Why are people "surprised" or "outraged"?

   There's been a lot of "news" reports by the media lately about our government collecting tons of data on us. I just can't wrap my head around why people are finding this a shock.

   With all the horror stories in the news and all the outright fear-mongering by politicians, the media, and everyone else that has an agenda of one kind or another, you might think that the general public would have become numb. I mean, how long can a person be blasted with fear and horror before their brains just turn that part off? Does it even work that way? Maybe long-term exposure to such things just makes people paranoid. I don't know, but there's probably been a few papers written about it.

   Anyway, back to what I was saying.

  Ever since 9/11 there's been this big push to find and stop terrorists before they can attack U.S. soil. The Average Joe on the street, prompted in part by the aforementioned fear-mongering, has been willing to give up rights one by one in the name of safety. This, of course, proves that the 9/11 attack did it's job. It worked. It frightened a nation. That's the basic purpose of a terrorist attack; to cause terror in as many people as possible.

   Fast forward to today. The media, in another attempt to gain more ratings, is racing to tell Average Joe about the government collecting personal data on U.S. citizens. How can this possibly come as a surprise to anyone? If you scream at someone to do something - anything - to protect you from the bad man, you shouldn't be surprised if they do that "anything"! You've also given up your right to be outraged about it. You asked for it. You screamed for it. You begged for it. Now you've gotten it and you want to be outraged? Too fucking bad.

   Now, don't get me wrong here, I don't like the idea of any government collecting personal data on the citizenship as a whole, which seems to be what's happening now. I don't care what they say they use it for or what "safeguards" they have in place. The simple fact that it has been, and is being, collected en mass is enough to raise my hackles. However, unlike Average Joe, I'm not afraid to walk down the street. I don't fear that terrorists are going to blow up my town. I've weighed the odds and decided that my privacy and my rights are more important that the illusion of safety.

   What Average Joe seems not to have realized is that he's far more likely to to die from heart disease, cancer, a car accident, or just tripping on something than he is to be injured or killed by terrorists.

My wonderful day.

I had to borrow my boss' car today so I could go to the rez and get some stuff. My boss picks me up a little after noon. We go into town and do some errands, then bossperson goes to work (it's about 1:30 by this time) and I take the car (SUV actually, but whatever). Now, we both know the rear driver's side tire has a slow leak. It's not a big deal, just something that hasn't gotten fixed yet. The tire's looking a bit low when I get in to take off, so I pop over to the gas station, fill the tire up, get gas, and, figuring it can't hurt to be prepared, grab a can of fix-a-flat. Then off I go.

As I'm tooling down the highway, I can feel the tire losing pressure slowly; but I figure I can make it to where I need to go before it becomes a problem. I was almost right.

Just as I'm slowing to pull into the the smoke shop, I feel the tire go the rest of the way flat. Fortunately, this particular shop doubles as a truck stop. I figure I'll put in the fix-a-flat and fill the tire after I make my purchase. That'd at least get me back to town, right? Yeah sure. Not with my luck.

I put the fix-a-flat in and start filling the tire with air. As I'm doing this I can hear the air coming back out of the tire almost as fast as I'm putting it in. Crap. Time to crawl on the ground and see what's up. I get under the vehicle and find there's a gash on the back wall of the tire about an inch long. I suppose it's a good thing that I just happened to stop with the tire in the right position for the slice to be on the bottom, otherwise I probably wouldn't have heard the leak and would probably have been stuck on the highway changing a tire instead of in a nice flat (and safe) parking lot. There's no way fix-a-flat was gonna fix that one.

Okay! No problem. Changing a tire is easy enough, even if it wasn't on my to-do list for the day. There's just one little problem. There's no spare.

"Are you  kidding me?", I say aloud. "Who the  doesn't keep a spare when they know they have a bad tire? !"

I get on the phone and call the boss.

"You know you don't have a spare, right?"

"I don't? Are you sure?"

"Yeah, I'm pretty  sure."

"Did you look in the trunk?"

"Ummm...you don't have a trunk. Your spare goes under the vehicle."

"Well, look in the trunk. I'm sure it's there."

"Which part of 'You don't have a trunk' didn't you understand?"

