The reason I’m writing this is because I was just ears-bleedingly-loud-music-rolled by yet another fucking website: http://www.shrutilaya.org (WARNING: the sound on the site is loud…and it never fucking ends).  Look, you amateur dipshits, people actually may look at your website at school, at the library, at work and they don’t need to listen to your shitty music blaring unexpectedly.  It’s annoying and it’s rude.  It’s like if you went to your local library and just started shouting.  It’s like if you were anywhere and just started shouting.  There is no difference between this and acting like a crazy person.  Because that’s what you are — yeah, I’m looking at you, Webmaster G-Dog!, with your Macbook PRO in the coffee shop sipping lattes and furrowing your brow while you work with your webmasterin’ skillz because I don’t know how many years of webapprenticeship you went through and I don’t care how many years you were a webjourneyman before being elevated by some blazing Sword of Greyskull-like dildo that christened you into webmasterhood (pathetic piece of shit, I fuckin’ hate you) — you’re a crazy person.

Here’s the deal.  I want to go to your website, glean some information that I deem important, and get the fuck away.  I don’t want to be pulled into your idea of what my experience should be.  I don’t want to be dazzled by flourishes of pretty colors and smart spacing.  I don’t want a million stupid gadgets in my way for my convenience.  I don’t really care about using your website as a springboard into my social networks because let’s face it, they’re stupid anyway.  And you’re stupid.  I will ignore your ads with every ounce of my being.  I will close every popup you dare to open.  If your entire website is in Flash, I will wonder if you are trying out for the special Olympics because you obviously have Down’s Syndrome…and your mother probably drank during her pregnancy.  All I ask is that you give me what I want and that you get the fuck out of my way.  Who knows?  Maybe I would even pay for that.

There’s been some buzz about Mickey Mouse’s Makeover. When I saw the rendered image of a new “cantankerous and cunning” Mickey, I thought to myself, “My word! That looks just like Sonic the Hedgehog!” (Yes, I sound like Dr. Watson when I think to myself…by Jove!) Anyway, take a look for yourself. I must say it will be fun to watch toddlers hugging this new Mickey at Disneyland; he looks like he’s ready to punch someone in the face.

OK, I agree…a little graphic. I have to admit I don’t know much about Satan’s butthole nor the frothy badness that spews from it, but we shall leave the explicit details for another time. Tonight I was watching television when lo a little commercial featuring a web product sold by a Mister Neil Clark Warren comes on. You know the ones:

I’ve got a business and when you’ve got your own business, you’re too busy to form relationships with real people in real life. I mean, I’ve got my own business, people! That’s why I gave eHarmony a try. That’s how I met {insert random name here}…

[Speaker falls in slow motion into {insert random name here}'s arms]

It’s like we just clicked. It’s like we were made for each other…

[Speaker and {insert random name here} exchange a smooch]

I can’t imagine life with {insert speaker’s name here}. I just look at {insert speaker’s name here} and…

[Flash to speaker and {insert random name here} making out in front of camera]

I didn’t think love could be like this…

[Flash to speaker and {insert random name here} in mid-coitus]

Thanks, eHarmony.

[Enter Dr. Neil Clark Warren, founder of eHarmony]

Isn’t it great to find true love (except if you’re gay)? With 29 dimensions of compatibility, we’ve removed all the spontaneity and thrill of finding that special someone into a scientific and meticulous process consisting of answering questions and constant disappointment.

Anyway, fuck those eHarmony commercials.

But I really really really really really really hate Lolcats. I don’t quite get it. What is this phenomenon? How has it gotten so popular?

Here’s my impression of how it came about:

Gosh, gee, golly, gee-whiz, that sure is a cute picture of a cat. But no, I, I can’t just send it to all my friends and family and co-workers and passers-by and strangers and such. No, it’s missing something. YES! It needs a caption of some sort. Yeah, as if the cat were trying to say something. Like as if the cat has ATTITUDE! Boffo!

But wait, I have an even better idea! (Gee, golly, I’m so clever!) What if I misspelled the captions so that the cat’s not only got attitude but he can’t fathom our quaint human world with our rules of grammar and bizarre social customs.

OMG, GENIUS!!!!!!!!!

I mean, they’re cute and all, but it’s like pushing cuteness to a whole new level. It’s like punching someone in the face with cuteness.

But won’t someone please think of the children…I mean, cats? It’s like you can’t take a cat seriously anymore. You see a cat pooping and instead of recoiling in disgust, you think, “I Shoodna Eatn Dat Hole Ding!” or two cats fucking and you say to yourself, “OOPS! Where my junk go?” I mean, don’t you remember when you looked at a cat and simply thought, “Meow.” This is borderline animal cruelty. And I’m not afraid to say it once and for all.

UPDATE: Apparently, they’re being turned into a musical. I believe this is one of the four horsemen.

And it seems like eons ago that the History Channel had programming about history.

UPDATE: Here’s a breakdown of the History Channel’s lineup: http://graphjam.com/upcoming/?pid=11861

This video reminds me of Sartre’s famous lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism…for some reason I dunno.

And of course the pièce de résistance:

The last 5 seconds speak for themselves…

The first reason to hate Twitter: the overly cutsie name. It’s hard to believe we now live in a world where grown people talk about “tweeting”. It’s enough to announce to the whole world for no particular reason, “Hey, everyone who barely knows me and barely cares about what I’m doing, this is what I’m doing right this minute!” It’s enough to say, “!” It’s enough to shout out, “I want to gossip about nothing important and feverishly typing away on my cell phone gives me a euphoric sense of self-satisfaction that…oh, wait a minute, this is so much fun I think I’m cumming!” But to call it “tweeting” gives it that special “retarded” touch.

