FIREBLIND.COM

So I went to Arby’s yesterday for lunch. Or maybe it was Monday. Either way, it doesn’t matter, unless you’re the investigator for my fraudulent back injury claim. If you are the investigator, I went to Arby’s Monday, when I could still walk. If you’re everyone else, I probably went there Tuesday.

But I digress….

Whilst at Arby’s I ordered a roast beef combo. The barely understandable gentleman behind the counter asked me if I wanted curly fries or potato cakes. When I said “just regular fries”, he said “no more regular fries”. I tried to ask him if this was permanent, but he wasn’t able to understand the question. So I grudgingly ordered curly fries and choked them down, thinking longingly of the days me and Regular Fries shared together.

I didn’t find anything on the intertubes about Arby’s getting rid of its regular fries, so maybe this was just a fluke. If it wasn’t, I’ve got to say that this is quite possibly the most outrageous thing I have ever heard in my 48 years of being a food columnist for fireblind.com. How can a company stop offering regular fries? Regular fries are to Americans what STDs are to Paris Hilton: they just go together. Getting rid of regular fries is what communists would do. Do you hear me? Communists! Arby’s might as well fly Vladimir Lenin’s body to headquarters and make him their Chief bloody Executive bloody Officer (bloody).

Now, a saner person might just say that the newly arrived Mexican immigrant employee did a poor job of explaining that they were out of regular fries for the day, but I prefer to think that Arby’s wants to take over the United States and kill your children. Oh, and I heard that they want to give free abortions to school children AND that they want to take god out of the schools. Freaking communists; they’re always trying to gank my stash.

A friend of a friend died this past weekend at the age of 21. I learned this via myspace. It’s weird to see death in such an environment, because for most of us it’s an occurrence very much removed from our daily existence. It’s even stranger when I look at the kid’s page and it says he logged in Friday, the day before he died. A bright, smiling photo still sits on the profile page. And there it will sit as a silent and perpetual obituary until myspace takes it down.

Death is such an odd thing in the digital age….

If you haven’t heard of it before, check out mydeathspace.com. It’s an amazingly difficult, yet compelling study of what life and death in the 21st-century looks like.

Scenario 1: I’m in southern California. My cousin is in northern Maine. I want to mail her a packet of poems I wrote in honor of Justin Timberlake. As of this week, it’ll cost me 41 cents. That’s 41 cents to go 3,500 miles.

Scenario 2: I’m in my living room. My brother is in the bathroom, painfully relieving his GI tract of tonight’s taco surprise. I want to text him a message making fun of his predicament. Depending on our relative data plans with our cell providers, it could cost up to 20 cents. 20 cents to send 6 words (”lol, u have teh explosive diarrhea”) of insignificant digital data over a gigantic digital network.

I could drive my 5,000 pound truck (editor’s note: holy crap!!) almost a twentieth of a mile on 20 cents, and Verizon/AT&T can’t push a bloody hundred or so bytes of data for less? I can send 53 stanzas of steamy JT love 3,500 miles for 41 cents, but it costs me half that to send 6 virtual words a few feet?

That, my friends, is what we in the Channukah music box industry call a “scam”. Or, what my friends in the Churro industry more appropriately call the ol’ “Irish McSwindle.”

So I’m filling up my ‘73 Pinto at some low-quality gas station when lo(!), I look up and see this Shell sign staring back at me. You can’t see it very well in this photo, but the guy on the left is holding up an engine part damaged by “low-quality gasoline”, while the creepy child molester guy on the right is holding up a pristine child penis version of the same part. I kind of chuckled, because this is my kind of advertising: making fun of poor people who can’t afford good gasoline.

Did I say that out loud? What I meant to say was, I think it’s funny that they would put a big “F-you” billboard next door to another business. It’s like if Knott’s Berry Farm flew a blimp over Disneyland with a banner saying something like “Mickey touches your children inappropriately on the Haunted Mansion”. There’s nothing Disneyland can do except shake it’s fist at the blimp.

Either way, it’s kind of shady and not quite being a good neighbor, but it cracked me and Jesus up, and that’s all that counts: learning a valuable lesson about friendship at summer camp.

My whole life I’ve been in favor of the death penalty. It seemed like a relatively simple equation: my ugly neighbor touches my Eggo brand waffles, and I say “leggo my Eggos”. He doesn’t, so I kill him. Wait. No, I don’t think that’s what I meant.

I think what I meant to say was that I’ve always believed that there are some things worth dieing for, and those things are generally worth killing for as well. An easy example is fighting off someone who is trying to kill your child. It would be a moral thing to harm the attacker in the interests of saving your child’s life. If the attacker were able to kill him or her, it seemed similarly moral to take their own life from them. They have taken the most important thing your child had, so we’ll take what’s most valuable to them.

That’s all fine and dandy in a direct cause and effect setting. However, I saw a quote from a prominent “new” atheist today that more or less stated that some religious ideologues are so dangerous that it would be in the interests of society to kill them. I don’t know what it was about today or that quote, but that single idea gave me some trouble.

In an article that I haven’t published here yet, I argue (as others before me have) that human free will is an illusion. There are so many subliminal processes and pathways that control our every move and thought that free will really is a figment of a constantly surprised consciousness (more on what I mean some other time). Basically, we are biological computers that happen to know we’re computers.

