...and poor parenting skills.
An article on the so-called Autism Epidemic.
This is exactly what happens when someone manages to evoke political action, and get excessive taxpayer funding, and mobilize it in the "fight" against a perceived-but-not-all-that-prevalent a problem: you suddenly get more of it.
Showing posts with label Children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Children. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
This Is Why The Public Schools Suck, Part VII...
I really do hate to pile it on, but sometimes things just happen in a certain way as to preclude the possibility of just letting something rest and perhaps fade into the background after a spell. This week, the New York City Department of Education has done some truly stupid things -- banning words that might hurt people's feelings, reinstating school bus services it cancelled despite court orders not to, rejecting tried-and-proven reading systems so as to not show the true depths of the incompetence of it's battalions of overpaid-unqualified teachers -- that there's no way in hell that some things will ever get to die a natural death.
What follows is a synopsis of a discussion I had with my sister last night regarding my junior-high-school-aged nephew's history assignment.
UPDATE: Great response to this post. I'm asking everyone who has a child in a public school, but especially in a New York City -- and specifically on Staten Island -- to pass this post on to everyone you think might be interested...and to the so-called Chancellor of Schools, himself. I'm assuming he'll be able to read it without his lips moving.
Also, if you're intrested in whatever else the City of New york has failed do to educationally, as well as learning about the stupidity of the public workforce entrusted with your child's education, simply click the Education and Public Schools tags at the bottom of this post.
Thanks much!
What follows is a synopsis of a discussion I had with my sister last night regarding my junior-high-school-aged nephew's history assignment.
UPDATE: Great response to this post. I'm asking everyone who has a child in a public school, but especially in a New York City -- and specifically on Staten Island -- to pass this post on to everyone you think might be interested...and to the so-called Chancellor of Schools, himself. I'm assuming he'll be able to read it without his lips moving.
Also, if you're intrested in whatever else the City of New york has failed do to educationally, as well as learning about the stupidity of the public workforce entrusted with your child's education, simply click the Education and Public Schools tags at the bottom of this post.
Thanks much!
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
When The People Are Watching...
...politicians and bureaucrats live in fear.
With regards to an earlier post about sucky public schools in New York City:
New York City School nitwits reverse "word ban" policy.
The reason this policy has been 'reversed" (the official snake oil was that the original ban was never a ban in the sense of being, you know, a ban, but rather a set of "recommendations") is because the general public was made aware of just what sort of dumbass, borderline psychotics are charged with their children's education, and what they were trying to do in the name of Political Correctness.
People: 1, Educrap Union: 0
At least until next time.
UPDATE: Bad link is now fixed.
With regards to an earlier post about sucky public schools in New York City:
New York City School nitwits reverse "word ban" policy.
The reason this policy has been 'reversed" (the official snake oil was that the original ban was never a ban in the sense of being, you know, a ban, but rather a set of "recommendations") is because the general public was made aware of just what sort of dumbass, borderline psychotics are charged with their children's education, and what they were trying to do in the name of Political Correctness.
People: 1, Educrap Union: 0
At least until next time.
UPDATE: Bad link is now fixed.
This is Why The Public Schools Suck, Part V...
Teacher’s unions against a phonics-based reading program that works, as opposed to the current trend in “education: which is to take the taxpayer’s money and run, leaving behind legions of stupid children to choke on your dust cloud.
Then again, it has been noted before in a millions studies on the subject that it’s generally well-known in academic circles that a majority of “education majors” were often themselves the worst college students, and the reason they became education majors – usually after changing majors at least once – is because it’s too easy to achieve a watered-down degree and then an iron-clad-almost-job-for-life public-sector job.
A job, incidentally, which only requires that you be able to pass a dumbed-down qualification exam written at a third grade reading level (because otherwise many minority applicants couldn’t pass it, and who wants to deal with the predictable civil rights lawsuits?).
Your average teacher is no better qualified than your garbage man to teach your children math and reading, and every bit as overpaid.
This is but yet one more reason to break the government monopoly on education in this country.
UPDATE: If you wish to read even more about the insanity taking place within our public schools, click on the taglines at the bottom of this article. Your eyes will be opened once you know just what it is that our so-called "educators" are doing to kids within the school setting.
Then again, it has been noted before in a millions studies on the subject that it’s generally well-known in academic circles that a majority of “education majors” were often themselves the worst college students, and the reason they became education majors – usually after changing majors at least once – is because it’s too easy to achieve a watered-down degree and then an iron-clad-almost-job-for-life public-sector job.
A job, incidentally, which only requires that you be able to pass a dumbed-down qualification exam written at a third grade reading level (because otherwise many minority applicants couldn’t pass it, and who wants to deal with the predictable civil rights lawsuits?).
Your average teacher is no better qualified than your garbage man to teach your children math and reading, and every bit as overpaid.
This is but yet one more reason to break the government monopoly on education in this country.
UPDATE: If you wish to read even more about the insanity taking place within our public schools, click on the taglines at the bottom of this article. Your eyes will be opened once you know just what it is that our so-called "educators" are doing to kids within the school setting.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
This is Why The Public Schools Suck, Part IV...
New York City "educators" compile list of 50 words that are never-ever to appear on a test, just in case someone gets offended...and stuff.
I could expound upon this for hours, but do I really need to? This isn't funny; it's your tax dollars at work, and your children in danger! Political Correctness run amok, is what it is. Shameful is what it is.
If it had not appeared in print -- in a newspaper which is frequently all-too-happy to present the Libtard point of view as if it were a dictate from the Almighty, and then present it as the bestest fuckin' thing evah! -- I would hardly have believed it.
I'd call it "child abuse", but that term has apparently been banned.
I could expound upon this for hours, but do I really need to? This isn't funny; it's your tax dollars at work, and your children in danger! Political Correctness run amok, is what it is. Shameful is what it is.
If it had not appeared in print -- in a newspaper which is frequently all-too-happy to present the Libtard point of view as if it were a dictate from the Almighty, and then present it as the bestest fuckin' thing evah! -- I would hardly have believed it.
I'd call it "child abuse", but that term has apparently been banned.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Throwing Money at a Moral and Ethical Problem Never Works...
Paying 'The Poor' to be better parents? How much you wanna bet most of that money went to crack, malt liquor and home pregnancy tests instead?
There are specific reasons why most 'Poor' people a) get -- and stay --that way, and b) are bad parents: they're stupid, and were mostly (not) raised by other stupid people. Giving them money to not be stupid hasn't worked for 50 years, but I guess some Libtard had his panties in a bunch and was determined, despite all that long experience with the Welfare State, to keep on trying.
There are specific reasons why most 'Poor' people a) get -- and stay --that way, and b) are bad parents: they're stupid, and were mostly (not) raised by other stupid people. Giving them money to not be stupid hasn't worked for 50 years, but I guess some Libtard had his panties in a bunch and was determined, despite all that long experience with the Welfare State, to keep on trying.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Unfounded Calls of Racism, Stupid City Government, and a Dead Child...
Today I’d like to tell you a tragic tale involving a dead 13-year old girl, a yellow school bus, a bad public transportation system, a tractor trailer, a school administration that is more concerned with appearances and political correctness than student safety, and a court system which city lawyers openly abuse. It will not end well, I promise you, and I can also guarantee that at the end of it all you’ll be shaking your head in stunned disbelief that so-called responsible adults could be this stupid, petty, and well, irresponsible.
