Crabby Blogging Lady

Snob alert! Snob alert!

So what IS it about Apple computer products that make them so exceedingly superior to Microsoft products, eh? I NEVER dreamed I would in any way, shape, or form defend Microsoft… but after trying out a few Apple products (and spending TONS of money doing so, when I could otherwise have paid off my mortgage or bought a few decades of college tuition), I walk away *not impressed* with Apple. This is not to say that Microsoft is imminently superior, it’s just that… well, they both suck. lol.

I’ve been researching the iPad. I already own an iPod Touch and a Mac Mini (not to mention a few half dozen aluminum keyboards and other assorted Apple accessories). I’ve looked into buying a MacBook or a computer or an iPad… but was stricken with a severe case of sticker shock. Holy cow, WHO would PAY SO MUCH MONEY for those things and more?! And for what?! Just for the snob factor?

I like my iPod a lot, but it’s nothing more than a cute, tiny entertainment device that twitters, plays my music, and–when it works– checks my email. Big whoop. The Mac Mini is sluggish and clunky. I dislike the dock with all the goofy buttons. I’m an adult, I don’t want a flapping purple duck for my instant messenger and a smiling box with a juvenile name (“finder”?!) for my desktop search. Moreover, I can’t do ANYTHING on a Mac. Want to create graphics? Gotta pay for that! Want to watch Netflix or online movies? Nope! Mac doesn’t have the hardware! Oh, you want a Mac that has Intel graphics so you can watch videos? Gotta pay for that! :-p Totally sux.

This is not to say that Apple makes inferior products. They certainly do not. I’ve enjoyed my iPod and have been delighted with the technology. I also admire the gazillions of money Steve Jobs is making, something akin to George Lucas, on all the “Apple related” ad hoc toys and toodles that are born out of marketing schemes. For each and every Apple product function, there is an independent accessory. Apple Macbook briefcases in a zillion sizes and styles… docks and stations and keyboards and etc etc… Some of the accessories are VERY cool. Others are… extraneous at best.

So I’m not saying Apple is inferior. I am saying, however, that the Apple stuff is certainly overrated. And DEFINITELY overpriced. Is it humane to pay as much for a powerhouse Mac computer when you can feed entire villages in Africa for a year for the same price? And then the technology is outdated within a year or two? Is this insane? At least with PCs, they are cheap! You can throw those a couple of those in the landfill every year or so and still have enough money leftover to make your mortgage every month, sheesh!

Is the entire Apple hype all just part and parcel of The Snob Factor? We women know how men are– they must always have a “good guy” and a “bad guy”; they must always have a war or some kind of competition going on, ykwim? In this world, can’t we just have PC users and Mac users who all get along and play the midi version of Kumbaya in harmony? Must there be this “my computer is better than your computer” attitude? And must there be this “my computer is 20x more expensive than yours and therefore must be better so let’s build an entire rabid cult around the product line” attitude?

I don’t think it’s worth it.

Not for me. For YOU. Well, for those of you who haven’t been working 18 hours a day, gutting you old house and building it back from scratch, learning how to do it in your “spare” time at night, oh and also working a job as well as cooking and cleaning and doing laundry (without a laundry room, and with only intermittent plumbing & electricity) for six people, maintaining a vegetable garden, and overseeing home school for a few weeks during the summer… for YOU it’s been a boring summer, hasn’t it? And to think that I was actually entertaining thoughts of online college or medical assistant school, to boot! Ha ha!

I don’t have much leisure time, in case you haven’t guessed. But today, I’m kicking off for a whopping TWO HOURS. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am fooling around, watching online videos! Oh, this one made me laugh. LOLOL. I love these guys.

What a card!!!

My thoughts are a little disjointed lately. Too much joint compound dust in my nose these days. :S

Seriously, I’m sorry I have neglected my blog. I have neglected a LOT of things. I can barely lift my arm to brush my teeth at night. I’m heartened by the thought that my life will be back to normal sometime soon, and I’ll have a CLEAN, SAFE, and WARM house to live in, in relative comfort and style! Yay!

Hang in there.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Touche.

THIS is NEWS?!?!

College Students Have Less Empathy Than Past Generations

College students today show less empathy toward others compared with college students in decades before, a study from the University of Michigan says.

Sara Konrath, a researcher at the university’s Institute for Social Research, looked at 72 studies that gauged empathy among 14,000 college students in the past 30 years. She found that empathy has been declining — especially since 2000.

The research finds that college students today show 40% less empathy vs. students in the 1980s and 1990s. The students are less likely to agree with statements such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”

The study did not evaluate why students are less empathetic, but Konrath says one reason may be that people are having fewer face-to-face interactions, communicating instead through social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

“Empathy is best activated when you can see another person’s signal for help,” Konrath says.

All you have to do is go out for a drive. You don’t need a reporter to tell you this, bub. Holy cow, kids are NASTY today! “Empathy,” what a word, lol. They “lack” “empathy.”

Maybe if they weren’t so pampered and pandered, that might help? Maybe if they didn’t have everything handed to them on a silver platter? Maybe if they actually interacted with the sick, the weak, the infirm, a little more? So much for all that “self-esteem” crap in school. Kids don’t need “self-esteem.” They need to work their BUTTS off so they know that 1.) Kids are NOT the center of the universe, 2.) They develop a sense of accomplishment in a JOB WELL DONE and not a prideful attitude of the eternal importance of their existence amongst us mortals.

