The Curse of the "i"

Parachute pants, those slap-on bracelets, Ace of Base, "Tubthumper". What do all of these have in common? They are things that once were perceived as the pinnacle of "it" and now are nothing but fodder for jokes as people that actually experienced those fads, reminisce about how stupid they were for embracing them.

Life would be a whole lot simpler if people would just learn to follow my mantra. "People are stupid." You can never trust people. You can never expect to do anything worthwhile with people. You can never take advice about what is and what isn't cool from people. Sure there are individuals that know these things, and that can be trusted. But people in general are just stupid.

So why is it that society is so eager to embrace the philosophy of people? One of the newer offenders of the people is the "i". Now, first on this list of "i" offenders is the ever so popular iPod. Oh how it is loved by the people. And it is in fact a very handy device. However, it is not the only form of a digital music player out there. Believe it or not there are many other options that are for the most part superior to the iPod. Unfortunately, people have decided that they like how cool and hip they look with their elitist white headphones, that they have completely dumbed down many people and have coerced them to buy into the people's garbage that iPod is the only way to go. When people see any MP3 player and call it an iPod, regardless of brand, they are showing how unwilling they are to learn anything for themselves and how important it is for them to be like people. This is like calling every car you see Prious. Are they all the same kind of car? No? Then please use the same common sense when dealing with other things...like MP3 players perhaps.

The "i" phenomenon has been a huge hit for people. Not only are there iPods and iMacs. But there are companies like iRiver and ihome. In my stats class, we have a clicker that allows us to send in the answers to quizzes in class (kind of like a gameshow clicker) and guess what, it is called the "iClicker". Seriously? I mean you have to be freaking kidding me. How could you get away with naming something like that the "iClicker"? I swear I saw at least 4 students trying to plug their hip white headphones into them just last class period.

It is not the fact that I like or dislike white headphones. Instead it is the message that people are trying to give when they are showing off those white people-approved headphones. They say, "Look at me! Finally I have done it! I am just like people. Don't you wish you could be like people too?" That is what is wrong with the "i" phenomenon. Everyone is so desperate to mimic people that they are willing to do the dumbest things in order to ensure success.

How long will it be before we all feel pressured by people to order the "iburger" or have ourselves some "iIcecream" for dessert. Because people, you have successfully helped verify the veracity of my mantra. People are in fact stupid. People are pure failure.

We should champion in a new era where stupidity is eschewed rather than embraced. Where conformity happens due to rational, individual prerogative rather than through peer pressure and the wanting to be accepted. Let us distance ourselves from people and surround ourselves with intelligent, free-thinking individuals. Now is our chance to cure the curse of the "i".

Strike One and You're Out!

For those cultured people out there that are familiar with NBC's genius series, The Office, Dwight Schrute is a person who craves authority. His insatiable appetite for power that he can unjustly wield over others is extremely hilarious-- when on TV. However, when people do this in the real world, it is far from funny. When those power hungry, self-deluded cretins think that they have to exercise their feeble and insignificant power in a way that surpasses their authority, they are epitomizing Pure Failure.

I am what you would call a connoisseur of sports. I enjoy playing, as well as spectating, athletic competitions. While enjoying the relaxed atmosphere and jovial attitude that enveloped my brothers' (two of them) city league softball game, I encountered one of the worst kinds of those power hungry cretins...in the form of the umpire.

Now I know that sports officials have been getting blasted for ages for making bad calls and betting on their own games, but sometimes they actually deserve the mud that is slung their way. If you think about it, sports officials have a very high percentage of correctness. If you compare their high percentage of correct calls (the SEC wants its basketball referees to be correct 94% of the time) compared to the percentage of other sports then they are way ahead of the competition. In baseball if you can hit over 30 percent of the time, then you are doing really well. In basketball shooting in the 60% range is considered good. 60% is a D. But I digress... while referees are not as horrible as many people make them out to be, there are times when they just suck. They make bad calls and stand by those calls because they don't want to look any worse, right? Wrong...especially in professional and college athletics where instant replay is almost a requirement. The bad calls live on and their level of incompetence rises.