Our story begins two years ago, when the New York City Board of Education (three lies for the price of one) began looking for ways to cut it’s budget without firing the 2,000 or so teachers currently held in so-called ‘rubber rooms’ awaiting termination or criminal prosecution, thus pissing off the local education unions, whilst still giving the appearance of being both fiscally responsible and fair to racial minorities.
Given that combination of political requirements, it’s not surprising that Educational Establishment (an oxymoron if ever there was one) came up with a politically-biased solution that cost a young girl her life.
It all has to do with appearances, and false accusations of racism, plain and simple.
You see, I live on Staten Island, the Forgotten Borough of New York City. It is a place that City Government tends to think of as a cash cow and a dumping ground for projects that no other borough -- with their decidedly greater populations and more vocal ‘community organizer’ types -- just won’t take, such as Landfills, Wind farms, prisons and infectious disease wards.
Wikipedia describes Staten Island as a ‘suburban community’, and it once was, but it is so no longer. What it has become is a 12-by-7 mile bonanza of property taxes for a City that can concern itself with your salt intake, but then not give a shit about whether or not your community has adequate sewers and storm drains, public transportation, hospitals, or schools. There are 500,000 people shoehorned onto this over-developed island which is always last on the City’s ‘To-Do’ list, but always first on ‘People We Can Raise Taxes On’ list.
City Officials just absolutely love the property and income taxes they can collect here (amongst the highest in all of the United States!), but they just can’t see their way to spending any of it here. Probably because the island typically votes republican, and most of us are gainfully employed. There’s far more money and political power in (created by politicians in the first place) poverty than there is in the catering to the needs of the Middle Class who pays for it all, you see.
Four consequences of this attitude are:
1) The Road System on this island is a joke. Many of the main arteries still follow their meandering, pre-Revolutionary War-era paths from days of yore – in some cases, they still follow the routes they took during the days of the Dutch Settlements (pre-1660!) and these are often narrow, crowded with vehicular traffic, and lacking in adequate safety features (traffic islands, traffic lights, stop signs, or crosswalks). You’ll find the roads in a perpetual extremely-poor state of repair (the 12’-long-by-three-foot-deep-pothole-full-of-frozen-water-on-every-corner capital of New York!), and many basic services – like sidewalks along busy streets – are simply missing, and no one in City Government gives a shit. I can’t tell you how many stories of ‘Person-struck-and-killed-by-car-in- neighborhood-without-sidewalks’ stories there are every year in the Staten Island Advance, the local newsrag. It’s easily in the double digits.
Remember, this is supposed to be 21st-Century New York City.
2) Public Transportation is seriously lacking, and what is available is often unreliable, hardly goes where it needs to (the Transportation Plans which brought it here dating to the 1960’s, and only begun in earnest in the 1980’s), and under-utilized since decades of abject neglect of the transportation system has created a cult of the automobile that would rival that to be found elsewhere in the United States. This may be the only place in all of New York City where your trip to the ‘Corner Store’ often requires a journey by car that will take you a mile or more from home, and take 30-40 minutes because of traffic.
3) Schools are in seriously short supply. Since most of the available land (even City-owned land) has been parceled off and sold to developers (we need more overpriced Mother-Daughter townhouse/condos on this island like we need a plague of locusts), or goes to more Parks and Nature Preserves (which we need like a hole in the head. 1/5 of Staten Island is State-or-Federally-protected Wetlands, bird sanctuaries, parks, national monuments, and so forth), less space is available to build schools. Especially middle schools. The last new High School, for example, built on Staten Island (in the early 1980’s) was originally designed as a minimum-security prison -- in a residential neighborhood -- that only became the ‘new’ New Dorp High School because of the near-violent outrage that sprang from a community that wasn’t even asked if it would want a prison in it’s backyard, nor told until the very last minute that one was even being built.
4) What schools we do have are generally placed far apart, and are poorly served by public transportation, requiring more yellow bus service than might be normal for children who live in the other boroughs where there are more schools and more transportation options available.
Yellow school bus service in this borough is a necessity if children are to get to and from school safely and in a timely fashion. In fact, Yellow School Bus service for Staten Island schoolchildren from kindergarten to Middle School had been a standard for over four decades, courtesy of a political class that once understood the unique nature of the problems here, and a federal judge who granted Staten Island a waiver when parents in the other boroughs claimed that Staten Island kids were receiving a benefit that children elsewhere weren’t getting. The majority of these complaints, incidentally, were based upon race. At the time, the majority of Staten Island public school kids were white.
And if anything ever screamed ‘Racism’ way back when, it was the idea of white, middle class kids being chauffeured to and from a school three miles away when minority children had to walk, often only just a few blocks. Go figure.
The accusations of racism in Bus Service have never completely gone away, and those who have yelled ‘Racist!” the loudest and most persistently, I can promise you, have never stepped foot upon this isle to see the truth for themselves. Then again, people who make their livings shouting ‘Racist!’ and extracting government money for it are very often never really concerned with truth, nor care about the consequences of their actions, so long as a politician scratches his particular itch.
To give you some idea, my nephew Mikey is one of those children who was eligible for Yellow Bus Service. Let me tell you what he has to do to get to and from school, and maybe this will illustrate the problem for you.
Mikey’s school is approximately 4.6 miles from his own front door. Without a school bus, Mikey has limited options. He could walk to and from school, having to cross at least three major arteries which local drivers treat like the Indianapolis Speedway, dodging distracted by text-messages or putting-on-their-makeup-in-the-rearview drivers for whom simple things like proper use of turning signals, red lights, traffic lanes, No Right on Red signs, and pedestrian traffic are crippling inconveniences which conspire to keep them from their quest to be the first to the next red light at 65-mph-in-a-35 zone. It’s like a for-real game of Frogger.
This is mostly a cultural problem, exacerbated by poor road planning, construction and maintenance. To illustrate these issues for you, it is not uncommon for private individuals around here to pool their OWN money to build their OWN speed bumps on their school-zoned streets, because the City won’t, citing the excuse of expense. The City, however, has absolutely no trouble finding the funds to remove those privately-financed speed bumps – often in the dead of night --just as soon as it discovers them.
Option Number Two is that Mikey can walk eight blocks to the Staten Island Railway Train (a misnomer which consists of two tracks travelling in opposite directions that serves approximately 1/6 of the island’s population on any given day), take it four stops, and then have to walk 10 blocks from the station to school, both ways crossing busy (sometimes blind because of the curves or overgrown park/wetland) intersections without crossing guards or responsible drivers.
Option Number Three is take a City Bus, requiring a three-block walk from home, a transfer, and then a six block walk from the nearest stop. This requires, incidentally, about 45-60 minutes, so that he’d have to leave home at 6:30 to ensure he got to school anywhere near 8:00, due to the numerous stops (buses here stop at nearly every block for some reason), traffic and irregularity/unreliability of service.
Option Number Four is to take another City Bus which leaves him closer to school (after a transfer to another route), but which goes two miles out of his way in order to get him there, and probably takes closer to 90 minutes, all told.
You can see the problem.
