout or even making/upgrading a website in the first place, it’s time to take a minute to think whether you’re really up to having a website. Especially when all these reasons target businesses; no business never seriously cares about hosting costs. Ever.
• Visual consistency is preserved through linked stylesheet files
  This can also be done with PHP, so far compatible with any HTML standard out there. Not that linked CSS files would be bad, but it’s not a reason to use them.
• Make your website less expensive by using div layouts
  Apart from hosting bills, what does this mean? Do website programmers charge per character, so writing div will be $2 cheaper than writing table?
• Make your website more accessible for alternative user agents
  “Alternative user agents” means the Nokia E90. And for all it’s worth, I think people surfing the internet are either too much of the nerdy gadget freak type to really have any interest on this website or anything else I have done or will do, or alternatively too busy to have a real computer, in which case they should probably not be surfing the net in the first place.

I mean, all these reasons seem to target people who make websites for large companies. So far no bigshot company website I have visited has been XHTML, or even valid HTML 4.0 to begin with. You know they all trust their Joomlas and SharePoints and other WYSIWYG portal systems, and there’s no way any of them produce valid code. Even with no content on the website. The CSS beauty, valid, proper Web 2.0 websites I’ve seen are all made, owned and upkeeped by some computer science student for their own Totoro fanstuff that is only read by themselves. It seems that making valid XHTML+CSS div markup is not a standard as much as a gimmick to boast that you know shit.

I once read an online pep talk to write div layouts to conserve bandwidth and space. Not to lower hosting bills, but because there might be 100,000 hits per day. That’s all very well… if you indeed do have a hundred grand hits per day. My superb hit count is an average 60 hits per day. Peak at 153. I’m so popular, oh I’m glad I chose WordPress to be my div layouted blog system! Where would my 2 readers be without the div layouts and linked CSS files and let’s not forget valid XHTML. Because you so give a shit.

Let’s just blame the games

I’ve noticed that when people are put in the front of something terrible, instead of thinking reasonably and accepting for what it is, they need to invent these weird theorems and find somekind of a scapegoat from somewhere. I don’t know why do they do this… trying to prove their friends that being the president of your high school sudoku club doesn’t mean you aren’t creative, living off of yellow press tip rewards, I don’t know.

The Jokela high school massacre is another one of such events. People are unable to accept that it was a messed up kid that acquired a gun and capped 8 people and himself. I’m not belittling what happened, of course it’s terrible. But I can’t understand why people have to go around with their stupid theories and solutions. As if something like this really required a solution. All this kind of thing is doing is dishonoring the deceased and insulting the relatives.

The newest invention is to blame Battlefield 2. I mean - it has guns, right? You kill people, right? Then it must mean that Auvinen did it because he played this game! What geniuses do we have here, huh?! 2,250,000 people play Battlefield 2. 2,250,000 people have not committed school slaughters. Get real.

I quote a newspaper column I read about the connection between video games and Jokela:

If you play a game long enough, it will start to affect you.

Says you and who else? I mean… I’ve played Red Faction almost from it’s release date (fall 2001). There was a phase in my life where I would wake up early in the morning, play RF all the way to the evening and late, late night, stopping around 2 AM to get some sleep in order to be fresh again in the morning to play some more RF. I didn’t then, and I still don’t have any kind of ambitions or desires to put on red overalls, fly to Mars and put some slugs and electric shocks into guys in blue overalls. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have the guts to shoot a wall from a distance with an air gun. It’s just a game, it’s just entertainment.

Auvinen had some other, serious problems, and even trying to imply that you would suggest that what happened in Jokela is Battlefield’s or Counter-Strike’s or any other FPS’s fault is silly. If a dad with children has played Leisure Suit Larry since day one, can we blame Sierra On-Line that he has to pay $27.10 every month for Disney Channel? If someone plays Port Royale 2, can we expect him to buy a sloop at any moment and go to the Caribbean to import and export immigrants, rum, sugar and leather jackets?

