Con Artist Or Just A Douchebag?

So either I was conned out of a couple of dollars today, or I donated to a real charity that I shouldn't have donated to anyway.  Whichever one it was, I feel bad now.

Anyway, it was at the Avalon Mall.  I was sitting in front of the bookstore at about quarter past ten, just waiting around and playing Doodle Jump on my iPod.  Next thing I know, some pushy Asian guy is shoving a laminated pamphlet into my hand talking about how there was a disaster in the Philippines last week, and how he's from there, and he goes to MUN here, and he's raising money for the children, blah blah blah.  And he was really pushy.  He didn't really introduce himself or try to start a conversation, it was just shoving a pamphlet at me, and then shoving a little black book into my hands and waving at it with a pen -- I dunno if I was supposed to sign it or if it was a pledge sheet or what.  I should have told him to piss off right then, because he was being really pushy and rude, so even if it was a real charity it was charity-by-guilt and I should have refused to donate anything on principle alone.   I didn't, though.  I'm bad at being immediately mean.  Give me a few minutes and I can be the meanest bitch in the world, but surprise me and the combination of Girls Are Nice Niceness and Canadians Are Nice Niceness take over.  I basically went "Uhhhh have some change and go away."  I had a few dollars in my pocket, and when I pull it out the guy said "It's okay, just donate whatever you have, you can donate all of that" and that's definitely when I should have refused to donate it, because who the hell says what I can and can't donate?  Unfortunately, I still hadn't started thinking at this point -- I have the worst reflexes in the world -- and so I keep the two-fifty I needed for the bus and gave him the two or three dollars left, mostly in quarters and dimes.  He thanks me and wanders off, and it isn't until after he's gone that I realize, "Wait, that was a really sketchy thing that just happened."

So I go to Google and look up "flood in the philippines" and the only articles that pop up are from August.  I immediately start feeling like a moron, because what kind of idiot lets a stranger talk them out of three dollars?  Granted, it's only pocket change, but still.  I've been kicking myself ever since -- I should have realized that the guy was ambushing me, I should have realized it was sketchy as fuck that I didn't hear of any disaster, I should have realized he was being way too pushy, I should have I should have I should have.  Anyway, I can't change anything by thinking about what I should have done.  Worst case scenario, some asshole has a handful of small change and the confidence to try scamming someone else (hopefully someone who is quicker on the draw than I am).  Best case scenario?  While my initial Googling didn't give me anything, a friend has linked me to a news article saying that there was, in fact, a flood in the Philippines last week, so it's possible that it really is just a pushy guy with a charity.  I still shouldn't have donated, because charity by guilt is a shitty way to get money and it's really rude to ambush a person to look for handouts, no matter the cause.  But at least it could actually be a real charity.  I'd rather the change I was conned out of actually go to saving people from floods or whatever instead of paying a jerk's bus fare.

I Hear The Sound Of Stupid....

No, seriously.  I heard Dad watching a video in his office and I just had to go in and say, "I hear some really stupid things being said in here, what the hell are you watching."  Turns out it was this.

I just, I can't...  The stupid, it burns.  I can't even make fun of this, it's just that ridiculous.

Todd Atkin is why America is terrible.

Well, one of the reasons why America is terrible, at least.

I was in the car with dad and heard over the radio that some American politician said that a rape victim's body naturally prevents her from becoming pregnant.  What?  No, really, what??  Seriously America, there is something wrong with you.

So I looked it up when I got home, turns out it's even worse than I thought!  Apparently it's only "legitimate" rape victims who are given this magical Rape Science pregnancy prevention.  And also this dude is a completely terrible person.  Seriously, what the hell is wrong in America.

Even setting down that somehow this is a popular political stance, that rape victims shouldn't get abortions because baaaaabiiiieeees -- why is somebody this fucking stupid allowed to be a politician in charge of creating laws.  Oh my god.  I'm literally stunned speechless by this.  Not only that somebody would be this completely terrible as a human being, but that somebody would be this completely fucking ignorant.  It's like, does this guy even realize that facts are actually a thing that have to be real, or does he think that if he thinks it really really hard it becomes true?