Anyway, back to the warm spring night at the ball game. My brothers were playing softball against another team...coincidentally, it was the other team from their company. The game was really good and although it was noticeable the umpire was good for little less than crouching behind the catcher, occasionally rubbing his groin into his gluteus maximus, I was able to refrain from audibly belittling him. I was loud and proud, rooting for my brothers' team. It was an overall fun time. However, it was inevitable that the umpire would make a blatant, reprobate call. The call came towards the end of the game. It was a close contest and I was avidly cheering for the success of my hermanos. Then it came: a hit into center field. The center fielder (my brother) caught the ball of the bounce and gunned it into home plate to the pitcher who was cover the plate (my other brother). The runner was easily beaten by the ball and was tagged out at home, or was he? After a dramatic pause, the jacka-- I mean umpire called him safe. Immediately the crowd was in an uproar. Even the other team was visibly astonished at the complete trash that was that call.

Being a very loud and outspoken person, I was quick to let my thoughts known. I started to heckle the ref for being so obviously handicapped. I was quite inventive in the way that I delivered these "zingers". Soon, the umpire was having a hard time calling strikes and balls while I was incessantly vociferating at his inability to slay the dragon known as stupidity. Flustered and not knowing what to do, he stopped the game and yelled for his boss (his name was Paul). Then he notified the pitcher (who was my brother) that if I were to yell again then the game would be forfeited and I wold be escorted from the game. I had to take a moment to process the information that had just entered my brain. They were threating to kick me out...of a city league softball game. My laughter could not be refrained. Amusedly I guffawed at the threat of being escorted out of a softball game by Paul. So, I decided that I would respect their pathetic wishes and I remained silent. However, being a complete bastard, I grabbed my video camera which I had previously been using to record the game, and walked behind the backstop and stood behind the umpire and next to Paul. Silently, I filmed the two of them, from a very uncomfortable and close distance. Angrily, they tried to force me to put my camera away, but I silently pretended that I didn't hear them.

Finally the game ended. My brothers' team ended up losing. With the game no longer forfeitable, I started to discuss the ridiculous nature of their threat to kick me out the game. It was amusing to call them juvenile and immature and to see their reactions. Obviously, because they suffered from the all to common ailment known as stupidity, I had to leave them be with a chuckle. But still it remains a fact that I was almost forcibly removed from a softball game for heckling a horrible umpire over one call. It lasted all of two minutes. Unfortunately, two men with illusions of grandeur and a penchant for abusing their pathetic amount of authority granted to them by the city recreational department, had to ruin the tranquil softball atmosphere. It is because of simpletons like the unnamed umpire and Paul, that we have to put up with people that are so self important that they don't realize the triviality of their current position. They fail to see that anybody who can read at a 3rd grade level could perform their jobs better than they can.

And now ends my ranting and I hereby award these two men, and all other abusers of unimportant power, the award of achieving Pure Failure.

Caramel: How is it pronounced?

When we were little kids, life was so much easier. We were all learning together, so being stupid wasn't something that was completely looked down upon. As we grow up, we are slowly subjected to more and more tests of our ability to not be stupid and, believe it or not, we are expected to not be stupid. So how is it that there are those that so utterly epitomize the very meaning of Pure Failure.

Last week, wanting to go get something to eat at an early hour of the morning, some friends and myself ventured to Denny's after both Village Inn and IHOP were closed. I haven't the time to rant about how stupid it is for both Village Inn and IHOP to be closed, because it forced us to visit Denny's. Upon arriving at the big "D", a voice from deep inside my soul, greatly urged me to refrain from going inside. I ignored the voice and I am so, so sorry that I did.

After entering Denny's we were shown our seats and luckily for us, we were surrounded...by idiots. Now these weren't you run of the mill idiots, these idiots excelled in different aspects of idiocy. I will elaborate.

After about 5 minutes after arrival, a group of people came into the restaurant. I have never seen a more pathetic sight. Each one of them lacked individuality and instead survived by leeching off of their friends lack of individuality. They all wore "gangsta" clothes and spoke with less than stellar English. The words "dude" and "sweet" and "I have no personality" were used superfluously. If I were throwing an awesome birthday party at, let's say Chuck E. Cheese's (a story for another time) these are the guys that wouldn't even be considered to be given an invitation to the shindig due to their inability to have any redeeming qualities that would benefit the goers of the party.