So, the Board of Education, in a cynical effort to have it both ways -- paying lip service to the concept of financial responsibility, while pandering to the louder elements of the “Everything in Creation is Racist!” brigade -- decided it was time to end Yellow School Bus service for Staten Island (White) Middle Schoolers. Two years ago, the City claimed that doing so would save an estimated $2 million per year, which is a joke when you consider the NYC Board of Education is capable of finding more ways to waste $2 million a week without even breaking a sweat.
Local government (our Borough President) went right to the courts to stop this plan and to have the waiver granted 40+ years ago guaranteeing school bus service upheld. The judge in that case let the waiver stand, and then asked the Board of Ed to turn over its internal documents and e-mails related to the decision to stop service. What he got was a mess of blank and/or redacted paper, and an injunction against his upholding of the original waiver issued by a judge in a different borough after the Board of Ed went judge-shopping in (more-liberal) Brooklyn. Another judge, a state appellate judge, told the Board to go and pound sand, upheld the waiver, and squashed the injunction, and bus service was restored.
However, the Board of Ed is nothing if not persistent – and willing to waste that potential $2 million savings on more lawyers – had the service stopped once again by yet another judge, claiming the Original Waiver violates the ‘spirit of’ the 14th Amendment, despite any practical considerations. The court fight continues to this day.
Which brings us to the tragedy that is 13-year-old Aniya Williams. You see, she was run over by a great, big, fucking tractor trailer on a busy thoroughfare in an industrial area as she crossed a street -- one without a City-provided school crossing guard, despite the fact that it’s in a fucking school zone, and it was the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL -- in an effort to catch a city bus home, and thus spare herself the 40-60 minute wait for the next one.
There are two ironies here:
1. This young lady was entitled to Yellow School Bus service under the Old Waiver, which would have picked her up in front of the school, and dropped her off mere yards from her own front door, if not for all the legal wrangling and false accusations of racism in bus service.
2. Aniya Williams happens to have been African-American.
For the sake of $2 million dollars (probably $10 million now after the legal fees are all counted up), and to quiet the uninformed noises that came from the full panoply of ‘advocates’, ‘community organizers’, ‘community groups’, ‘education watchdogs’, public unions and all the other busy-body organizations and individuals who typically speak out of their collective asses, a child is dead. The only saving grace here is that more children aren’t dead, because on any given day there are probably going to be 50 more Aniya’s, racing for a city bus that runs on an irregular schedule so that they won’t have to walk 4 miles home, and who are forced to do so because a City Government that can’t count, but which can pander to anyone with an uninformed complaint and wants to monitor your caloric intake, just doesn’t get it.
This post also appears at the Insane Asylum.
Our story begins two years ago, when the New York City Board of Education (three lies for the price of one) began looking for ways to cut it’s budget without firing the 2,000 or so teachers currently held in so-called ‘rubber rooms’ awaiting termination or criminal prosecution, thus pissing off the local education unions, whilst still giving the appearance of being both fiscally responsible and fair to racial minorities.
Given that combination of political requirements, it’s not surprising that Educational Establishment (an oxymoron if ever there was one) came up with a politically-biased solution that cost a young girl her life.
It all has to do with appearances, and false accusations of racism, plain and simple.
You see, I live on Staten Island, the Forgotten Borough of New York City. It is a place that City Government tends to think of as a cash cow and a dumping ground for projects that no other borough -- with their decidedly greater populations and more vocal ‘community organizer’ types -- just won’t take, such as Landfills, Wind farms, prisons and infectious disease wards.
Wikipedia describes Staten Island as a ‘suburban community’, and it once was, but it is so no longer. What it has become is a 12-by-7 mile bonanza of property taxes for a City that can concern itself with your salt intake, but then not give a shit about whether or not your community has adequate sewers and storm drains, public transportation, hospitals, or schools. There are 500,000 people shoehorned onto this over-developed island which is always last on the City’s ‘To-Do’ list, but always first on ‘People We Can Raise Taxes On’ list.
City Officials just absolutely love the property and income taxes they can collect here (amongst the highest in all of the United States!), but they just can’t see their way to spending any of it here. Probably because the island typically votes republican, and most of us are gainfully employed. There’s far more money and political power in (created by politicians in the first place) poverty than there is in the catering to the needs of the Middle Class who pays for it all, you see.
Four consequences of this attitude are:
1) The Road System on this island is a joke. Many of the main arteries still follow their meandering, pre-Revolutionary War-era paths from days of yore – in some cases, they still follow the routes they took during the days of the Dutch Settlements (pre-1660!) and these are often narrow, crowded with vehicular traffic, and lacking in adequate safety features (traffic islands, traffic lights, stop signs, or crosswalks). You’ll find the roads in a perpetual extremely-poor state of repair (the 12’-long-by-three-foot-deep-pothole-full-of-frozen-water-on-every-corner capital of New York!), and many basic services – like sidewalks along busy streets – are simply missing, and no one in City Government gives a shit. I can’t tell you how many stories of ‘Person-struck-and-killed-by-car-in- neighborhood-without-sidewalks’ stories there are every year in the Staten Island Advance, the local newsrag. It’s easily in the double digits.
Remember, this is supposed to be 21st-Century New York City.
2) Public Transportation is seriously lacking, and what is available is often unreliable, hardly goes where it needs to (the Transportation Plans which brought it here dating to the 1960’s, and only begun in earnest in the 1980’s), and under-utilized since decades of abject neglect of the transportation system has created a cult of the automobile that would rival that to be found elsewhere in the United States. This may be the only place in all of New York City where your trip to the ‘Corner Store’ often requires a journey by car that will take you a mile or more from home, and take 30-40 minutes because of traffic.
3) Schools are in seriously short supply. Since most of the available land (even City-owned land) has been parceled off and sold to developers (we need more overpriced Mother-Daughter townhouse/condos on this island like we need a plague of locusts), or goes to more Parks and Nature Preserves (which we need like a hole in the head. 1/5 of Staten Island is State-or-Federally-protected Wetlands, bird sanctuaries, parks, national monuments, and so forth), less space is available to build schools. Especially middle schools. The last new High School, for example, built on Staten Island (in the early 1980’s) was originally designed as a minimum-security prison -- in a residential neighborhood -- that only became the ‘new’ New Dorp High School because of the near-violent outrage that sprang from a community that wasn’t even asked if it would want a prison in it’s backyard, nor told until the very last minute that one was even being built.
4) What schools we do have are generally placed far apart, and are poorly served by public transportation, requiring more yellow bus service than might be normal for children who live in the other boroughs where there are more schools and more transportation options available.
Yellow school bus service in this borough is a necessity if children are to get to and from school safely and in a timely fashion. In fact, Yellow School Bus service for Staten Island schoolchildren from kindergarten to Middle School had been a standard for over four decades, courtesy of a political class that once understood the unique nature of the problems here, and a federal judge who granted Staten Island a waiver when parents in the other boroughs claimed that Staten Island kids were receiving a benefit that children elsewhere weren’t getting. The majority of these complaints, incidentally, were based upon race. At the time, the majority of Staten Island public school kids were white.
And if anything ever screamed ‘Racism’ way back when, it was the idea of white, middle class kids being chauffeured to and from a school three miles away when minority children had to walk, often only just a few blocks. Go figure.