If I kill a pixel person on screen on my computer in a game by clicking my mouse to have my pixel guy play an animation of him pulling the pixel trigger on his pixel weapon, it does not make a killer. To get actual influence from a game, you’ll need to have some other problems. And while playing GTA might not help, it’s not to blame either. Auvinen wrote only two sentences to which I can agree in his manifesto:

Don’t blame the movies I see, the music I hear, the games I play or the books I read. No, they had nothing to do with this.

People: It was just him and his stupid, twisted, skewed thinking. Not Battlefield. Shut up.

WoW players breakdown

Since the release of the original anti-World of Warcraft article over a year ago, I’ve done a lot research about the players of this dreadful game itself. Partly from the numbnuts “posting” on that “thread” (this looks very much like a forum, doesn’t it?), partly from people I have the grief to be acquainted with in real life.

WoW-fanboys is the only group of people in the world, where over 95% of its members all behave under the same stereotype; the same thing that Jack next door does, he’s great and told me to go get this game. We’re so alike, but he’s a bit more alike than I am. He’s coo’.

Get the hell real.

I’m not kidding - they all are like this:

1. Why do you play this game? What’s so great in it?
   The standard, invariable answer I get for this one is: “Try it, see for yourself”. This is not an answer to my question. I did not ask for tips based on what you think is better than life. I asked why do you play it. Why? A legitimate answer to that starts with the word “because” or optionally with your favorite apostrophe-raped version of the previous. Although I do not expect much of grammatical integrity from these people, there’s no way you can start “try it yourself” with “because”. So give it to me straight; why on God’s slightly viridian Earth do you play this obtuse game? “Try it” is not an answer, give it a rest.
2. WoW is boring. I don’t see the point in it!
   “Try it for yourself!”
3. Why is it more important to beat up pixel ogres than to - oh, I dunno… fix your life?
   “Try it for yourself, you’ll understand then!”
4. Okay, seriously… what is so good in it?
   “I can’t explain it… Try it for yourself!”
5. Well, what do you do in it?
   “Well, I just got myself these mana points when I beat of that warlock in the Outlands with Battlegear of Might from Razorfen Kraul but that fire mage is way more powerful with the Staff of the Shadow Flame more than with the Anathema for the Shadow Priest and I got this raiding guild with twelve other orc mages with staffs and mad Herbalism skills and Rage Fire Chasms in Black Rock Depths” and what the fuck are you talking about?
6. Well, in conclusion: why do you think it’s so addictive?
   “I can’t explain it… Try it for yourself!”

Problematic. Solid jumble!

Then, when they can not come up with anything else, they start with the same old boring shit: “Why do you care anyways? What’s it to you anyways? It’s none of your business!” It’s none of my business? My friends are getting obsessed with this game; instead of speding a fun two weeks in Greece or somewhere, they choose to buy 13½ years of WoW time. Super!

And what are you to lecture me about caring? These people come here to comment, debate with me, trying to convert me, shit-listing my favorite games and advertising this crap in every turn. How exactly is it your business what I play? Why the crap do you care what I play? Apparently much more than what I’m allowed to care about yours. Obsession makes people paranoid, makes people hypocrites.

On the other hand… when these people are playing this game, it means they are off the streets from bugging my life being too busy ignoring theirs. This won’t stop me from writing pompous text about it on my website, though; I do it because I know it pisses your simple brains off. And still you give a damn.

Swiss cheese.

Claude Moraes clueless

Please excuse our dust.

Yeah, I know. It’s been a while. Mostly because I have been answering idiots writing their blatherings over at the anti-WoW article. I was recently losing interest in this blogment/writing business, so I thought I’d just let this website die slowly by not writing anymore. But what do you know, you WoW-sheep keep it up on Google with your comments. Man. Hopes of getting this mysteriously deleted are after this article much higher, as EU seems to have this weird thing, what’s it called… oh yes, fascism.

