Tag: China

Just For Laughs

Just when I thought our winter of discontent was going to stick to the well-trudged paths of Doom Scrolling and Ain’t It Awful, our old friend Reality stuck its hilarious little head up out of the ditch and starting cracking jokes.  Have you heard the one about Lulu the dog who inherited 5 million dollars?  She’s currently chasing a yellow Lamborghini expressly bought for her enjoyment.  (I made up the Lamborghini part, but somebody actually did give their dog 5 million bucks.)  Or, how about the guy from Florida who turned his uncle’s skeleton into an electric guitar.  (Totally icky, but totally true.  God, we’re an idly rich society!)  Anyway, here are a couple more laughables that might brighten your winter afternoon.

On Valentine’s Day, Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudo wellness/awareness corporation, Goop, introduction a new vibrator.  According to the website, the good people at Goop have “tested a lot of vibrators over the years” before they finally came up with this double-ended PPD (personal pleasure device.)  Okay, full disclosure: I don’t know very much about vibrators, but I do know a thing or two about testing, so I’m interested in knowing how the Goop folks conducted theirs.  For example, there’s a machine at Toyota Quality Control that slams a car door 50,000 times to find out exactly how long it takes for the latch to finally break and fall off.  Is that the kind of test Goop did?  Or, in the aviation industry, before they ever put an airplane in the air, they put it in a wind tunnel to see how much force it takes to blow its wings off.  Did Goop do something like that?  And speaking of aviation, it takes hours and hours of study, training and inflight experience to become a test pilot: what qualifications did Goop’s vibrator testers have?  I would hate to think that Ms. Paltrow would put her name on a product certified by amateurs.  Or course, these are all moot questions because apparently the Goop vibrator sold out in hours.

A little more seriously, the Chinese government recently banned the BBC, and everybody west of the Vistula came apart at the seams.  While I think it’s a shame nobody living on the banks of the Yangtze will be getting the cricket scores anymore, I’m compelled to point out a couple of things.  First of all, this is China — whose idea of free speech is – uh – they don’t actually have one.  In the entire 5,000 years of recorded Chinese history, freedom of speech existed for about 20 minutes in 1911 when Sun Yat-sen sat on the Dragon Throne.  It’s like describing blue to a blind man.  Secondly, and more importantly, the BBC was never broadcast in China; it was only available in the luxury hotels.  The truth is 99.9999% of the citizens of the Middle Kingdom have never heard of the Beeb and wouldn’t know it if it bite them on the bum.  So, let’s just put this little act of censorship into perspective.  The Chinese government has millions of Uyghurs locked up in concentration camps, they beat the crap out of thousands of Hong Kong students every weekend and perform hundreds of human organ transplants (where the donor is not notified) every day.  Honestly, if, after that litany of evil, you’re getting your knickers in a knot about who gets to watch Masterpiece Theatre south of the Great Wall, I can’t help but give it giggle.

But I saved the best for last.

Somewhere in Louisiana, a woman sprayed her hair with Gorilla Glue.  For those of you who are unfamiliar, Gorilla Glue makes Super Glue look like a worn-out Post-it note.  This stuff could put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and Lebron could bounce him up and down the court all day without any ill effects.  So, right about now you’re probably thinking “What a horrible accident!  The poor thing was probably in a rush and grabbed the wrong bottle.”  Nope, she did it on purpose.  Here’s what she recently posted on social media:

 “When I do my hair, I like to finish it off with a little Göt2b Glued Spray, you know, just to keep it in place. Well, I didn’t have any more Göt2b Glued Spray, so I used this: Gorilla Glue spray. Bad, bad, bad idea.”

OMG!  But, wait!  This isn’t the funny bit, yet.  After she discovered there was no way to wash this stuff out of her hair, she started a GoFundMe account to pay for a surgical removal – and people gave her money!  Over $18,000!  Think about it!  There are children starving in Brazil, and a bunch of people consciously decided, “Screw you, ya skinny little six-year-old!  I’m giving my money to a lady in Louisiana with Gorilla Glue in her hair.”  Anyway, now she’s lawyered up and is thinking about suing the Gorilla Glue people because, despite the various warnings against using an industrial strength adhesive on skin, clothes and/or eyes, the label does not specifically mention hair — and therefore it’s misleading?  Wow!  Gorilla Glue better get their act together before people start spraying it on their hotdogs to hold the wiener in the bun.

Don’t we live in a magical, frivolous age?

Macho News

Well, here we are — still locked in a struggle with … Okay, let’s not bore each other with the details.  None of us can escape Doom Scrolling these days.   Personally, I find the numbers have gotten so big I quit trying to comprehend them — back in September.  However, I’m still planning the party for when we finally strangle the life out of this wicked little virus.  And the first toast is going to go to anyone in the medical profession.