The accusations of racism in Bus Service have never completely gone away, and those who have yelled ‘Racist!” the loudest and most persistently, I can promise you, have never stepped foot upon this isle to see the truth for themselves. Then again, people who make their livings shouting ‘Racist!’ and extracting government money for it are very often never really concerned with truth, nor care about the consequences of their actions, so long as a politician scratches his particular itch.
To give you some idea, my nephew Mikey is one of those children who was eligible for Yellow Bus Service. Let me tell you what he has to do to get to and from school, and maybe this will illustrate the problem for you.
Mikey’s school is approximately 4.6 miles from his own front door. Without a school bus, Mikey has limited options. He could walk to and from school, having to cross at least three major arteries which local drivers treat like the Indianapolis Speedway, dodging distracted by text-messages or putting-on-their-makeup-in-the-rearview drivers for whom simple things like proper use of turning signals, red lights, traffic lanes, No Right on Red signs, and pedestrian traffic are crippling inconveniences which conspire to keep them from their quest to be the first to the next red light at 65-mph-in-a-35 zone. It’s like a for-real game of Frogger.
This is mostly a cultural problem, exacerbated by poor road planning, construction and maintenance. To illustrate these issues for you, it is not uncommon for private individuals around here to pool their OWN money to build their OWN speed bumps on their school-zoned streets, because the City won’t, citing the excuse of expense. The City, however, has absolutely no trouble finding the funds to remove those privately-financed speed bumps – often in the dead of night --just as soon as it discovers them.
Option Number Two is that Mikey can walk eight blocks to the Staten Island Railway Train (a misnomer which consists of two tracks travelling in opposite directions that serves approximately 1/6 of the island’s population on any given day), take it four stops, and then have to walk 10 blocks from the station to school, both ways crossing busy (sometimes blind because of the curves or overgrown park/wetland) intersections without crossing guards or responsible drivers.
Option Number Three is take a City Bus, requiring a three-block walk from home, a transfer, and then a six block walk from the nearest stop. This requires, incidentally, about 45-60 minutes, so that he’d have to leave home at 6:30 to ensure he got to school anywhere near 8:00, due to the numerous stops (buses here stop at nearly every block for some reason), traffic and irregularity/unreliability of service.
Option Number Four is to take another City Bus which leaves him closer to school (after a transfer to another route), but which goes two miles out of his way in order to get him there, and probably takes closer to 90 minutes, all told.
You can see the problem.
So, the Board of Education, in a cynical effort to have it both ways -- paying lip service to the concept of financial responsibility, while pandering to the louder elements of the “Everything in Creation is Racist!” brigade -- decided it was time to end Yellow School Bus service for Staten Island (White) Middle Schoolers. Two years ago, the City claimed that doing so would save an estimated $2 million per year, which is a joke when you consider the NYC Board of Education is capable of finding more ways to waste $2 million a week without even breaking a sweat.
Local government (our Borough President) went right to the courts to stop this plan and to have the waiver granted 40+ years ago guaranteeing school bus service upheld. The judge in that case let the waiver stand, and then asked the Board of Ed to turn over its internal documents and e-mails related to the decision to stop service. What he got was a mess of blank and/or redacted paper, and an injunction against his upholding of the original waiver issued by a judge in a different borough after the Board of Ed went judge-shopping in (more-liberal) Brooklyn. Another judge, a state appellate judge, told the Board to go and pound sand, upheld the waiver, and squashed the injunction, and bus service was restored.
However, the Board of Ed is nothing if not persistent – and willing to waste that potential $2 million savings on more lawyers – had the service stopped once again by yet another judge, claiming the Original Waiver violates the ‘spirit of’ the 14th Amendment, despite any practical considerations. The court fight continues to this day.
Which brings us to the tragedy that is 13-year-old Aniya Williams. You see, she was run over by a great, big, fucking tractor trailer on a busy thoroughfare in an industrial area as she crossed a street -- one without a City-provided school crossing guard, despite the fact that it’s in a fucking school zone, and it was the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL -- in an effort to catch a city bus home, and thus spare herself the 40-60 minute wait for the next one.
There are two ironies here:
1. This young lady was entitled to Yellow School Bus service under the Old Waiver, which would have picked her up in front of the school, and dropped her off mere yards from her own front door, if not for all the legal wrangling and false accusations of racism in bus service.
2. Aniya Williams happens to have been African-American.
For the sake of $2 million dollars (probably $10 million now after the legal fees are all counted up), and to quiet the uninformed noises that came from the full panoply of ‘advocates’, ‘community organizers’, ‘community groups’, ‘education watchdogs’, public unions and all the other busy-body organizations and individuals who typically speak out of their collective asses, a child is dead. The only saving grace here is that more children aren’t dead, because on any given day there are probably going to be 50 more Aniya’s, racing for a city bus that runs on an irregular schedule so that they won’t have to walk 4 miles home, and who are forced to do so because a City Government that can’t count, but which can pander to anyone with an uninformed complaint and wants to monitor your caloric intake, just doesn’t get it.
This post also appears at the Insane Asylum.
Friday, June 17, 2011
If the Punishment Truly Fit the Crime…
...then these douchebags would have their heads crushed by a truckload of cinderblocks.
Pennsylvania man crushes newborn's head with a cinderblock.
I can't tell you what I would like to see done to these assholes; it might possibly get me arrested for merely describing it in all it's grisly detail. People like this make me want to rethink my position on Abortion
...at least Retroactive Abortion, anyway.
Children are innocent; only their parents are evil, and these two losers are the very embodiment of evil -- a 20-year-old skinhead degenerate, and a 28-year-old-baby-making-machine who can't keep her knees in the same zip code at least one day out of every nine months. This woman was having so many babies they were dropping out onto the kitchen floor like raindrops upon a tin roof, to read the story.
This doofus killed his child because he couldn't afford to feed it. The so-called Mother let him do it. They deserve to burn at the stake.
We live in a a country where Abortion on Demand (unfortunately) is readily available. We live in a country where it is possible to leave an unwanted child at a hospital, fire station, or orphanage, no questions asked. We live in a society where multiple birth control methods are available to anyone who wants them. Fuck, you can even buy them at the check out counter in some supermarkets. If you don't want to get pregnant, stay pregnant, or keep the baby, you have options.
This mated pair of douchebags instead chose murder.
I stop and think about how many people I personally know who can't have children of their own who would have plucked their own eyes out or paid any price, to have the opportunity to take this child home and call it their own. This didn't need to happen, except for the stupidity, selfishness, and craveness, of some depraved trailer trash.
The Death Penalty hardly suffices in this case. I want these two to suffer, publicly. Flogging, branding, the iron maiden, drawing and quartering, I don't give a shit, just don't keep these two alive in a prison somewhere. That ain't justice.
Rest in Peace, Little One. Your Life on this sorry rock was all-too-short, but considering who and what your parents are, you are, perhaps, the luckiest child in America, in a some sad fashion; You won't have to suffer anything else at the hands of these two murdering cretins; your five siblings, however, are going to have to find a way to live with what their parents have done.
Pennsylvania man crushes newborn's head with a cinderblock.
I can't tell you what I would like to see done to these assholes; it might possibly get me arrested for merely describing it in all it's grisly detail. People like this make me want to rethink my position on Abortion
...at least Retroactive Abortion, anyway.