Yeah, I know. I’ve taken a vow of not dabbling in politics. I’m not. The fact that Claude Moraes is an MEP is irrelevant. He could’ve done what he did as an MEP or signing a PetitionOnline.com petition while working a two-shift job as tech support earning $2,400 per month and getting more and more pissed every day because he knows he could’ve get the exact same wage at McDonald’s without having to get a pain-in-the-ass degree at computer science.

Claude Moraes recently (?) rallied against Cloetta Fazer for their golliwogg doll logo on their liquorice. Look at it:

Image by Kobsu of Wikipedia.

Oh! That’s so racist! I mean, I bet everybody’s offended and humiliated to death by this horrifying picture! I can already see the tears in the African poor slaveboy’s eyes if they’d ever see such an inhumane image!

It’s only liquorice. If you think this is racist, you have problems. I should get a hold of one of these and go to street, slam one in a black person’s face and yell “ARE YOU OFFENDED?!?!” This logo dates back to 1927, and I’m quite sure they did that exact same thing back then too, just to offend black people with confectionary. I mean, the connection here is obvious!

Well, then look at Claude Moraes:

Oh, I see now! He’s so dark it’s a personal issue for him! Come on. Claude here is MEP of social affairs. Why the fuck does he give a shit?! Or was it like that Claude’s some random black friend calls him some late Friday night after 15 whiskeys and splutters:

Hey Claude, man. You know… there’s this liquo- liquorice thing, you know… like, in Finland… and… there’s a brother on the packaging, man! G-go snipe that shit, foo’!

Then Claude goes around the town and tells everybody about this super-insulting liquorice bar in Finland that he has never seen or eaten but is offended anyway. It’s like, there’s nothing better to do with our time and money, so let’s find some remote product and sue the manufacturer. Social affairs… you know, Claude, there’s also poor and homeless people in Finland. I live in a suburb, I have to walk around 500 metres and I’ve already seen 10 homeless people. Why don’t you come save them, hero? I bet they’re totally offended when you fly to Strasbourg with your private jet to get some of that cheap wine and ponder with the parliament what on Earth should we do about the global warming.

I did some research, too:

Now I see what the fuzz is all about. Moraes does have a point; these are like mirror images. Totally.

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!: Bullshit!

I keep on finding more and more TV shows lately. Remarkably they all are utterly dumb. It’s almost like all TV stations in the universe decided that this decade’s youngster like dumb programming, so they all bought licenses from HBO. Some are dumb because they try to be funny but ultimately are not (like “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!”), others are dumb already for their sole concept (like “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!”).

The aptly named TV show “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!” is probably the most dumbest and most hypocritical TV shows of all that I’ve seen. The show’s basic idea is to have two millionaires… well, one millionaire rant about how something people believe in is bullshit. Excuse me, mr. Jillette, but isn’t it just about what your own business stands for, being a magician and all? This show is aimed at middle class average unemployed patch bearded numbnuts, and really the fact that it had the biggest number of the word “bullshit” that I’ve ever heard during such a small time speaks for that target audience.

What is this show’s function? It’s not humour, I didn’t laugh and I really can’t classify Penn’s blatherings as jokes or situation comedy. It’s not exactly a documentary either. So what is it, then? I made a careful analysis, which follows here. What “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!” is not: comedy, documentary, talk show, quiz/game show, news broadcast, children’s television, topical show. What “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!” actually is:

i

i

i

I saw the episode #2 of season #1, about alternative medicine, and how people would believe any kind of stupid trash you would sell them. Now, I’m not claiming that the “cures” were effective or not ridiculous. But I emphasize the word “believe” in there. Believe, as in belief. It’s would be just as well as saying: “Those Jews are freaking idiots. Like life would be in some stupid cycle. This guy is an asshole! Biologist agree that when the life’s over, it doesn’t start again. Judaism is just a piece of bullshit!” Next, they would probably “try” to wake up some dead animal to see whether it’ll spring into life again, with the obvious result of that it doesn’t. Who actually pays these guys for this?