But, despite our current global predicament, apparently no invisible bug can put a stop to macho, that strange phenom that turns normally reasonable people into WWE wrestlers.  But in the real world, they’re half as comical and twice as crazy.  Here are a couple of examples from the current news feed.

1 – For some unknown reason, they’re shooting at each other in some place I can’t pronounce in Central Asia.  Call me a cynic, but when Google’s Auto-correct can’t even find the place, there can’t be that much there to fight over.  Folks, look around you!  The world has problems, and who owns which bit of real estate 100 kilometres south of Tbilisi isn’t one of them.  Mother Nature is killing enough people on her own these days.  You don’t need to add to the carnage!

2 — There are a couple of games of “You-did-not/I-did-so” going on.
The American media reported somebody (read “the Israelis”) killed Al-Qaeda’s #2 man in Tehran.  The Iranians are saying, “No, they didn’t.” But, strangely enough, Abu – uh – (I don’t actually care what his name is) hasn’t showed up for his Suicide Bomber classes since August.  (You decide!)
Meanwhile, allegedly, the Chinese military used microwaves to literally cook the Indian army out of a disputed border area in the Himalayas.  The Indian government says, “No, they didn’t.”  But, given what we’ve recently discovered about Chinese culinary traditions, I wouldn’t be too quick to poo-poo the idea.

3 — In America, they’ve whipped out the lawyers to keep fighting the presidential election that was over several Tuesdays ago.  I’m not surprised: litigation is as American as baseball.  But given the various and sundry lawsuits circling the White House, this is rapidly turning into a 21st century rendition of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?”

And finally:

4 — The folks at Big Pharma are acting like a bunch of schoolboys.  First of all, last week, Pfizer and BioNTech announced their Covid-19 vaccine was 90% effective.  Right after that, Moderna said “Oh, yeah?  Well, our vaccine is 95% effective!”  Then, right after that, Pfizer and BioNTech told everybody their vaccine was 95% effective, too, with no measurable side effects.  Not to be outdone, this week, the researchers at Oxford jumped into the fray and said their vaccine was almost 100% effective for old people.

Hey!  Just stop it!  Instead of dickin’ around, playing my-vaccine-can-beat-up-your-vaccine, how about getting it on the market?   There are 7.8 billion people on this planet who’ve been holding their breath since March, waiting on you.  I mean, thanks and all that, but really!

The Week That Was – 2020

week

There are some weeks when nothing happens – zip, nada, bupkis!  And then there are other weeks that just boil over with stuff going on.  Last week was the boiling kind, and here are a few events of note.

After three and a half years of dickin’ around, the UK finally left the EU.  And — no big surprise — the sun didn’t fall out of the sky, the Chunnel didn’t implode and Big Ben didn’t chime 13!  In fact, if you were asleep at midnight GMT, too bad — ya missed it.  Still, the Irish are offended, the Welsh are dismayed and the Scots are downright pissed off.  But let’s face it, if the English were offering free tea and crumpets, somebody on that island would bitch about it.  However, one part of Brexit does unite the various peoples of the United Kingdom: they all — boys, girls and baby squirrels – hate London.

Ground Hog Day was completely overshadowed (heh-heh-heh) by the Super Bowl.  Apparently, the game had over a billion viewers worldwide.  I don’t believe it.  Outside the good old U.S. of A, there are only about 12 people who actually understand American football, and they’re all Packers fans.  No, most folks watch the Super Bowl for the ads and the halftime show – and, this year, the halftime show didn’t disappoint.  What’s not to like?  A full 15 minutes of synchronized semi-naked women, bumping and grinding as if there were a 2 for 1 sale on orgasms; men dressed up as sperm; a pole dancer and a choir of children to prove it was all about feminism.  I don’t know about you, but after the final ass shakes, I was satisfied.  Anyway, the little rodent in Pennsylvania got second billing, and nobody cared if he saw his shadow or not.  However, according to folklore, since Kansas City beat San Francisco, we’re going to have six more weeks of dull, flat and boring.

Sunday was also 02-02-2020, International-Give-A-Nerd-An-Eyeroll-Day.  Despite all the Internet yipping about it, these “palindromic anomalies” are actually quite frequent.  The next one is – uh – next year on the 12th of February (12-02-2021.)  However, Americans are going to have to wait until December 2nd (12-02-2021) because, for some weird reason, they put the month first.  I guess these number games are kinda cool, but they do beg the question, “If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody count the leaves?”

And finally:

Faced with the uncontrollable spread of an incurable virus – again — the Chinese built a couple of hospitals in less than two weeks!  (You can see them do it on YouTube.)  Wow!  Meanwhile, in Europe the people of Barcelona have been working on Sagrada Familia since 1882, and they still haven’t finished it.  Lazy is such a hard word. . . .