Children are innocent; only their parents are evil, and these two losers are the very embodiment of evil -- a 20-year-old skinhead degenerate, and a 28-year-old-baby-making-machine who can't keep her knees in the same zip code at least one day out of every nine months. This woman was having so many babies they were dropping out onto the kitchen floor like raindrops upon a tin roof, to read the story.
This doofus killed his child because he couldn't afford to feed it. The so-called Mother let him do it. They deserve to burn at the stake.
We live in a a country where Abortion on Demand (unfortunately) is readily available. We live in a country where it is possible to leave an unwanted child at a hospital, fire station, or orphanage, no questions asked. We live in a society where multiple birth control methods are available to anyone who wants them. Fuck, you can even buy them at the check out counter in some supermarkets. If you don't want to get pregnant, stay pregnant, or keep the baby, you have options.
This mated pair of douchebags instead chose murder.
I stop and think about how many people I personally know who can't have children of their own who would have plucked their own eyes out or paid any price, to have the opportunity to take this child home and call it their own. This didn't need to happen, except for the stupidity, selfishness, and craveness, of some depraved trailer trash.
The Death Penalty hardly suffices in this case. I want these two to suffer, publicly. Flogging, branding, the iron maiden, drawing and quartering, I don't give a shit, just don't keep these two alive in a prison somewhere. That ain't justice.
Rest in Peace, Little One. Your Life on this sorry rock was all-too-short, but considering who and what your parents are, you are, perhaps, the luckiest child in America, in a some sad fashion; You won't have to suffer anything else at the hands of these two murdering cretins; your five siblings, however, are going to have to find a way to live with what their parents have done.
Friday, May 27, 2011
No Prom For You!
A local high school has decided that a quarter of it's seniors are to be barred from the Prom, this decision stemming from an incident of drunken vandalism that showed up...predictably...on Facebook (your children are retards, you do realize that?). The principal, in my opinion, is absolutely correct; these kids committed crimes starting with vandalism and probably going all the way up to DWI. They defaced and disgraced themselves and their school, and they shouldn't be allowed to take part in any activity that is predicated upon school spirit or ties, having just demonstrated that such things mean absolute shit to them.
The response from the parents of these little douchebags, though, was as entirely predictable as it was distasteful: it begins with the "My Kid's a Fucking Angel who's been unfairly singled out" routine, and then ends, as it most certainly must, with "I have a $1,000 invested in this fucking prom, you'd better goddamned believe my kid is going!"
This is the Battlecry of the Middle-Class-With-No-Class which makes up a majority of the local population. They raise baboons and then get defensive when someone else complains about it, or worse, pokes their bubble of suburban bliss by making them have to face the truth about both their children and lack of critical parenting skills.
Predictable: denial that they've raised a fucking Philistine, pissed off because it's costing them money. It's no wonder a good many of the kids on this Island suck: look who raised them...or at least fed them, because if they were actually 'raised' they might have some manners, brains and some respect. These kids don't have parents: they just have people who donated the proper gametes. Children who have real parents don't do these things.
And while the kids at Moore Catholic are complaining about having to accept responsibility and suffer for their foolish actions, another Staten Island Catholic High School -- an older and far-more respected institution -- has celebrated it's last prom...ever. Talk about perspective?
St. Peter's Girls High School is the counterpart to my Alma Mater, St. Peter's Boy's High School. The school has been a part of the community since 1852 (and was one of the best-ever girl's basketball programs in all of New York City). It is an institution. And it will soon be closed for good, despite the best efforts of the alumni to save it, because the Archdiocese cannot afford to keep it open.
The Archdiocese can sell the property of another parish (St. Margaret Mary's) to Muslims who will build a mosque upon it, but it can't find any money to keep St. Peter's Girls open? Typical. maybe if the Archbishop wasn't being chauffeured around in limos?
Anyways. the young ladies who are, sadly, the last graduating class, perhaps had a bittersweet experience at their Prom. Knowing, as I do , how girls at St.Peter's are infused with a sense of self-respect, and a love of their institution, I predict that their Last Prom was everything Moore Catholic's most certainly cannot be. For one thing, it was attended by Young Adults who respect themselves and their traditions, instead of barbarians who get drunk, draw dick pictures on the school walls, and cry like little bitches when they're punished for it.
I'm positive they'll do extremely well in college, too. I'm taking bets that half of the Moore Catholic class of 2011 eventually winds up working for the Department of Sanitation, the DMV, or in jail. Most likely following in their parents' footsteps.
The response from the parents of these little douchebags, though, was as entirely predictable as it was distasteful: it begins with the "My Kid's a Fucking Angel who's been unfairly singled out" routine, and then ends, as it most certainly must, with "I have a $1,000 invested in this fucking prom, you'd better goddamned believe my kid is going!"
This is the Battlecry of the Middle-Class-With-No-Class which makes up a majority of the local population. They raise baboons and then get defensive when someone else complains about it, or worse, pokes their bubble of suburban bliss by making them have to face the truth about both their children and lack of critical parenting skills.
Predictable: denial that they've raised a fucking Philistine, pissed off because it's costing them money. It's no wonder a good many of the kids on this Island suck: look who raised them...or at least fed them, because if they were actually 'raised' they might have some manners, brains and some respect. These kids don't have parents: they just have people who donated the proper gametes. Children who have real parents don't do these things.
And while the kids at Moore Catholic are complaining about having to accept responsibility and suffer for their foolish actions, another Staten Island Catholic High School -- an older and far-more respected institution -- has celebrated it's last prom...ever. Talk about perspective?
St. Peter's Girls High School is the counterpart to my Alma Mater, St. Peter's Boy's High School. The school has been a part of the community since 1852 (and was one of the best-ever girl's basketball programs in all of New York City). It is an institution. And it will soon be closed for good, despite the best efforts of the alumni to save it, because the Archdiocese cannot afford to keep it open.
The Archdiocese can sell the property of another parish (St. Margaret Mary's) to Muslims who will build a mosque upon it, but it can't find any money to keep St. Peter's Girls open? Typical. maybe if the Archbishop wasn't being chauffeured around in limos?
Anyways. the young ladies who are, sadly, the last graduating class, perhaps had a bittersweet experience at their Prom. Knowing, as I do , how girls at St.Peter's are infused with a sense of self-respect, and a love of their institution, I predict that their Last Prom was everything Moore Catholic's most certainly cannot be. For one thing, it was attended by Young Adults who respect themselves and their traditions, instead of barbarians who get drunk, draw dick pictures on the school walls, and cry like little bitches when they're punished for it.
I'm positive they'll do extremely well in college, too. I'm taking bets that half of the Moore Catholic class of 2011 eventually winds up working for the Department of Sanitation, the DMV, or in jail. Most likely following in their parents' footsteps.
This Is Why You Should Never, Ever, Donate Bodily Fluids...
...unless there is a deep level of personal commitment. I wouldn't even think of giving mine to someone who wouldn't, at the very least, make me breakfast before she left, and then didn't make the effort to forget my address or phone number.