I highly doubt that apart from any training for his profession, Penn didn’t even finish school - the only word he knows is “bullshit”. I was almost dropped out of my chair with all those “bullshits” flinging at me. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Judging by the looks of it, Penn is quite a sack of old bullshit himself - in ego and in physique.

With Canon, you can’t

A thing not many people probably know about me, is that my hobby is photography. I have a gallery in Stock.xchng, the least communist website on Earth. Now, I tried to take a decent photograph of a faucet with some soap, thinking it’d be super artistic. I used Canon PowerShot A520, and while I admit that it’s not the most professional, expensive or newest machinery on the planet, it’s still a rotten piece of garbage. Its picture quality is feeble, its lightning quality is trash and its overall quality does not exist.

To even make decent photographs, you need to find the right shooting mode that actually lets you adjust the right setting, you have to guess the settings themselves (nobody can know the settings with this camera - it variates everything), set of the ridiculously volume flash, set on the MF mode, point the sun or a powerful lamp and press the shoot button to the halfway to set the light (otherwise your photo will inevitably become too dark), watch for your finger not to tremble a nanometer so you won’t loose the lightness setting and only then point the objective to the target. If it’s a moving thing, it’s probably not there anymore at this point. I mean, PowerShot A520 is sort of designed to be this tourist camera - snap a shot of your pets, holidays with the whole family waving in front of the Colosseum, unforgettable moments of your cousin’s sister’s friend’s daughter’s birthday, stuff like that. Why is it so hard to take a decent photo then? If you want to take a shot out of a tourist bus, try doing all that above and still take a picture. Bet you that you were too late.

It wouldn’t be that bad if it did remember your settings, but you have to input them all again if your zooming takes more time than the Canon camera sees fit and shuts down automatically. I had to guess after a massive trial-and-error scheme (which usually does not apply to the average East German lederhosen tourist) that you can take sharp shots out of a speeding car with the sports shooting mode. Too bad that it doesn’t allow you to mess with most of the shooting settings, so it’s after all pretty much useless. To demonstrate all this negative stuff I’ve said about this camera, here’s the progress how I made the photo that I was after of that faucet and soap:

1. I tried with the automatic settings first. Not at all good at all, no.

   

2. Second try: this time with the “P” shooting mode, which lets me mess with all the options. But, these are the presets. No good. Sure, the thumbnail looks nice, but in photography, the little things matter - look how grainy and blurry it is!

   

3. Messed with the settings now. I got it to be more clear, but still it’s a bad joke.

   

4. The grain on Canon is actually so bad and hard that even $180 program with a sole purpose of removing grain cannot comply it out to a satisfactory level. I don’t even want to show the result.
5. Finally, I got the picture I wanted, after fine-tuning pretty much every little setting Canon has. I spent 22 minutes in that toilet, just taking a photo of a faucet and a pump of liquid soap. Result was a grainy, unsharp, offcolor, sloppy picture, halfly of what I was looking for.

Canon is just so incompetent. I acknowledge that Canon does have pretty goos professional cameras, but they have a price tag of several thousands. And why do they have so many mandatory settings in the camera? Nobody’s going to go through them all if they want to take a nice photo of acrobats in a pyramid formation in some school ending festive. I’m absolutely sure that the picture of a Great Tit on a stick that one can set to be the opening picture was not taken with this camera. I’m quite sure that the camera it was taken with was not a Canon at all.

This is a photo of a violet, taken with my Canon PowerShot A520 with the closest setting to the actual colors that I could find. It- it’s blue! What do you call that? I thought that violets are supposed to be… violet.

PS. I’ve started my own blog. As in of my personal interests and stuff. Thought that you are reading my blog right now? You’re wrong, this is just one of my websites. My blog is here.

Anysee E30 - one of some

Anysee is a Korean company. They make just and only digital receivers for computers. I got myself Anysee E30, the cheapest, and the most not card reading functions, as a protest against pay channels which broadcast shit that I don’t want to watch in exchange for outrageous sums of money. But I digress - back to Anysee.