And Twitter wallows in the mundane and the superficial. Take Facebook for instance. How many friends do you have on Facebook? Now how many “actual” friends do you have in real life? Is there a disconnect? Probably. Be honest. That’s the nature of social networks. We want to connect through them, but they are public by nature and so it is almost impossible to be oneself fully and therefore connect in a genuine way. Take being on camera for instance. When you are on camera, you act different. You put up a front. You play the part of yourself. Because you’re exposed. Social networks are much the same way. Many of us act different on social networks because they in their own way shine a spotlight on us. And as a result, they are anti-social. Because we are not wholy ourselves, we are encumbered from making true connections online.

I am reminded of the old days of IRC. In those heady days when people got online, entered chatrooms, and gabbed with random people they’ve never met, you had a sense of anonymity. You could be whoever you wanted. You could say whatever you wanted. You could be a lover, you could be a smoker, you could even be a midnight toker. And ironically, people are more themselves that way. It’s when your imagination runs wild that you reveal the most about yourself. Nowadays, people no longer have that anonymity. Instead you see people building up their individual profiles, driving up their friend numbers, and generally putting up a face to the world. We get so easily wrapped up in the superficiality of the medium, that we lose sight of ourselves.

The last reason for hating Twitter stems from hype. I’ve heard everything about Twitter. How it has/will change the way humans communicate. How it fundamentally alters your life. How it is a game changer for the Interweb. It’s 140 characters, people. 140 fucking characters! It’s a glorious way to say to the world, “I just typed less than 140 characters!!!” Like all social networks, it’s built on the presumption that the world cares. The world doesn’t care. I’m sorry to have to break it to you. The world does not care! Sure, maybe you’ll touch the life of some migrant worker in Central Zimbabwe with your stunning review of the bag of popcorn you just ate, but that just seems really unlikely.

Ultimately, most people want the web to change our lives. I am reminded of the philosophy discussion group I ran for a while. People clambered for an online discussion and someone finally put up a forum on their site for people to participate in philosophical discussions online. Almost no one participated and it eventually died. Why? I think it’s because you lose the dialog. Admittedly, this is where I think Twitter has the ability to shine. It allows you to have dialogs — albeit badly. Dialogs allow you to connect. But dialogs are hinged on immediacy. When you don’t have the immediacy, everyone having the short attention spans that they do will move onto something else. And there’s nothing social about that.

So why did I go through the trouble of explaining my morning commute? I like to think of it as an example of bending the rules. In a normal scenario, a person would simply follow the WALK signal and cross the street accordingly. I know the traffic pattern. I know how the lights work. I don’t need the WALK signal. I can bend the rules and this comes from a deeper knowledge of the intersection and the traffic patterns there.

So why does this matter? Because it illustrates my point: knowledge can trump the rules. Take the case of trikinosis. Trikinosis ensues when pork infected with a roundworm called Trichinella spiralis is ingested producing cysts in your gastrointestinal tract. Jews and Muslims are forbidden to eat pork because it is seen as unclean. Perhaps they found people dying of this parasitic disease, attributed to pork, and came to the conclusion that pork = bad. They didn’t know about trikinosis and how to prevent it. We do. And so millions of people in the world are able to eat trikinosis-free pork without fear of repercussion. Here is a case where knowledge trumps the rules.

Recently, there’s been a furor over gay marriage and there’s a lot of people out there arguing against it on the basis that “the Bible is against it”. In short, the argument is it’s against the “rules”. I always find that the argument “the Bible tells me so” is a weak argument. In fact, it is a non-argument because it denies the debate entirely. It is a fair way to go about things as a child, but grownups have to think beyond these boundaries, for the world is not so Manichean. There’s a lot of gray out there. There are lot of difficult questions. Simply wishing away the complexities of life doesn’t get you very far. We should seek knowledge to understand the complexities of life and how to navigate them. That’s what grownups typically do. I don’t know why people are so afraid to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Hell, it gets me through the intersection faster.

I won’t get into details about Krishna since it goes beyond a mere blog post, so I’ll leave it to Wikipedia to get your started. Growing up learning about the life of Krishna, one thing had always struck me as peculiar. You see, unlike Jesus, there are many stories of Krishna’s childhood. Through old stories in the Mahabharata, we see Krishna grow up. And unlike Jesus, we see this child, this god-incarnate, as a mischievous little bastard.

Yes, folks, little Krishna gots himself into a mess o’ trouble. He’d steal butter. He’d tie people up. He’d steal the clothes of young women. And with godlike acuity and magic, he just as easily got himself out of trouble. Which of course always struck me as odd. Because this flies in the face of everything we know about God. God, the creator, the all-powerful, the all-knowing, etc., etc. So why would God manifest Himself as a mischievous child? What does that say about Hinduism?

I simply ignored these tales as rubbish for many years until I had an epiphany, and the epiphany was this: It does say something about Hinduism. In many pagan religions, gods are looked up to as one would look up to a mother or a father. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God is the father. Even Freud said that our feelings about our parents are transferred to that being we call God. And we want to be like children again with an ever-loving God to protect us.

And yet in Hinduism, we have this God-child, this Krishna, who with all of his wiles, all of his mischief, Hindus accept and worship. Because while in other religions, people are taught to love God as one would love a mother or a father, Hindus — through Krishna — are taught to love God as one would love a child. Unconditionally. Without fear or remorse. With acceptance and care. Like a mother or a father would. Like a grownup.