And if you can't make the delivery yourself in the time-honored fashion, then you don't want anything to do with being a sperm donor, either. It's not worth it if there's a turkey baster involved. If your recipients are a pair of lesbian chicks you wouldn't fuck without a steel-reinforced concrete condom and a fifth of Johnny Black, then you probably don't even want to be in the same house with that womb. If one of them lists her occupation as 'clairvoyant' and 'funeral celebrant', you definitely don't sell your seed for anything less than your weight in gold, and even then, you might think twice.
Here's another argument against Gay Marriage (as if the anti- argument wasn't already self-evident): how do you redefine 'Fatherhood' when the Warm-and-Fuzzies wear off between the Primaries, and you have to consider the rights of the gamete donor in the 'divorce'?
I feel for this guy, because he has been a father in all respects, it would seem. Especially financially; this pair of carpet-munchers wanted children, but children that someone else would pay for, looks like. This guy paid for the pre-natal care, the midwife, child support, and even offered housing to the mother and the defective she was playing house with. The child, to the...ahem...women, appears but a prop in their bullshit 'lifestyle choice' kabuki play.
He even offered to build them all a house to live in!
I hope this guy can get his daughter away from this pair of ding-dongs.
And if you can't make the delivery yourself in the time-honored fashion, then you don't want anything to do with being a sperm donor, either. It's not worth it if there's a turkey baster involved. If your recipients are a pair of lesbian chicks you wouldn't fuck without a steel-reinforced concrete condom and a fifth of Johnny Black, then you probably don't even want to be in the same house with that womb. If one of them lists her occupation as 'clairvoyant' and 'funeral celebrant', you definitely don't sell your seed for anything less than your weight in gold, and even then, you might think twice.
Here's another argument against Gay Marriage (as if the anti- argument wasn't already self-evident): how do you redefine 'Fatherhood' when the Warm-and-Fuzzies wear off between the Primaries, and you have to consider the rights of the gamete donor in the 'divorce'?
I feel for this guy, because he has been a father in all respects, it would seem. Especially financially; this pair of carpet-munchers wanted children, but children that someone else would pay for, looks like. This guy paid for the pre-natal care, the midwife, child support, and even offered housing to the mother and the defective she was playing house with. The child, to the...ahem...women, appears but a prop in their bullshit 'lifestyle choice' kabuki play.
He even offered to build them all a house to live in!
I hope this guy can get his daughter away from this pair of ding-dongs.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Your Children Are Still In Public Schools, Because...?
New York spends more per pupil, only manages to create more and bigger idiots than any state in America.
Here's a laugher: a good many of these doofuses will, eventually -- because it takes them six to eight years to finish their (remedial) 'education' at City College, where German Shepherds teach English and lack of involuntary muscle responses is no bar to admission -- become the next wave of overpaid teachers in this City. Only in New York could you accept the worst graduates, from the worst colleges, obtaining the easiest-to-get major, and then pay them to teach others.
It's a well-established fact that 'Education' majors are commonly drawn from the lowest echelon of academic achievers, and most of those will have switched majors at least once before settling on 'Education' because most other worthwhile degrees require work. Remember: those who can, do, those who can't, teach...
Nowhere is this more evident than in New York.
Without a cushy public sector union job to fall back on, many of those...ahem...City College graduates...would never be employed in an above-minimum-wage job.
Money Quote fromMichael Goodwin in yesteryday's NY Post:
MANY NYC GRADS CAN'T READ THIS
Responding to my Sunday argument that city schools deprive students of the freedom to fail by promoting too many who aren't ready, a professional aide in a Manhattan high school offers front-line evidence. Here is what she wrote:
"The increased graduation rates are being achieved by means that are absolutely fraudulent and are generally known as 'credit recovery programs.' In exchange for completing a minimal amount of work (and I do mean minimal ), students are granted credit for courses that they previously failed.
"In addition, teachers are 'encouraged' by the principal to pass 80 percent of the students in each of their classes. I can attest, with great confidence, that at least 80 percent of our graduates are functionally illiterate."
The writer, who asks to remain anonymous to protect her job, then quotes from student statements that are rife with errors: " . . . so they started hitting me and I felt to the floor." "I triped and fall with caused bleeding and my pants to torn."
Students say they are "dessie" (dizzy), hurt a "risk" (wrist), have a "hedick" (headache) or are "bruced" (bruised).
"Obviously," she adds, "social promotion is alive and well at all grade levels."
Sadly, her experience is not unique or even unusual. This is the real outrage of too many New York schools.
But then again, the priority is not education at NYC Schools. It can't be, not with all that money to be divvied up. And of course, where's there's taxpayer money to be passed out, there's Political Correctness and Corruption, too. Like these cases, from Andrea Peyser in today's NY Post
:High-school math teacher Rivky Love hounded a girl whom she called her "best friend and sister" with late-night texts signed, "Love you."
The married 36-year-old even offered to slip the Edward R. Murrow student an advance copy of a test. Love was suspended for six months without pay from the Brooklyn school. Then she's back as if nothing happened.
Meanwhile, a devout Christian elementary-school assistant teacher, Anita Wooten-Francis, 52, says she was ridiculed and fired by her principal because she prayed in an empty classroom at Brooklyn's PS 224. This, after more than 16 years of unblemished service.
Why can't Johnny read? At city schools, pervs are a protected class. And quiet devotion is punished.
It's supposed to be all about the chidlren, right? Apparently not in this state, where you have the highest property taxes in the nation and this is the sorry result. Tear thepublic school system down and replace it with private schools supported by tuition. If the dregs of this city can't afford it, then give 'em a voucher; it'll still be cheaper and more effective than continuing to warehouse kids in a state-run babysitting service, run by mouth-breathing retards.
Here's a laugher: a good many of these doofuses will, eventually -- because it takes them six to eight years to finish their (remedial) 'education' at City College, where German Shepherds teach English and lack of involuntary muscle responses is no bar to admission -- become the next wave of overpaid teachers in this City. Only in New York could you accept the worst graduates, from the worst colleges, obtaining the easiest-to-get major, and then pay them to teach others.
It's a well-established fact that 'Education' majors are commonly drawn from the lowest echelon of academic achievers, and most of those will have switched majors at least once before settling on 'Education' because most other worthwhile degrees require work. Remember: those who can, do, those who can't, teach...
Nowhere is this more evident than in New York.
Without a cushy public sector union job to fall back on, many of those...ahem...City College graduates...would never be employed in an above-minimum-wage job.
Money Quote fromMichael Goodwin in yesteryday's NY Post:
MANY NYC GRADS CAN'T READ THIS
Responding to my Sunday argument that city schools deprive students of the freedom to fail by promoting too many who aren't ready, a professional aide in a Manhattan high school offers front-line evidence. Here is what she wrote:
"The increased graduation rates are being achieved by means that are absolutely fraudulent and are generally known as 'credit recovery programs.' In exchange for completing a minimal amount of work (and I do mean minimal ), students are granted credit for courses that they previously failed.
"In addition, teachers are 'encouraged' by the principal to pass 80 percent of the students in each of their classes. I can attest, with great confidence, that at least 80 percent of our graduates are functionally illiterate."
The writer, who asks to remain anonymous to protect her job, then quotes from student statements that are rife with errors: " . . . so they started hitting me and I felt to the floor." "I triped and fall with caused bleeding and my pants to torn."