Mostly Engrish is in all-Asian products, but Anysee has worse English than what I’ve read from 2nd grade English essays. After you have finally gotten your Visa back to your sweaty palm, knowing that a healthy deal of 99€ (~$133) has been extracted from you bank account, your donation to Asian economy will be grated with

I thank for purchase a anysee.

The box cover says from word to word “Anysee delivers Digital TV”. You get the idea that Anysee has a mighty brand and a name, and a long, historic, significant tradition in making electronics of some other field and that they have now joined into the digital TV business. …they have 3 products. 3 products in the universe bear the Anysee logo. In fact, I believe that the company itself writes the name all in lowercase; anysee, like a normal word. That’s right, even the Korean Anysee officials don’t think that Anysee is worthy a capital letter with its 3 products.

Well, you might say, 3 products is not so bad. No of course not. If I owned a electronics company, and we made computers, televisions and game consoles, those 3 products would definitely not be bad. But Anysee’s three products are: E30, a digital TV receiver, E30 Plus, a digital TV receiver and E30 C Plus, a digital TV receiver. Those are the only products Anysee makes and has ever made. But, enough of the company backgrounds.

So, I put the receiver on my table, connected the cable to the computer and installed the software. Everything good so far (except the English grammar). After installation, it gives me the almost correctly spelled notice: “There is no channel. Search channel first”. Okay. Using the automatic mode, it goes through all possible channels - nothing. I even went as far as getting the exact MHz number for the Finnish public broadcasting company’s (YLE) channels, and searched for it manually. Nothing.

Maybe the antenna is too weak, after all, it would be silly to expect something like this work completely as-is, straight from the box. With the $800 satellite dish on the roof, it was time for Black&Deckering my walls, pulling an antenna cable through it to my room, the cable all across the room and to the receiver. Searching - found all channels. My, how cheaply it was done: just $28 for the cable + plugs and accessories, $137 for the Black&Decker drill, $800 for the dish, plus the $133 for the Anysee. $1,098 spent and yet it still needs a computer (compatible ones upwards of $900) to see a thing. Speaking of cheaply done things, when I open Anysee for the very first time, it asks whether to use DxVA or not, and “for the case DxVA function doesn’t use”, I should select video size. I decided to go with DxVA forever and ever, so I also checked “This window will not be showing from now on. ( After you check working norm”, and clicked OK.

So now with my new digital receiver for my computer, I get the following new channels:

• YLE Teema - uninteresting documentaries about long since deceased Swedes in some Finnish wooden villas. Yippee.
• YLE Extra - mindsavers and test screens. Read more »
• JIM - nonstop of Do-It-Yourself channel, with a couple of distasteful 60s horror movies thrown in for good measure.
• Subtv - there’s only one thing to watch on this channel between all the trash and unfunny sitcoms - The Simpons. Too bad I have them all on DVD.
• Urheilukanava - sports 24/7. I’m not a sports fan, otherwise this wouldn’t be such a bad channel.
• The Voice - I really have no idea what this is supposed to be.
• IskelmäTV - a TV channel for a radio channel? You gotta be kidding me!
• Digiviihde - amateur porn films in the middle of the night. Otherwise, it’s empty. Snore.

Not really Anysees fault, I know. But what is Anysees fault is the bubbles on the lacquer of my wooden table! The Anysee is always on when my computer is, regardless if I watch TV or not. And it’s boiling hot. It does absolutely nothing except burning a blue LED light and it could melt through ice in a blaze after 10 minutes.

Nevertheless, I try the recording functions. Error! Here’s an interesting fact about Anysee: it can’t record a show if its EPG (Electronic Program Guide) title includes a colon (:), or any other special character that Windows does not accept as a part of a filename. So, I try on recording something that does not include weird characters. All goes well, and the recording works efficiently, the live program itself doesn’t lag, and on the surface, everything looks nice. Then, 2 hours later, I want to see my recording - not a chance. The file doesn’t play in Windows Media Player nor Winamp. What the…?

