I want my country back

Today, I drove down to >insert college town here< to pick up my son, and on the way back, wedecided to stop off at the grocery store to pick up a few items. One item I'd been looking for for a while now was matches, in the box. They used to be with the grill stuff/paper plates in the paper stuff section, but when I went to find them for the last few months, they haven't been there.

So, I happen to look at the very bottom shelf of the impulse item shelf at the end of the checkout line, and there are the matches. Gee, that was really easy to find, your grocery store morons.

But.. it gets better. We used the scan-it-yourself aisle, because the other aisles were all pretty full, and we only had about 6 things.

the machine hung up because, get this: matches are an "age restricted item."

What the fuck?

matches? since when are matches an age restricted item? holy shit!

You have to show fucking ID to get allergy meds, for shit's sake, and you can't even get them during late store hours, you have to fuck around at the pharmacy to get fucking sudafed, for shit's sake, which used to come nice and cheap, and now only comes in expensive name brand so thank you, you congressional assmonkies, and now you have to show proof that you're 18 to buy fucking MATCHES??

I want my country back. I want the stupid nannystate bullshit to fucking stop allready.

this is insane.

Memorial Day

I frequent a religion message board, where deletions run rampant.
This gem was posted by a man I only know as "Kuma" and all I know about him is that his wife is Japanese, he's a bit older than me, and he has a warrior's spirit.

I know it will get deleted, as he angers the Religious fundies over there, and they won't like this.

so I'm posting it here, to keep alive.

16022. On Memorial Day
by kuma03, 5/29/06 15:34 ET


If you wish, I would like to Memorialize the following fallen and effected by the selfishness of warfare:

- The soldiers fallen giving their lives for what they were told to believe in.

- The soldiers fallen rescuing fellow soldiers, civilians and even the enemy from harm.

- The wives, husbands, sons and daughters who were told that their loved one has fallen.

- The soldiers that must return to their nation missing limbs or handicapped in other ways from experiencing warfare.

- The children in the war zones that grow up emotionally severed from seeing the destruction

- The politicians. Yes... the nuts that convince us into war. They will fall eventually with the death of others on their conscience.

- The medics: their job is to save lives. And for the rest of their lives, they will wonder if they had done something different, more lives would have been saved.

- the 'Enemy': everyone is an enemy to someone else if you set the table for such an event. Just discern the information that you are getting for dinner.

- The 6000 fallen US men and women in Afghanistan, Iraq and WTC.

- The 40,000 civilians of Afghanistan and Iraq.

And finally: all of the faces you never hear about that fall in war: executed, disease, suicide, starvation, frozen, or simply die from having no more life left to address the horror.

San san san

Origami

So, I'm following the directions for beginner's origami, and I'm happily folding away, when suddenly I realize that what I'm holding in my hands does not resemble what I'm supposed to have in my hands so much as it resembles an origami boulder folded by retarded simians. Oh, it resembles a butterfly, but where the paper is supposed to be in pieces, it's in one, because I opened the fold out, instead of pulling the point straight down, and who can follow all those directions that are just a bunch of two dimensional pictures anyway? It looks like a diamond, how am I supposed to know what's going on back there. Hey, at least I'm lucky enough to have figured out where I went wrong.

So I unfold everything, and start over again. Unlike my life, in which I just sit back and say "where did I go wrong now?" and it's not as if I can go looking for the directions to show me where I should have folded point a to point b instead of point c.

Even more frustrating is when I've made something before, and when I go to make it again, even following the same directions, I cannot figure out how I got it to go the right way. No clue. I do what I thought I did before, but obviously, it's not what I'm supposed to have done, because I'm sitting there with a bird base that refuses to do anything, instead of the halfway made dragonfly that I should be holding.

Now that IS what my life is usually like.

When I get my origami paper, I usually separate it into two piles. Colors I like and colors that I don't like. Colors I like are purple, green, blue, red, black, gray, and yellow. Bright yellow, and only because it makes some pretty origami stuff, normally I'm not a fan of yellow. Any metallics also go in the 'good' pile.

In the meh pile go all the browns, the oranges, the peach, the lime green, and the pink. These are the papers I use to fold anything new, that I'm not sure how to make, so if I'm gonna fuck up a paper, it's not one of the really nice ones, it's one of the narsty brown or orange ones.

One set of papers I get are tie-dyed in different colors, and I put the purple/blue/green ones in the good pile, and the brown/yellow/pink/orange/red ones in the meh pile. One of these papers has yellow corners and pink and red in the middle, and the butterfly I folded from it actually looked nice. My first run peach tulip in a lime green leaf/stalk also came out well. Yay me. The brown tie-dyed ones make good piggies, mice, and koi.

The metallic, two-sided paper that I get (actually, I think it's the only two-sided paper in the store. My craft store has a horrible dearth in the origami paper department, and I'm too frikkin busy (yeah.. busy. busy sounds better than lazy, no?) to either make my own, or find a better craft store.) is really pretty, most of it.

the above sentence is proof that my mind? is ADD, according to my family. Seriously, I was driving through the valley with my son and some friends one day, and talking about something or other, and saw a duck at the side of the road, and right in the middle of my sentence, I said "hey look! a duck!" and continued on with my train of thought without missing a beat. My son likes to remind me of this occasion at every possible opportunity.

So the papers, which come metallic/plain, are the following combos: gold/red, silver/purple, purple/green, green/yellow, magenta/blue, blue/pink. All of these make really pretty two-color origami ...er, things. Except the blue/pink. The blue, itself, is gorgeous. It’s a deep, pretty blue. The pink? is the same color as the regular pink origami paper. It's not a pretty rose color, it's not a deep magenta color, and it's not even a light, springy, happy pink. No, it's exactly the shade of pepto bismol.

Which would be great if I wanted to fold an origami pepto bismol bottle. Now, I'm certain that SOMEBODY has already folded one of these, and has posted directions for it on the net, and a dogpile search would bring up at least half-a-dozen pages on how to fold an origami pepto bismol bottle, but for shit's sake, that should be the definition of "way too much time on your hands" if you're making an entire web page on how to fold an origami pepto bismol bottle, not to mention the time it took to actually figure out the folds to make an origami pepto bismol bottle. Thinking about it though, is a freebie. Just means you have an active mind.

yeah.

Or, as in my case, your mind just goes in origami folds, all convoluted, and pain-in-the-ass, but if it works out right, you get something really neat.

inspired by a post @ I'm Not Sorry

more medical procedures would benefit with the use of nitrous oxide.
hey, I'd get a pap smear every six months if it came with nitrous.
mammograms? hey, squish it smash it, bombard it with tap-dancing squirrels dude, just hand me the mask.

So I'm thinking....

when I have a migraine, and that never bodes well.

but the whole three-gods-in-one thing? kinda like a reeses' cup. you know, peanut butter and chocolate, together is two flavors, one candy.. except there's three, so it'd have to be the reeses' cups with the caramel in them. You know, so there'd be three flavors.

I wonder if the holy spirit gets ticked off being the caramel?

I really need more excedrine.