Students say they are "dessie" (dizzy), hurt a "risk" (wrist), have a "hedick" (headache) or are "bruced" (bruised).
"Obviously," she adds, "social promotion is alive and well at all grade levels."
Sadly, her experience is not unique or even unusual. This is the real outrage of too many New York schools.
But then again, the priority is not education at NYC Schools. It can't be, not with all that money to be divvied up. And of course, where's there's taxpayer money to be passed out, there's Political Correctness and Corruption, too. Like these cases, from Andrea Peyser in today's NY Post
:High-school math teacher Rivky Love hounded a girl whom she called her "best friend and sister" with late-night texts signed, "Love you."
The married 36-year-old even offered to slip the Edward R. Murrow student an advance copy of a test. Love was suspended for six months without pay from the Brooklyn school. Then she's back as if nothing happened.
Meanwhile, a devout Christian elementary-school assistant teacher, Anita Wooten-Francis, 52, says she was ridiculed and fired by her principal because she prayed in an empty classroom at Brooklyn's PS 224. This, after more than 16 years of unblemished service.
Why can't Johnny read? At city schools, pervs are a protected class. And quiet devotion is punished.
It's supposed to be all about the chidlren, right? Apparently not in this state, where you have the highest property taxes in the nation and this is the sorry result. Tear thepublic school system down and replace it with private schools supported by tuition. If the dregs of this city can't afford it, then give 'em a voucher; it'll still be cheaper and more effective than continuing to warehouse kids in a state-run babysitting service, run by mouth-breathing retards.
"But There's Nothing To Do..."
My Doomsday Diary.
Here's how I spent what was supposed to be our Final Day on Earth. Except for the Happy Ending, I found myself that day fervently hoping the planet would, indeed, split wide open and burn to a cinder. It started with my nephews.
I feel somewhat badly for today's children, mostly because they have been robbed of all the things that I believe should make up childhood.
I've been thinking about this notion this past week because of what happened last Saturday...
I have four nephews, aged 14, 13, 11 and 5. They're great boys, and by that, I mean that I love them very much, not that they're the best behaved. In fact, my nephews have the manners of a pack of wild boars...wild boars with toothaches and hemorrhoids, I mean. They can be a touch ornery and rambunctious, to say the least. Part of this is just The Age; two teenagers, busily exploring the boundaries, pushing every envelope. The two younger ones, naturally, mimic what they've seen the older ones get away with, which is quite a bit as my sister and brother-in-law are a bit lax in the discipline department. When I was their age, if I pulled half the stuff they did -- and got caught -- I'd be on the phone looking for organ donors, just in case I needed them in the aftermath of the truly horrendous beating I was going to get.
Worse, I grew up in a house with my grandparents and my uncle and his family. Stepping out of line -- and getting caught -- meant, potentially, three beatings. Even worse, I went to Catholic school, which meant stepping out of line included a bonus beating from the nuns, then three beatings when you got home. Considering that I was a beastly little swine as a child, I'm amazed that I was able to survive a John McCain-like experience of near-constant physical torture. Fortunately, for me anyway, I seem to have gotten away with just enough to avoid permanent brain damage.
My nephews have, thus far, been spared the experience of a truly epic beating at the hands of their belt-and-wooden-spoon-wielding grandparents, wooden-hanger-wielding mother, and the open-hand buttocks assault of an ex-Marine Uncle, and in today's Catholic schools you couldn't find a Shao-Lin- ruler-wielding nun if your life depended upon it. Besides, they all go to public school, except the oldest, and the Catholic school he attends is generally regarded as 'soft'. I went to grammar school with Dominican Nuns who moonlighted as hand-to-hand combat instructors with the Green Berets, and a high school with Black-belt Christian Brothers, half of whom seemed to be tough Hell's Kitchen Irishmen, and every last one of them claimed to have been a Golden Gloves boxer in his youth.
Suffice to say, short of being raised by the Spanish Inquisition, with alternate weekends at Gestapo Headquarters, very few people know physical discipline like I know physical discipline. Today they'd call this 'child abuse', but back then, it was just what parents did to straighten their kids out when that was necessary.
But, I digress...
Anyways, I had occasion to 'babysit' my nephews, despite the fact that none are babies anymore, but the oldest are certainly too irresponsible to be left to care for the younger two when their parents are away. Their father had pulled a weekend overtime shift. Their mother was dragooned by the Little League they've all played in to do her 'volunteer' service. My mother, a woman whom God certainly sent to annoy the living shit out of every other living being on Planet Earth, came along. Heaven forbid she should have to sit at home and rely upon her own wits to keep herself entertained for a day. It began, predictably enough, with constant complaints about 'the Sciatica', her back hurts, her legs, her knees, her sinuses, and even her fucking ass. It's all an act, by the way, it's all a play for attention because she's sympathy junkie and a drama queen.
This is the First Indication that I'm going to have trouble at some point. But I'll get back to that in a moment. Let's start with the Second Indication that it's going to be One of Those Days.
If there's one thing I really dislike about Modern Kids, it's the silly whining they all engage in about having 'nothing to do.'
Mind you, my nephews live in a house which has FIVE televisions, all with cable access including 150 channels and On-Demand programming up the Wazoo, two DVD players (with an extensive library), a Playstation 3, an X-Box 360, and a Nintendo Wii, each again with an extensive library of games. The garage is simply overflowing with bicycles, skateboards, kick scooters and roller blades, not to mention a bewildering array of portable ramps and rails for them. All my nephews play baseball -- Little League, High School, and Travelling Teams -- so there are enough bats, baseballs, and gloves laying around to equip a Major League Team. The only things missing are Buck and McCarver, chewing tobacco, and Yankee Stadium.
There are two computers in the house, both with internet access. I know they have internet access because guess who installed the cable modem and Wi-Fi router (that would be...Me)? There is a vast array of computer games available, as well, not to mention two or three Nintendo DS consoles. There are enough Lego bricks (the five year old is a Lego junkie who might soon require methadone treatments to wean him off of them) to build a life-size replica of the Manhattan Skyline.
There is a small library of age-and-theme-appropriate literature, and for good measure my sister has stocked the house with all manner of Art Supplies, colored pencils, sketch pads, crayons, markers, paints, and so forth, that would have made Van Gogh lock himself in her basement, and kept him far too busy with it all to even have time to think of cutting his own ear off.
Oh, and the three Big Ones have cell phones, too, and text message Lord Knows Who constantly. She just might be raising a passel of boys with the strongest thumbs on all of Staten Island.
I can understand the five year old complaining "I have nothing to do", because, well...he's five. Five year olds have attention spans measured in RPM's, although, like I said, he's a Lego junkie and when he's in his zone you don't hear a peep out of him for hours at a time.
And the Swimming Pool hasn't even been opened for the season yet. On a good day, my nephews will protest, loudly and in a manner which reminds me of a menstrual girl, if their mother suggests they go outside to play. They've been known to cry about 'how unfair' that is. Did you ever know kids to complain they're being sent outside to play? They'd rather ride their kick scooters IN THE HOUSE, on her marble-and-ceramic-tile floors, and she lets them get away with it.
So, who has 'nothing to do'? Well, the 13 and 14 year old, naturally. They're the biggest pests of all that way. They decide that since there's 'nothing to do' why not engage in a bit of absolute stupidity and build a tree swing?
