Marist College IT Can Lick It

Seriously, I am typing this in clasrroom number 7 in some random building at Marist College and while I have nothing against the debate team or even the school at large the fucking IT department swallows. So I plug my computer into the ethernet jack so I can check my email during this deabte. The computer is going to hotmail and instead of displaying the log in page I see a little Marist page. A cute little logo with a little red fox (I think I wrote my fox story somewhere earlier in this blog) and some text. Anyway, I go to switch over to hotmail and it brings me back here. Turns out this is like a fucking log-in page and I have to log in to use their internet. I didn't think actual instituations of higher learning, like above high school, needed this kind of internet securtiy. Uh-oh, little jon or jane could plug in their laptop and search for pornography without permission. Its not like I am trying to use their computer terminals, I have my own.

I would imagine there is someway that I can get by this without a password, but I have no idea how I would do that. This is the problem with understanding almost nothing about computers. What the fuck are they worried about, I just don't get it, it makes absolutely no sense to me. I can't do anything that costs them money, I can't hurt their computers. All I can do is access the internet. I can't bill porno to their server, or whatever fucking stupid internet term is relevant here. I need to find one of the Marist people and ask them if there is some way to resolve this issue or whatever. I just want to check my email. People annoy the hell out of me.

I haven't discussed the whole gay marriage thing much, largely because I would imgaine you, like me, and everyone else, are so constantly infuriated by the idiocy of what is apparently a majority of this country that I can't believe you would want to hear more about it. I do want to mention, however, a mad props shout-out to two mayors. One is of course the dude from San Francisco who looks alot like I think Norm Coleman if he was just out of college and cool. You can see him lighting up a joint in some shady place back in his Haight-Ashybury days and talking about how much he likes pissing off the terminator by going against the contitution. While I agree with John Stewart's argument "Wow, what courage, standing up for gay people in San Francisco"- I do think it takes guts to do something you know will get you national attention and will inevitably get overturned. It however must be fun to hear Arnold talk about all this stuff, I would want to take the stupid Austrian fuck on as well if I were the mayor of a signigicant city. I cannot figure out how even someone as stupid as Bush can stand behind and say "I support Governor Schwarztenegger" without snickering under his breath. I don't think this ammendment will possibly pass, but the fact that it would even get a chance is so ricockulous. Why exactly do you give a fuck. Haven't you noticed that the constitution is written so as to not specifically deal with these issues of specific legislation. I am obviously no law-talkin-guy but I am fairly confident in my assertion that the only other ammendment which has dealt with a negative right (that may not be the proper legal term, I am meaning a restriction of rights) was prohibition. Ah, hopefully we can return to the good old days of prohibition, the prominence of the mafia, prolific murder and fear as well as completely ineffective laws which render the public increasingly complacent against a government which refuses to understand it. What exactly is it that this ammendment outlaws, its still legal to suck whichever set of genitals you want. If you really hate gay sex, believe that it is an abomination, I could understand why you would want to outlaw gay sex. But all this ammendment does is outlaw me giving another dude my inheritance automatically or including him on my medical insurance. I doubt they would care if I just donated my property to a same sex friend, but once someone rolls deuce on you its magically different. Not to be confused, of course, with being magically delicious, which applies only to Lucky Charms.

I also want the shout out to include the mayor of New Paltz, NY. This person is apparently doing the same thing and I find it wondefully reassuring to see gay couples walking out of a court with their marriage licenses in hand, even if it will only go on for a little while longer. We drove through this area today, it doesn't seem to be very large and I am pretty sure most of the gay couples getting married here took a day trip up from the city, but what do I know. I can also tell you that New Paltz, NY sounds like a made up name from Mad magazine, Paltz just really seems like one of the terms Mad would use for an assfucking dipshit. I'm talking their ridiculous overuse of words like "schmuck." I don't know that these words have yiddish roots, but to a gentile from the midwest it has always sounded like they do.

So in conclusion, to echo Scarface in Dave Chappelle's classic film Half Baked: "Fuck you (to the Marist IT department), fuck you (Governator), fuck you (Mr. President), you're cool (mayors in question), fuck you (executives at the WB, I know I haven't talked about it yet, I am still too pissed).

