Paste Eaters, We come in Peace

At some point everyone gets into a discussion about alien life, alien to Earth, not your country, that’s a horse of a different color.  I know some people don’t believe, but that’s because they haven’t done the math.  I’m not saying E.T. has ever come to our little corner of the universe, let alone Earth, I’m just saying statistically speaking there has to be some sort of life all over the place.  It just adds up.

But usually the conversation is about ‘intelligent’ life, (insert obvious dumb human joke here).  People who believe in such things, and of course, movie makers always assume not only is there intelligent life but that we are well below the bell curve when it comes to brain pans.  Have you ever noticed, as far as the universe is concerned, we are the slow kids in the back of the class eating paste.  Paste Eaters! The lot of us!  We are never portrayed as equal or heaven forbid, the superior race.  Hell, even in one of the StarTrek movies, whales got higher billing then humans.  I like whales and all, but come on, kill the humans if there be no whales captain. It’s insulting.

Here’s a thought, what if . . . what if, WE ARE THE MOST INTELLIGENT creatures in the universe?  Scary huh?  The most intelligent beings ever and our best solution to nasal discharge, rectal cleansing, disposing of life bearing fluids, spilled milk picker upper, chewing gum receptacle, windshield cleaner and new shoe filler is wadded up paper.  Wadded paper, so many uses, so little respect. 

But we could be top of the class, A#1, intellictus superious ; maybe just maybe, there is life out there waiting for us to come to them. 

Hey Earth people! Come over and visit us, you guys have rockets, all we have is square wheels, and damn it they just make life so much harder. 

What kind of idiots continue to use square wheels? WE RULE!

But you know it wouldn’t work, we’d screw it up and before you can say “Bob’s your uncle” we’d be enslaved to an alien race, forced to make wadded up paper for their every desire.  Hey, what did you expect from a race of people who let their children eat paste?

This is why we are never portrayed as the superior race and always as the pestilence who need to be eradicated from existence. We eat paste.

Carsickness, it's not just for people

I guess my car is getting old. Bummer.  I’ve been in the sweet spot for a while now, no car payment, no problems, no complaints.  But for the first time since I’ve bought it, something happened that upset me: CHECK ENGINE.  You know the light, you know the feeling, it’s a bummer.  And quite honestly it shouldn’t say ‘CHECK ENGINE’ it should say ‘GO BUY SOME KY’ you’re gonna need it.   Nothing good comes from that light, the best you can hope for is something not so bad, but no matter what it’s going to cost you, and you know it. 

Another problem I have with the check engine light is that it tells you absolutely nothing. Something might be wrong , and it’s going to cost you but other than that, you’re left in the dark, well except the light that says ’CHECK ENGINE’.  Who knows maybe when you take the car into the shop they just turn the light off, charge you $535 and tell you it’s fixed.  I have this same thought about car washes.  When you upgrade the car wash and get Package #2, you don’t actually see any difference other than a light blinks towards the end of the wash that says Package #2.  Are we just paying an extra 7.50 to watch the light, light up?  Could be the same scam in reverse. Could be.       

There’s very little you can do but drop the car off and say a prayer to the car gods; well that and mosey into the showroom and check out the new models.  Everyone’s been here before, the car’s getting a little long in the tooth, (long in the grill?) and you wonder if this is the beginning of a slippery slope of never ending repairs or just a bump in the road.   It can’t hurt to find out what’s out there, and what your car is worth or can it.  Turns out the new models are pretty damn nice & my car isn’t worth very much, big shock huh?  So do you holdem’ or foldem’?  Where’s Kenny Rodgers when you need him? 

Arguments for both, new car = reliable, no surprise costs, and of course New Ride.  You were expecting New Car Smell, but you’re not getting it, I’m not really a fan of that hodgepodge collection of 100 different chemicals interacting together to bring you what should be called Toxic#9.  But I do get the association of that smell with newness and we tend to love newness, except with tumors, no one ever said oh boy! New Tumor!  Argument for old = paid for.  Don’t ever underestimate Paid For, those are 2 beautiful words, I love them, much more then new car smell and tumors. 

Here’s the thing, my car (up until now) has been very, very, very reliable, (in case you weren’t counting that’s 3 verys, high marks, even from the East German Judges)  hat’s off to Volvo for allowing me run up over 200,000 miles on a car in under 7 years with basically just maintenance.  I can’t complain, but I’m an American, what can I say? I want more.  The car still looks great, still rides, still runs great and I’m only on my second set of breaks.  I know right? Crazy!  But if things start going, they’re going to start costing – a lot.  I could be just worried about nothing, but then again the new models look pretty good.