What does the Anysee support answer? They give me an eleven-bulletin list of instructions, which include the deletion of 5 programs, of which only one has “anysee” or “E30″ on it, unplugging, restarting, manual complex installation of new drivers without the reinstallation of any of the 5 deleted programs. No, not shady at all. As isn’t the Anysee… in my trash bin.

Blu-ray is embarrassing

Blu-ray. So hip that they can reaffirmingly let loose of English grammar and skip an “e”. DVDs are just as good as anybody is going to need. The leap from VHS to DVD was enormous, and I won’t even go about listing all the features why DVDs rule VHSes. But, I will supply a list of the new changes in Blu-ray when compared to a regular DVD:

• High-Definition video

Makes all the difference. And this goes nicely with AACS (Advanced Access Content System) copy protection. Too bad that AACS screws 3 million people and more in America alone with older HDTVs, only because it’s more than just to expect that people who donate money to Hollywood monopolies in their own good will to simply watch a movie they buy, are undoubtly all criminals. Look at that sentence; if you buy something, you are treated like a robber.

Another con is the money Blu-ray sucks out of ignorant technology nerd’s wallet. Not taking into account the hardware you need to buy which you need to make the hardware you need to buy to make Blu-ray work work, the Blu-ray discs are so expensive in their own right:

Taken from NetAnttila.com. Props to them.

What’s that? What do you call that?! You pay over twice the money for the High-Definition disc of the same movie with the same content just to see Adam Sandlers moles. If you make a copy of your pricy Blu-ray disc, you may be charged even more money from it by the movie companies! So would you rather pay 17.95 € (~$24.20) for a DVD with an ability to make home copies just in case it gets shredded for backup (which one should have every right to do) or 36.95 € (~$49.80) for a Blu-ray disc that expects straightforward that you are a criminal by having the most impossible copy protections on the face of Earth that require God knows what technology, not anymore to protect the copyright but just to make more money for the paranoid AA-ending organizations and their members.

So what does the blue laser in the Blu-ray disc player do good? Nothing. Whatever goes to Blu-ray disc can be fitted exactly on a very normal, good ol’ red laser dual layer DVD disc. But then again, that wouldn’t bring any more money to the executives’ pockets, so that would be totally out of the question. Solution? Don’t buy the Blu-ray discs. I don’t really see how anybody would be stupid enough to waste over double the money for the same thing with less rights and a blue case, which is translucent, hip and all stupid. HD = Hoax for Dumbasses.

By the way, the decryption key for HD DVD (Blu-ray’s archenemy) is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. I believe that this goes to say that I don’t like HD DVD much more either, and generally hate the AACS and their superfluous condemnation against their own customers.

Being an utter asshole: Priceless

What is it with all the crap about the “priceless” slam? It’s not funny. It was never meant to be funny, and it’s not unpurposely funny either. It’s a freaking commercial spot for a credit card. Yet all numbnuts that think they’re top-class comedians spurn images of someone, passed out in his own sick to Funpic.hu (which actually has a complete own category for “priceless” -stuff), with cheaply done Paint text on it like this:

Tickets to this convention: $150
Drinks and meals: $35
A picture of you in your own puke: Priceless

Oh my GOD!! It’s so freaking hilarious that I almost wrecked my $560 elite black office chair into my hip green closet while rolling with it uncontrollably because I was laughing so hard! How could anybody ever invent a better joke than this, this is just so awesome! Beats actually funny humor 6 to nothing. You know what makes it even more hilarious? The facts that the “authors” of these sources of all things funny are illiterate morons and that the pictures usually don’t even resemble the credit card ads. So what’s so funny in them then? Oh yeah: nothing.