Now I'm not saying Canada is perfect in every single way and none of our politicians are dumb or bad. I mean, look at Stephen Harper, he's a total dirtbag.  But this guy just comes off as being, I don't know, evil or something.  Seriously, what goes wrong in your head to make you think that any of this is an acceptable opinion for a decent human being to hold, much less for a decent human being to say out loud on television in a position of authority?  Because you know, there's the whole abortion/conception/babies thing, and then there's just being a terrible terrible person who hates women and doesn't seem to think of them as real people but instead as babymaking boob-wearers.

What?  Oh no.  Nonono.  My sister just told me that he's a member of the United States House Committee of Science, Space and Technology.

Fuck you very much, eBuddy.

So eBuddy is an annoying piece of crap, did you know that?

It's not that it's a bad program per se. I used it all the time in college because I didn't have a computer of my own and the only ones I had access to were the school computers, so no MSN.  eBuddy did the job well enough then.  If it were just the quality of the program I wouldn't really mind it at all.  I mean, I didn't really like it, but I didn't hate it then like I do now.

See, it's not the program itself that I hate.  What I hate is how every time I have to use eBuddy, if I'm not on my laptop or if MSN is being a douche, eBuddy takes it upon itself to change my display picture and status message.  And it never said anything about doing that.  So I didn't realize at first, since half the time MSN won't load display pictures for me, that I was going around for a week or two with the eBuddy logo instead of my picture, and that my previous status message had been changed to promote eBuddy.  When I clued in, I was...less than pleased, let's say.

Putting it simply: I don't appreciate being taken advantage of like that.  I didn't sign up to become a walking advertisement for a service I'm not particularly fond of.  But the kicker is, I wouldn't have minded if they had just said something when I signed in!  I can totally get them saying "Because we provide this service for free, we have changed your display picture and included a link to our site in your status message in exchange for providing you with an alternative to MSN" or something.  But by not asking, and by not even alerting me that they've changed my visible information, eBuddy seriously pissed me off.  I've started avoiding eBuddy entirely, using other MSN alternatives when I need them, and my status message for the past month has been about how irritating eBuddy is.  So, thanks to eBuddy sneak-changing my status and image, not only did they not get the advertisement that I wouldn't object to giving them had they just asked (or even just had the decency to let me know!) to getting negative publicity because I'm complaining about how terrible they are every time I see them.

So like my MSN status message says: I am not using eBuddy, because eBuddy can go suck a rotting hippo cock.  I'll stick with Skype and Beejive for MSN replacements.

Turns out it's hard to find photos of rotting hippo cocks online, but you get the picture.

Sometimes people suck.

An open letter to some of the more irritating customers of the store we were doing a job for a few weeks ago:

Just for future reference, the next time you try to enter a store from the exit door, and you see a couple of people in flagman vests and hard hats standing on ladders fiddling with wires from the nonfunctional automated doors?  It might not kill you, much to your surprise, if you were to enter through the working Entrance door about five feet to your left, clear of any obstructions.

Also, if the Exit doors have been pulled shut and powered down while people work on them, and while the Entrance door that you should be using anyway is working perfectly fine (again, just five feet to your left!), please do not physically pull the Exit door open.  Perhaps it didn't occur to you that it had been closed for a reason, but maybe the ladder leaning against it and the people obviously working on the door wiring should have been a sign.

If after becoming fed up with the previous store customers the aforementioned vested-and-helmeted workers create a barricade of lawn chairs to deter people like - well, to put it bluntly, people like you - please do not shove the lawn chairs aside and try to pull the Exit doors open so you can enter the store.  As I said, the functional Entrance doors are five feet to your left, and labeled in large, bright green letters.  I apologize for inconveniencing you with this arduous detour.

Finally, when the nonfunctional closed barricaded Exit doors have been further decorated with a hastily made sign saying "Please Use Other Door <------" scrawled in Sharpie on a scrap of printer paper.  When you came up to the door, gaped uselessly at the sign, and then turned to me saying "Uhh, can you open the door?  I can't get in."  I just wanted you to know that the pause before I told you to try the Entrance door to the left wasn't because I was trying to understand your question.  I was just desperately hoping to spontaneously develop some dark magical power with which to strike you down.  Sorry again for the inconvenience.