Kids should work hard at anything and everything– digging ditches, sat prep, whatever. But they MUST be forced to work hard. And they must stop being pampered!!!

Our society cannot righteously complain about the monster that society has created. It didn’t just magically happen. These monster have been created. Welcome to the school of hard knocks, you “empathy” “lackers.” It’s called REAL LIFE. As soon as you go out into the real world away from your ivory towers and coddling parents, and try to find jobs amongst your peers and try to make a living, you’ll find out that everyone ELSE is JUST as lacking in empathy as YOU!

YOW. Look at this sucker.

(Is that really just Photoshopped??)

THAT, dear people, is the mother of all sinkholes, according to the news folks. It swallowed a THREE STOREY building (and everything in it). Don’t go here to learn more about it– go here. Apparently, a tropical storm (Agatha) blew through Guatemala. The

Tropical Storm Agatha swept across Central America yesterday, bringing torrential rain that killed more than 100 people and opened a 60m-deep sinkhole in Guatemala City which reportedly swallowed up a three-storey building.

The first named storm of the 2010 Pacific season dumped more than a metre of rain in parts of Guatemala, also hitting El Salvador and Honduras. At least 113 people were reported killed, with around 50 missing in Guatemala alone as rescue workers searched through the rubble.

The 30m-diameter sinkhole opened up in a northern district of Guatemala City, with residents blaming the rains and substandard drainage systems. Local reports said one man was killed when the building was swallowed. In 2007, three people died when a similar sinkhole appeared in the same area.

It’s nice to see a news report spell the word “storey” correctly. Not even Spell Check can get it right.

ANYWAY.

WHY the people would plunk a city in the middle of a swamp baffles me. It’s like Los Angeles or Mexico City– hey, who cares if the subsoil is about to crack open and swallow us all up?! Let’s build a big city here, expand it, and dump really expensive homes in the place!! And then, when disaster strikes, we’ll demand that the federal government declare an “emergency” and all the other sane folks living in non-disaster locations will bail us out!!!

It’s really sad that disasters happen. But if you are ASKING for them to begin with, and sympathy is not forthcoming… why do you complain?

Anyway, I hope the Guatemalans are doing OK. It’s gotta be tough. I feel sorry for those folks.

Oh gee. And I thought the resemblance was only behavioral. But now that I think about it…

Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.

The biologists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been slowly reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals, the stocky hunters that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago, by extracting the fragments of DNA that still exist in their fossil bones. Just last year, when the biologists first announced that they had decoded the Neanderthal genome, they reported no significant evidence of interbreeding.

Scientists say they have recovered 60 percent of the genome so far and hope to complete it. By comparing that genome with those of various present day humans, the team concluded that about 1 percent to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today is derived from Neanderthals. But the Neanderthal DNA does not seem to have played a great role in human evolution, they said.

Yeah, bright guy. That’s because there WAS no evolution. It’s all a fairy tale. There’s no evidence for it. Period. The best thing they have is finch beaks, and there ain’t no new species popping out of those birds when the beaks get bigger or smaller during good times and bad– despite Steven Jay Gould’s ridiculous proposal of “spontaneous generation.” I found this great outline of what evolutionists believe:

According to the Darwinian religious beliefs, life began in this way:

(1) There was exactly the right atmosphere—and it was completely different from the one present today.

(2) The ground, water, or ocean where life began had exactly the right combination of chemicals—which are not present today.

(3) Using an unknown source of exactly the right amount of an unknown energy, rightward amino acids formed in sufficient quantities so that …

(4) … they could intelligently combine into enormous amounts of proteins and nucleotides (complex chemical compounds in exactly specific and highly intricate interdependent sequences).

(5) Then they intelligently reformed themselves into various tissues and organs inside a “simple” main organism.

(6) The organism found something to eat that didn’t kill it (this sounds silly, but this is important) and a way to intelligently transform those nutrients into sustainable and useful energy.

(7) The simple organism did some careful thinking and highly precise planning (as with all the other points, well beyond the collective intellectual abilities of even the finest human minds living or dead), and developed a nearly infinitely complex genetic code to cover hundreds of thousands of different factors.

(8) At this point, it found someone to marry, developed a perfectly functional reproductive system, and was ready to start reproducing offspring.

The last point reveals that all the previous points had to occur within the single lifetime of just one single celled organism. Since microbes and bacteria don’t live very long, this first living pioneer had to think and act lightning fast. So fast that, I’m afraid, the entire “theory” is just an impossible dream.

Nothing is said here about irreducible complexity, too, which is basically that ALL the systems of the evolved organism (digestive, cardiovascular, respiratory, immune, etc) had to suddenly spring into being and action together and concurrently, otherwise the organism could not live. Take away one of the systems (respiratory, for example) and you got no life there. The functioning organism (such as, YOU and ME) are so complex that we could not have possibly evolved from a one-celled organism into the extremely irreducibly complex being that we are. It’s IMPOSSIBLE. It’s IMPOSSIBLE mathematically, and logically. IMPOSSIBLE.

So back to Bill Maher and his crappy show broadcasting across tv stands…. he can act like a Neanderthal all he wants… devolve as just another lusty Huxley moose… but the fact is we were CREATED. You guys want to live in a fairy tale? Go right ahead. But don’t censor our speech and force US to believe that drivel.

For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” — Aldous Huxley, “Confessions of a Professed Atheist,” Report: Perspective on the News, Vol. 3, June, 1966, p.19.