 "Oh! I remember. It's in my basement. Call [insert name of mutual acquaintance/coworker] and see if she'll bring it to you."

So I call, and, naturally, her kid has her car. She tells me she'll get there as soon as she can.

She finally gets there at about 4:30, stays long enough for me to grab the tire, and heads out. A few minutes later I'm also on my way.

As a side-note: Cheap, crappy little scissor jacks  aren't my idea of the ideal tool for lifting heavyass SUVs, but what do I know?

The Land of Painted Caves

Okay, I'll admit it. I've read the entire Earth's Children series. I'll even admit that, for the most part, I've enjoyed them.

The Clan of the Cave Bear was awesome, as was The Valley of Horses. The Mammoth Hunters was an enjoyable read, although the whole "love triangle" thing felt a bit contrived. The Plains of Passage had a bit more adventure to it, and was still fun to read. The Shelters of Stone was decent, but not as good as the others. I still enjoyed it, but not as much as the rest. I firmly believe that 99% of the sex scenes in those books could have been reduced to "Then they fucked.", but that's just one small annoyance that many people might not agree with. In any case, it didn't detract from the story, as I could easily skim past it and continue with the actual plot.

Then we get to the focus of this post. The Land of Painted Caves. I can sum up my opinion of this book with a simple "What the fuck was that pile of shit I just forced myself to read?" The only possible redemption for this pile of garbage is if it's only purpose is to set up for a book 7.

What I hated:
I can only assume that Jean Auel took an extended tour of some caves, and wanted to share what she'd seen. She went into nauseating detail about caves and cave paintings. Now, don't get me wrong, the detail is part of what I enjoyed about her earlier works. This time it was too overdone and redundant to be even remotely entertaining after the first description. A better place for it would have been a guidebook to ancient cave sites.

The Mother's Song. Great, she wrote a nice poem. I don't really need to read it 300 times. Okay, it wasn't really 300 times, it just felt like it. Maybe someday I'll go back and count the number if times it's there.

Ayla has an accent. Yes, we know Ayla has an accent. It's mentioned a few times in previous books. Mentioning it once or twice in this book would have been okay, but does it really need to be mentioned every single time she talks within hearing of anyone but Jondalar? Do even the people she's known for years need to take special note of it every time she opens her mouth?

Hey! Horses! Holy shit, a wolf! Every time she meets someone, the reaction is the same. That's somewhat understandable. The problem comes when people she's lived, hunted, and worked with for 5 fucking years can't get over it. Really people? The Mamutoi got over it in a few months.

Ayla can't lie, but she's either pretty good at it or she doesn't remember shit very well for someone with an almost super-human memory. I'm not going to punish myself by going back and looking for specific examples, but there were a few points where I thought "That's not what happened. Stop making shit up." I re-read the entire series before I started this one so it would be fresh in my mind.

This book was redundant redundant. Oh, and did I mention that it repeats itself too? I don't know, maybe Ms. Auel got so caught up in her detailed descriptions of the world that she never noticed that the characters had the exact same conversation 5 times already, but you'd think her editor might have noticed. Her detailed descriptions are great, but I swear she just copy - pasted them whenever she wanted to add filler. Rehashing every single important event of the previous 5 books 12 times wasn't entirely necessary, either.

****Spoiler****

Ayla the dirty bitch. Jondalar had an affair, which long time readers know wouldn't actually be a major problem for Ayla. She might be a bit irritated over the specific person he banged on the side, but it wouldn't drive her to do something petty and stupid. For some unknown and unexplained reason she becomes wildly jealous and decides to fuck some dirty drunk that Jondalar hates for the sole purpose of pissing her mate off. It works. Afterwards, she seems surprised by his violent reaction, even though she knows that he beat the fuck out of another guy before they met just for being a tattle-tail.

****End Spoiler****

Unfulfilled promises. Alright, we were never really promised anything. I just assumed that all the talk of opening communications with the Clan before bad shit happened would be covered at some point in this book. It wasn't. We don't even get a report of a Clan sighting. The closest we come is finding out that the Clan visits, and probably holds ceremonies, in one of the sacred caves that is visited. We also see almost nothing but dirty looks and unflattering comments from the "bad guys". They were a potential plot point that was ignored unless Ms. Auel needed to add a couple paragraphs in somewhere. Like this book needed more useless filler.