If we’re computers, it seems somewhat immoral to simply snuff out the life of one because of the potential danger their organic programming poses to everyone else. If we don’t, however, it’s possible that their “virus” will spread beyond themselves and infect numerous other people. The more people have the dangerous programming, the more likely they are to harm you or I. Put in those terms, it makes a lot of sense in a Machiavellian way to bump off the source of the virus before it can spread. That’s pretty scary to me though. What if society decides that I’m suddenly a virus and decides to kill me even if I’ve never done physical harm to someone? Wouldn’t it be a lot nicer to try and re-program me in the image of society?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Some of our human brethren are so broken that I doubt they can ever be capable of living peacefully with everyone else. The human mind is an amazing organ, but once corrupted, it is incredibly difficult to get it back. So the question becomes, do we tolerate the worst of our kind, or do we perform an abortion on the universe and get rid of them before they can really do some damage?

From a theoretical perspective, I’m in favor of the abortion. From a more pragmatic standpoint though, it’s a damn scary thought. If the guy does some physical harm to someone, it’s much more black and white to me. Once you get into thoughtcrime though, I think I have to bow out.

Nevertheless, let this be a lesson: always use a condom. Not only does it prevent an abortion in my dumb, figurative sense, but it saves us from having more idiots in the literal sense. That, and it means fewer ginger kids trying to get their soulless hands on my Eggo.

Originally, Ikea was my arch nemesis, and then Best Buy was my new arch nemesis, but today Newport Cigarettes company has become my new new arch nemesis.

Seriously, do I need to explain why?

Clicky for full size.

Actually, it’s not. I’m being a bit trite. Atheism is pretty harsh, but in the end, it is a far more magnanimous and benevolent way of living than religion creates.

Either rent it, or buy it. Now. It’s easily one of the best films released in the last few years. If nothing else, see it only for the moment where Will Ferrell’s character brings Maggie Gyllenhaal a present. Probably the most clever scene in any film of the last 2 decades.

We all know the story of the Garden of Eden: God creates stuff, god forbids stuff, the snake tricks Eve into eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve go to college to learn how to sew and make clothing from fig trees, God punishes them and the snake.

There are a number of things I find cute about the first few chapters of Genesis, but I want to point out two here. First, the Bible says that the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals. Second, after the whole big to-do, God tells the serpent that his offspring will be forced to crawl on the ground.

That’s it!

The snake is pretty much responsible for every single act of pain and suffering in the world since then, and all he has to do is slither around on his belly. Humans? In addition to horrible diseases, warfare, tsunamis, etc, they also get to go to Hell. Sounds like God and the serpent had a little side thing going on….

But I digress. What I wanted to say was that it’s funny that all of snakedom was punished because one snake decides to get all uppity and overthrow everything that God slaved away on. You think that A) God could have created dumber snakes, or B) more intelligent humans. Or, for that matter, he could have avoided the whole debacle by you know…NOT putting a Tree of Knowledge in the garden. Nevermind that he imagined light and magically made stuff appear out of nowhere: throw in a snake with an IQ of 85 and everything falls to pieces. I can see God now: “Oh noes!!1! How could I forget about the cunning snake? All my plans, ruined! If only I could see the future, nothing like this would have happened! Oh…what a world!”

Note that the Bible does not say that the devil tempted Eve. It’s clearly a smart (talking!) animal acting of its own volition. By the way, who taught the snake about good and evil?

One final thing: why punish every serpent for this one serpent’s crimes? Probably because the big G-O-D seems to like punishing everyone and everything when a couple of people make mistakes. Adam and Eve eat from a forbidden tree? Why not give some little African kid AIDS and then let the vultures eat his carcass when his mom starves to death? We should probably hack off his father’s arms when a roving militia comes into town too! A bunch of adults turn away from God? Why not drown everyone on earth, including newborn babies and animals in the Great Flood? A pharaoh starts acting like a jerk to Moses? Hmmmm…let’s see…what’s a good punishment? I know! How about killing all the innocent firstborn children? After that, we can give everyone else boils. Nevermind that it’s one guy being a dick; we’ll let everyone starve and suffer horrible pain. Hooray!

Or, how about this chestnut: a king hears that a messiah was born. Why not let him slaughter all the innocent male children in Bethlehem? That should make everyone happy!

I guess what I’m trying to say is, Go Team God! You’re super awesome!

I listen to talk radio a lot. Not as much as the old guy with the big mustache down the street who swears NASA talks to him on his ham radio, but a fair amount of my drive-time is spent listening to tinny AM stations. One of the constant themes is global warming, and on the more conservative stations, how stupid the idea of global warming is.

Granted, the incredibly good-looking jury in my head is still out on whether climate change is caused as much by us (humankind) as we think it is, but I’m very open to the idea. After all, the research for GW is being conducted by some of the most brilliant minds to ever walk the earth using the best technology ever seen. At the very least, I can say that there is incredibly strong intellectual evidence to find a correlation between the stuff we do and climate change.

You would never know this, however, by listening to conservative talk radio. The way these guys talk, you would think GW research is being conducted by blind, semi-retarded anarchist high school students who would like nothing better than to bring down the “Amerikan” economy. (See what I did there? I spelled “America” with a “k”. Take that, Big Business!)

It’s as if Global Warming has driven over to your parent’s house in it’s 1969 Corvette with its sexy hairy chest, climbed in through the second-story window using the ivy on the front porch, and is now having its way with your smokin’ hot and fully-developed, though ignorant and gullible 16-year-old sister. Hey, at least he’s assistant manager at the KFC.

In any event, all i really wanted to say is this: if the scientists are wrong, so what? We’ll have reduced pollution, decreased the pressure on natural resources, and developed much more efficient and long-term energy sources. We’ll make more jobs in the industries that develop the new technologies to replace the jobs lost in the old industries. Maybe I’ll even eventually get my stupid flying car.

On the other hand, if they’re right, and we don’t do this stuff, your sister’s not the only one who’s gonna get screwed. (Editor’s note: Zing!)