Maybe I shouldn't be allowed to cook.

I destroyed another pot today.  I'm not very good at this whole kitchen cooking thing.  I'm not even normal-makes-food-taste-gross bad cook, I'm like, bend-the-laws-of-physics-to-make-things-impossibly-terrible kitchen destructor.  Case in point, I melted a stainless steel pot.

Granted, it probably wasn't actually a steel pot.  It was sold to us as one, but considering the whole melty-ness of it, Dad says it probably has an aluminum bottom.  Still though, I didn't know pots could do that before today.

I was only trying to make spaghetti!  Unfortunately, my attention span is.....less than great.  Actually my attention span might be non-existant.  I was thinking about how absolutely starving I am, and was like "There's sauce in the fridge, I'll put on spaghetti!  Spaghetti is awesome!"  So I fill a pot with water, and put in about twice as much as I needed on the reasoning that I'd probably forget about it and let half of it boil away before I remembered.  This is standard practice for me when boiling water.  It's not really a good omen.

So I go back to the living room, intending to reply to a message on MSN and then getting the noodles from the pantry.  But of course I get distracted, and completely forget about being hungry and having the stove on.    I only remember when Mom gets out of bed and goes, "Hey, what's that smell?  Are you cooking something?" You know that moment where you can just feel the "oh shit" expression forming on your face, right before you drop everything and run?  I do.

So I drop everything and run to the kitchen, and find that our new stove is apparently much hotter than our old stove.  The water has completely boiled away, the bottom of the pot is glowing orange, and when I pick it up to move it off the hot burner only half of the bottom of the pot came with it.  There's pools of molten metallic liquid on the burner, and the pot's got these silver stalactites hanging of the bottom.

So I try cooling the pot in a saucepan of water, but it doesn't seem to work very well. The pot keeps screaming at me.  So I give up and put it upside-down on another pan on the back of the stove -- no, that one wasn't on, I only turned on the one burner this time.  Mom and Dad come in and marvel at the incredible way I destroyed the kitchen this time.  None of us even knew pots could do that!  Especially not really good, supposedly stainless steel pots.

Luckily, my parents are awesome.  Once I was at a friend's house and she accidentally let a pot boil dry.  The pot wasn't really damaged, but her mom still freaked out about it and they got into a screaming match over it.  Compare my parents, they see that I've completely ruined one of the best pots in the house and they immediately start laughing about it.  As long as nothing's on fire, they're happy.  And at least this time I didn't scorch a hole in the floor!  I should tell that story someday, it's a pretty good one.

Long story short, Mom shrugged it off and went back to bed and Dad told me to get my camera because this was kind of totally awesome.  Now I have a spiky-bottomed death-pot and an old Wowbutter jar with the giant lumps of metal we picked off of the burner that Mom told me to keep as a souvenir.  And also pictures to prove it happened.  I'd say this was probably my best cooking-fail yet.

The Egg Quest: Continued

Okay, not an auspicious start to my quest.  I burned the bacon first go round and set off the smoke detectors, but at least this time there isn't a hole in the floor this time.

I still don't like eggs.  I did my best.  The bacon was delicious, but it was bacon so of course it was.  Maybe I should have put some salt or pepper on the eggs or something .  And also cleaned the pot after I burnt the first two strips of bacon, because the burnt taste ended up being really obvious in the food and the burnt bits turned the eggs a sort of dull greyish colour that looked....not really appetizing, to say the least.  Also I broke a plastic spoon in the eggs and didn't realize until I saw it on my fork.  In my defense, it was a white spoon and really blended in with the egg.

So now the question is, what do I do next in my quest to improve eggs?  How do they taste so good in my breakfast taquitos, but so terrible on their own?  It can't all be the bacon making it fantastic, can it?  Well okay it probably can because bacon is magic like that.  Maybe a bacon omelet or something, or I can just keep adding things to scrambled eggs until they start tasting good.  Or should I move on from eggs entirely and see if I can make some other terrible foods taste good?  Decisions, decisions.