If there is a breathing organism on this planet or any other planet so far known by human, that can honestly say that he or she finds these things actually humorous, I’d like to offer my most sincere consolations and advices to go see a therapist. It’s just like the fat kids in school yards that keep on repeating the same punch lines randomly to go with their worst impression of the original comedian, ruining the joke completely.

Kid #1: I just got myself a new computer!
Kid #2: B-E-A-utiful!

It’s funny when Jim Carrey says it. It’s not funny when some kid on a fat lump diet tries to be cool by saying it. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they just have to repeat it randomly in any given dialog. These are things that come and go (B-E-A-utiful has long been gone, I know), but “Priceless” seems to cling on with its tacky self. It seems to have formed into a hype, a phenomenon of some sort.

“All Your Base Is Belong To Us” is still somewhat funny, regardless of it’s relatively old age, so that pretty much merits a cleverly justified phenomenon. “Priceless” has never even been funny, and yet it’s all over the Internet. What the hell do you call that? I haven’t seen “Priceless” ads on television for ages now. I do see these unfunny, highly blood pressurizing “Priceless” “jokes” on the Internet every day. Like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this or this. Or maybe this, this, this, this, this, this, this or this? Some of these images already circulate the Internet, and then some lard nerd goes and slaps his interpretation of “priceless” on it (such as this when compared to this), probably in hopes of making it more humorous and get 2 barely readable compliments from anonymous surfers of his own blog. Probably as opposed to snaps from some brand home party when your parents are away and someone pees in his/her pants or accidentally shows of her tits (OMG TAHTS S0 HILLAROUS!!!!1). It’s like a Chinese malfunctioning steroid - it makes nothing more funny. In fact, it makes otherwise funny images not funny.

I went through all of these, and yet I haven’t even tittered. Every 12 year old little shit inside the little elite cult of some forgotten elementary school is probably cackling himself to death, which I see as a positive thing: less morons who promote this earwax.

Useless Dr. Phil

It’s 5:30 PM at a Tuesday evening and I turn on my TV set. There’s Dr. Phil starting up. Unfamiliar but not unheard of to me. For the whole 55 minutes it ran, only one thought was in my head: “Who the crap really cares?”

Before it seemed to be some reruns of renovation shows from Do-It-Yourself Network. At least you can get ideas of your new bathroom, and useful, general tips on how to do what. Scarce homes these days have both a television and not a light bulb in the toilet, so tips on doing lightning in your bathroom and basically any room might be useful. But this public therapist session isn’t really helpful, useful or interesting.

Now I know that two irresponsible, overloving parents have a badly behaving, undiscipline 2-year-old daughter in some shithole state on the other end of the globe, and that she pees in her pants. Probably worth each penny it takes to make this show, and broadcast it over the world. Whoa, I almost feel like I learned something important. Dr. Phil’s advice on what to do with this girl is to steal her toys and television. So, if I happen to ever get a allegedly clever daughter with ADHD disorder that has great lungs and likes to pee in her pants, I’ll remember to take her toys and TV out when she’s 2 years old. Or better yet, I should tune into the channel again next week to see the next episode, where some other 2-year-old kid always has at least 4 pacifiers at any given time, to see what to do with my 2-year-old-to-come when or if he or she gets a pacifier problem. What useful information this show gives me!

In fact, the whole show is just one big commercial to sell his books. Primetime, good ol’ fashioned American corporate advertisement, on a spot where I could come up with hundreds of better shows to air on instead. In addition, it’s a feeble way to pass more minutes as an excuse for the massive advert income you generate, to try to thank you for your ad-watching, and in the meanwhile, make you watch more ads - in and between the shows. You also get to see other people’s personal stuff, like wedding videos. As if you really care, it’s also embarrasing for the poor people, who have to resort in this commercial, free-of-charge but public therapy for utter idiots.

As a commenter on a Finnish television guide website cleverly put it:

“Just think, some general idiot like that helps some super idiots and then the rest of the idiots watch this stupidity at their homes.”

- malib on 8th of May 2007, 11:06 AM

I think this sums up Dr. Phil pretty nicely.