What I liked.
Well...Jonayla had a fun scene where she got to be more "heroic" than either of her parents managed through the entire book.

There must be something else I liked, but I'll be damned if I can think of any right now.


For those who haven't purchased this book yet, don't. Don't even borrow it from the library. If you have purchased this book, and you have a friend that wants to read it, tell them "no". I can't think of a better gift to give a friend that a refusal to let them waste even a few minutes of their life on this piece of garbage.

Starve 'em 'til they grow some balls

By now you've heard that North Korea is a starving country begging the world for handouts. Well, that's just too fucking bad. There is exactly no good reason for the rest of the world to send food to a nation that's just going to use it to feed their military and sell the rest to build weapons they're going to use to try to strong-arm their benefactors.

As far as I'm concerned, if the people of North Korea want to eat they can grow some balls and get rid of their piss-poor, greedy, uncaring, power-hungry government. Sure, it'd be a bloody affair, but, lets face it, Kim Jong Il needs to die and so do all his cronies. That power-mad fuck would rather rule a nation of the dead than allow one tiny shred of power to slip from his grasp. You can bet he doesn't ever go to bed hungry.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the only (or even the best) way to overthrow a government is through violence. Egypt is proving that change can come without war, but we all know that, if the people of NK tried peaceful protest as a means for change, thousands of protesters would be killed for no gain and the military would crack down even harder on the people than they do now.

Unfortunately, the only chance the North Korean people have at being treated even marginally better than slaves is through armed revolution. Maybe when they've been hungry long enough they'll decide to do something about it.

The Big Dipper

Unless you've been living under a rock or in a cave - like a bear - there's a good chance you've heard about Pizza Hut's "Big Dipper" pizza. Basically, for those bears out there who have been living in a cave, it's a sauceless pizza that's cut into breadstick-like slices. Instead of putting pizza sauce on the pizza, they give you four little cups of warm marinara so you can have all the dipping fun you can stand. In my case, this wasn't much.

A good idea in theory. In practice? Not so much.

I don't know if their marinara and pizza sauce are the same thing, but I do know they taste different to me. That may be just because the sauce on the pizza got baked. Either way, dipping this sauceless pizza in marinara makes it taste just a little "off".

Then there's the temperature problem. The little cups of marinara get cold faster than the pizza does, so pretty soon you're dipping warm pizza breadstick things into cold sauce. Not my idea of an ideal combination.

Did I mention you get four little cups of marinara? That's great, unless you're feeding five people. Then you run into the dreaded problem of "How am I going to get the right amount of sauce on this stupid thing without double dipping?". Everyone knows that double dipping is like waging germ warfare. You just don't do it. You might as well grab a bat and bludgeon your friends and family to death if you're going to double dip. It's that bad. Everyone says so. But you have to do it if you don't want to just eat sauceless pizza breadsticks, and, let's face it, you really don't want to do that. So you watch for your chance to dip again when no one's watching, and, inevitably, someone notices and they get all upset and tell you how much of an ass you are for double dipping and everyone hears and no one wants to touch the sauce anymore. Now everyone who still wants to eat has to eat sauceless pizza breadstick things. Not that anyone has an appetite left after you got caught double dipping. They're too busy wondering how long it'll be before your germ warfare kills them. Good job. You just ruined it for everyone, you selfish jerk.

That last paragraph got a little out of hand.

Anyway, like I was saying, the Big Dipper may look like a good idea on paper, but I won't be ordering it again.

Now "House" is on, so I've got to go.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I hate winter. I wish I were a bear. Then I could get away with sleeping through it. On the other hand, I'd have to sleep outside in a cave or den or wherever it is bears hibernate. And eat raw fish. And garbage. And carrion. I'd also have to fight with bears!

Ok. I don't want to be a bear. Mostly because bears don't have internet. Or computers. Or video games. Or movies. Or books. Poor bears.

There should be a book drive for bears. Life without books would be horrible. Next time you sit down to read a book, think about the poor bears out there in the woods with nothing to read.

Bored