A CHECK ENGINE light can really make you think.  People have Check Engine lights, we just call them symptoms but they are just as informative as the cars.  Go online with your symptom and see what you got . . .   hmmmmmmm   … could be a bug that will be gone in a day, could be The Black Death!  Ever notice ever since the Internet people don’t just ‘get sick’ now they have some syndrome, disease , condition that could have killed them, but didn’t.  Everyone goes for the most exotic illness they can find that fits their symptoms, no I haven’t been to Bora Bora, but I’m telling you doc,  someone on the internet say’s I have 3 months to live if you don’t give me the drugs now!  I trust them, they wrote it down on the site, why wouldn’t it be true?  What kind of doctor are you anyway?  I saw it House MD also, yea Chase thought it was Wilson’s Disease, and Cameron thought it was an Autoimmune but the sick guy just happen to have sex with someone who WAS in Bora Bora and …  No I didn’t have sex with someone who was in Bora Bora but you see how it could happen. . . .

It’s really weird, when people’s check engine lights comes on, they automatically think the worst, like they want to face death or something, either that or there are WAY too many drug commercials.

Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you sleep too much?  Do you gain weight when you eat?  Do your feet get sore?  After a run do you feel tired? Do you have trouble breathing? Do you sweat? DO you have trouble sweating? Did your parents used to call you lazy?  You could be suffering from Uzagotdat.  Take Lathohydralious, side effects include: nausea, vomiting, lack of sex drive, blurriness, hyper tension, dry mouth, thoughts of suicide, rectal bleeding, and delusions of grandeur. 

The media & the internet is turning this nation’s people into a bunch of hypochondriacs.

But what if it’s not just people?

What if our cars suffered from hypochondria?  What if they installed sensors all over the car to make sure everything was running at peak performance?  What if they connected all those sensors to a central nervous system, umm er, CPU? And what if anytime a sensor had a reading that was just slightly off Peak Performance it sent a message to the CPU and then to a light that signaled the driver?  What if that light read, ‘CHECK ENGINE’?  UT OH

 I hope my car doesn’t get rectal bleeding.

LinkedIn To Homohobilis

Someone recently told me that LinkedIn was the new eHarmony and not because they both got hacked by a password seeking basement dweller, but because well, we are human. 


We can’t help it, we are visual people, and we make a lot of judgments based on what we see, blame evolution or lack thereof.  It came in handy when Homo habilis was choosing between bachelorette # 2 and bachelorette # 3, instinctively knowing, birthing hips – grunt good, spends too much time at Caves Fifth Avenue – grunt bad.  Habi needed strong healthy offspring not overpriced shoes with red bottoms, which quite frankly could be accomplished by walking on a dead saber tooth tiger, so take that Louboutin. Grunt Grunt.


The reality is, we see, we judge, we decide.  Pretty girl me like grunt grunt. But a lot goes into ‘me like’. We instinctively look for visual clues to decide if that person fits our needs and wants.  Piercings, tattoos, hair length, eyes, clothes, they all give us visual clues that we use immediately after seeing someone to size them up.  Should I take her back to my cave or grab my club and beat him to death?  


Politically incorrect or not, it’s part of being human, so unless you have a time machine to go back and change Habi’s psyche your stuck with it.  But pretending it doesn’t exist is not the solution, don’t be a hypocrite, embrace it and then learn to work with it.  


I started off with LinkedIn & eHarmony didn’t I?  I should get back to that.  Well I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, that picking someone for any purpose whether it’s for mating, cobbling shoes or time travel we try to make the right choice based on credentials but we almost always throw in a likeability factor, after all, we do have to deal with them on a personal level. How’s that for justification?  Justice may claim to be blind but then why does beauty always win and ugly dies?  It’s true, kill 1 squirrel who is destroying your house and you could get fined, kill 10,000 termites and no one cares. It pays to be cute in this world, don’t ever forget it.


Studies have been done; good looking people are more successful.  (Note to self, call plastic surgeon)  So should it be a surprise that employers use LinkedIn to not only check out people’s credentials but check out the person too?  Hey hiring someone isn’t all that different then a relationship, in fact I can argue it’s more like marriage, only you’ll probably spend more time with your co-worker then your spouse, God Bless the Almighty Dollar! Our priorities really are screwed up.
 
The employer goes on line searches employee, first thing they look for is, did they post a picture.  Now let’s see, lonely guy goes on line, searches single women in area, first thing he looks for is, did they post a picture.  Hmmmm. What do they look like, where was the picture taken, why are they taking a picture of themselves in the mirror? Can I see through … nope just a shadow.  Notice we still don’t know if they like to take long walks on the beach or if they are detail oriented.


Of course we will get to that, that’s the important stuff right? Maybe, or maybe it’s just the prerequisite.  Ever go on an interview at a restaurant? Ever go on a first date to a restaurant?  There are a lot of cross over questions.  Tell me about yourself?  Where are you from? So where do you work, what do you do there? Have you always been in this area?  Is that saber tooth tiger blood I smell?  The similarities are endless.


We try to evolve and we try not to be shallow and judgmental, we try to be open to everything and everyone, we try not to club strangers with extra appendages.  But no matter how much we say it doesn’t matter we still want Jim Lange to show us what the bachelorettes look like before we decide, just like Habi.