Also during our Denny's stay there were these group of pseudo-intellectuals that for the majority of their stay, debated the pronunciation of the word Caramel. I never knew that such an insignificant word could waste so much time of someone's life. Of course, considering that their lives are nothing but wastes anyway, its not that serious of a deal.

I could go on and on about how the waitress was probably the worst waitress I had ever had, but then I would have to rescind my comment the next time I go to Denny's because I would end up with a waitress that was worse.

Denny's, with its stellar service mixed with the overflowing number of douchebags that frequent the place help Denny's become Pure Failure. If you have to go to Denny's because you are forced to do it, here's some advice: jump out of the car while its driving. It doesn't matter how fast the car is going, open the door and remember: tuck and roll. Because if you allow yourself to go to Denny's not only will you be subject to the worst service in restaurant history (I mean, do they actually try to suck that bad?) but you will end up being one of those douchebags that I write about because you went to Denny's.

The Individual vs. The Collective

After having lost the main source of inspiration for my first blog, I have had succumb to the natural order of things and start over. So here it is: Pure Failure. I oftentimes find myself being very critical of pretty much everything around. If someone says something that makes my brain hurt, it is my obligation, nay, it is my duty to help them realize that they should never, ever say that again. Inasmuch as I loathe the stupidity of pretty much everything around me, I have embarked on a zealous crusade to manifest to all, the things that are Pure Failure.

It is simply incredible that there are so many individuals that have achieved so much. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone; where would we be without his genius contributions to society? Inevitably, we would be doomed to personally visit people and converse with them face to face. Could you imagine the horrors that would befall us if we were reduced to that? We can't forget about the pride of Hungary: Laszlo Biro. Without this man's penchant for dreaming up the impossible, we would be stuck with dipping feathers into inkwells in order to correspond to all of our fan mail. Thank you Laszlo for inventing the ballpoint pen. And lastly, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee. Without him, we would be without the world wide web. If he were to never invent the internet, we would still have to remember real house addresses rather than those that start with WWW. Our endless supply of online amusement, from pornography to pornography, would no longer be at the tip of our fingertips and we would no longer have the chance to lie about ourselves on social networking sites. Truly I am thankful for the efforts of all those who have invented things that improve our quality of living.


If individually we can achieve anything, collectively we can achieve nothing. People as a whole are prone to constant acts of idiocy. Why is it that we regress in intelligence when we gather together in groups. In fact, the more people congregate, the more they devolve into a useless conglomeration of unintelligible, babbling baboons. What causes this phenomenon? The answer is right in front of us...celebrities.

We, as a collective group of idiots, waste our monetary income in order to be entertained. It isn't enough that we have Dish Network with it's 476,000 channels of quality television programming, or the fact that we can rent RedBox movies for free using those handy codes. Instead we need something more. Who cares that celebrities already do ridiculously easy jobs for a nauseating amount of money; we instead need to watch them act when they in fact aren't acting. We allow ourselves to actually care about which Olson twin is addicted to beef fajitas and flan. We open ourselves up to be interested in the love lives of those crappy actors that do nothing but make crappy movies. Remember Anna Nicole Smith? She got famous because she callously married a decrepit yet lively old man that had lots of money. She realized the American Dream of putting a toxic amount of silicone in one's body in order to be thought of as attractive. When her quality life ended, every news channel in existence were considerate enough to actually ram it down our throats in place of actually meaningful news, like when Achmed is going to pick up his homemade bomb and strap it to his chest and blow up people just for being American. Was that the right choice? Probably not for those who were accidentally in Achmed's way.

I hereby issue an edict that all celebrities are now known as Pure Failures. No longer will we waste our existence hunkered in front of the T.V. desiring nothing more than to know what Britney Spears' sister is going to name her new hamster. No more of those seemingly clever names that are given to celebrity couples where you combine their names to get one really deplorable cutsie name. I propose that as individuals who value intelligence, self-worth, and hard work, that we should pay no heed to the celebrities that do nothing but lower our collective IQ. Because when we allow ourselves to be caught up in celebrities fickle problems and relationships, we our doing nothing but dooming ourselves to the inevitable end of becoming part of a society where value is based on how many times you have gone to rehab rather than how you have actually contributed meaningfully to society.