I actually have an adddendum that I just thought of. I know exactly what it is that most pisses me off about contemporary technology. No, its not the lack of working with my hands. No, its not my alienation from the products of my labor. No, its not the weird beeping sounds computers make. It is technology attempting to regulate how much of something I can have. In some ways this applies to the Marist IT thing, since those bastards are attempting to regulate how much internet access I can have, but I am referring more to the regulation of an actual phsycial product. The example that keyed this off today were the paper towel dispensers in the bathrooms in the Rest Stops on the NY State Thruway. These are the little blue ones that you have to wave your hand in front of and then they dispense to you what it considers exactly one unit of paper towel. Now, this would be all cool, since it is essentially just an automatic version of pushing the lever down on a normal paper towel dispenser. It gets fucked up because the automatic refuses to dispense you another towel until it determines that enough time has passed. You can wave your hand and do a little fucking dance in front of it, but no way in hell is it going to spit out another one until it is damn good and ready. Its like it has to determine whether or not you have even attempted to dry your hands with just one, and if you decide, only after thorough initial drying, that another unit of towel is imperative for optimum dryosity, can you renew your subscription to paper towel weekly.

The same thing happens with those coupon dispensers at the supermarket, that stick one coupon out at you, which you take. Then they delay like 5 seconds and spit out another, which you also take. Then it waits another 5 seconds and spits out a third, which you again take. Just now, when you are really in the spirit of removing coupons it decides that you have had enough. Nope, it says, you get a maximum of three coupons. I have an idea instead. Yep, instead of you dispensing me only three coupons and then deciding arbitraily that I can have no more, you just do your machine duty and spit out the coupons and I will determine whether or not I need to remove them. I will determine for my self how many towels I need to dry my hands. You were created simply to give them to me. I am in one of those moods where I hate these pieces so much I would just smash them to remove an adequate supply of paper towel were they not monitored by video cameras and constitutive of some sort of misdemeanor against the State of New York.

Maybe I got a little carried away there, but I will admit that I have more than once purposefully run either my cart or my shoulder into those red coupon spitters as I walked down a supermarket aisle. I know they are hinged and just bounce back but it makes me feel better. I think it might be a good idea to insert computer chips into random devices which make the thing say "You have succesfully used violence against an inanimate object to demonstrate that your position is accurate" or even just "Ouch!! Okay, you are right" so that we would feel some sense of vindication when we inevitably smacked a coke machine or copier. Even if that didn't alter the performance of that particular technological item at all my day would be instantly enlivened by hearing a machine even superficially acknowledge that it completely bonered something. Maybe you could make the chips say different things depending on how hard they were hit. So you could either get it to say "Whoops, my bad" or "Calm down, calm down, I said I was sorry deuce. Chill." Anything would be appreciated.

Now that I am on the subject, I really like Special K. I saw this ad the other day for the Special K diet and here is what they said, almost literally word for word: "Replace two meals a day with Special K cereal and you can lose 6 pounds in a week." I was like, "Holy shit, I should totally do that. I love Special K, I can lose like 312 or so pounds over the next year." Katie turns to me and says, "You know you only get one bowl, right." And I think it was quite obvious that I indeed did not know that I only got one bowl. That fact makes this diet like the least interesting thing in the entiere world. They didn't even say it on the commercial, I saw it again and paid close attention. It wasn't even in the random small print. It was no where. I want to become an ad exec for Edy's Ice Cream--Join the Edy's Ice Cream Diet!! Just replace all three of your meals with Edy's Ice Cream and you can lose about 20 pounds a week!!!!--of course you only get to eat like 2 spoonfulls of ice cream every meal, but thats okay, you should be able to figure that out. I have not once, never once, in my life sat down with a box of Special K, a gallon of milk, a spoon, and a bowl, and eaten only one bowl. I am pretty sure that the amount of Special K which I regularly pour into a bowl is actually more than an actual bowl. That is kinda screwed up notably, that a bowl can be more than a bowl.

While I did write this at various times over the weekend I am now returned to Buffalo. We got back fairly late last night and while I may have something to say later about the Oscars, for now I just want to get this shitty up.

Peace,

MB-K