Now, about this swing. It's my brother-in-law's fault. He decided one day that it would be a good idea to find himself a length of rope, toss it over a high branch on the tree out front of the house -- over 30 feet in the air -- attach the broken seat from an old office chair to it, and then encourage his children to swing from it. Even the Biggest Doofus. There's just two problems with this swing; the first is that once you're on it and gain any sort of momentum, you're swinging out into the street, and since there's about 20' of rope involved, you're swinging 20' out into the street and into traffic. The second problem is because of the peculiar position of the anchor branch, once you begin your 're-entry' from the street, you're likely to crash headlong into the trunk. If you're, say, 14, and weigh about 150 pounds and gather enough momentum to make the swing worth your while, if you hit that tree you're probably doing 20-25 MPH when you make contact.
Considering that the other three launch the 5-year old with enough force to loft the Space Shuttle, he's probably going to hit it at closer to 30 mph, assuming he manages to keep his grip at all.
For that reason specifically -- the five year old must be kept off of this dangerous contraption -- they are forbidden to do this thing without their father being there to supervise, so that they don't get stupid and carried away, and a 911 call has to be made. This Swing-erecting event also leads to the most inhuman arguing and crying you've ever heard over 'who's turn' it is; it's like listening to sorority sisters argue about who gets to use the Big Mirror, and there's no place for me to plug in my curling iron in the common bathroom with 12 other girls already in it. The whole operation is far more trouble than it's worth, if you ask me.
But this is exactly what they want to do, and they keep insisting they have the right -- and permission -- to do it whenever they fucking want to. Except that I know they fucking don't. So, I tell them; No Swing, find something else to do. This pronouncement gets the expected grousing, and unfortunately, no surprise at all, a lot of cursing.
I would have swatted them good for sassing me, but I'm not allowed to touch my sister's children that way. Consequently, neither does she...not until they've reached the point of being in close-to-riot condition. No wonder they push the envelope; there's no consequence for even having the audacity to dare it. Someone should smack them around. I took things from them I wouldn't take from a grown man without insisting he step outside and defend his honor.
The Law has been laid down. No Swing. I go back into the house. The The First Indication is now heard from, and you would think the Gates of Hell had just burst open and poured forth a vast horde of soul-stealing demons, red in tooth and claw, fire and brimstone flowing from their flared nostrils.
A bit about my Mother, first, so that you can get some idea of what's about to happen when I continue this story. My Mother is, without a doubt, the most disagreeable person in this Solar System. She's not a bad woman, she just has some rather strange ideas and an overly-inflated opinion of herself which is totally detached from reality. The first problem she has is that whenever she says something, no matter how stupid, how inane, how inappropriate, how non-topical, insulting, no matter how unasked for, she believes it should be treated as if Moses carried the decree down from the Mountaintop engraved in stone. As soon as the words are uttered, she either expects whatever it she wants to be done right this very second, or that it is to be regarded with the same reverence and respect that we have for the law, worthy of immediate attention and action, and we should all fall to our fucking knees and thank the shit out of her for having graced us with her words of wisdom.
I beg to differ. She was a rotten mother who offered no real guidance, and who's children suffered for her poor choices in husbands, and the bad decisions she made that ruined her life. These required her children to pick up the pieces for her, because that would require effort, and then support her for the last 25 years of her life. She's fortunate that we haven't taken her out into the woods, slathered her in animal fat, and left her there to face the grizzlies alone, or just tossed her off a convenient pier in cinderblock underwear, already.
As if this wasn't annoying enough, this distasteful personality trait is attached to a woman with an anxiety complex so monumental, and a variety of other mental issues of the Poor-Me type (the very worst), that it has kept the best therapist on Staten Island busy for 25 years...with no improvement to date, whatsoever. Which leads me to the question; just who the fuck was it who said she was the best in the first place? Because she's convinced that her every word should be an Imperial command, and because every second that passes between command and action builds up the cycle of anxiety and impatience, and because it all plays into this martyr complex of hers, nothing is ever simple. Everything is a fucking imperative, Earth-shattering emergency that is accompanied by That Sound.
That Sound. Look up the word 'cacophony' in the dictionary. Doesn't even come close to describing it. Imagine it like this: the sound of 4,000 cats being castrated simultaneously with a rusty, unsharpened garden scythe, set against the background noise of a pack of constipated wolves baying at the moon whilst being serenaded by some great locomotive that hasn't had it's moving parts oiled in a couple of centuries moving at high speed, which then tries to come to a screeching halt upon a dime.
That's almost it. But still not quite. You also have to imagine someone pouring table salt into your eyes when you're hearing it.
It's a terrible sound. Hearing it gives one the impression of great shards of jagged glass and ten-penny nails being pounded into your skull. The sweat breaks out on your spine. Your teeth are set on edge as if someone just slit your asshole with a razor blade and then poured lemon juice and Liquid Plumber into the open wound. You'd rather be sucked into a jet engine -- and survive -- than to hear that sound. You'd rather have someone open an umbrella up your ass repeatedly than to listen to it. You'd rather be the sex slave of some Al'Qada dude with a sandpaper and blowtorch fetish. It's a sound I've heard -- even in my sleep -- almost every day of my life for the last 44 years, and the amazing part of it all is that I haven't killed her yet.
MAAAATTTTYYYYYY! Come up here...NOW! Ohmygodohmygodohmygod....Look what that LUNATIC is DOING! STOP THEM!
The Swing is being set up. They can't even get the rope over the branch, and already, it's as if someone has just been struck by lightning, run down by a garbage truck and shot eleven times...all at once. And I absolutely HATE being called "Matty". I'm not a seven year old in short pants and knee fucking socks.
So, I tell them. No swing. Now knock it off. "But we have nothing to do." Bullshit, find something else.
Ten minutes later:
MAAAAATTTTTYYYYYY! LOOK WHAT THESE KIDS ARE DOING! Gooutthereandbreakhisass, goddammit!
Guys, I said Knock It Off. No Swing. Do us all a favor, and don't give that pain in the behind inside another reason to start wailing. I don't want to hear it, and it's pissing me off. Just shut her up and stop, or I'm taking this crap away from you.
Not two minutes later, it starts all over again:
So, I take the rope, the seat, and the garden tools they're using trying to get the damned thing over a 30' high branch. Find something else to do, fellas, because if I have to listen to that woman one more time, someone's getting killed, and it might not be just her.
At this point, the little guys want to go to the schoolyard and ride their scooters. Of course they do; it's only a mile walk, and naturally, the Big Ones don't want to go. I can only imagine what I'm coming back to when these two, naturally, resume their stupidity behind my back and Ye Old Nervous Windbag inside has several hours to witness and endure their nonsense and get progressively more aggravated, frustrated -- and even shriller -- because they ignore her repeated commands to stop it.
I take the Little Guys to the schoolyard, and we have some fun. They get to ride their scooters, they jump around on the playground, we play with a football they've found...and I get hit on by a chick. There's two scifoozas that we run into on the street nearby who talk as if they were taught to whisper in a sawmill, and use language that's...well... 'salty' is an inadequate description. It's even worse than mine.
Scifooza Number One can't stop talking about her boobs. In front of my two young nephews. She's telling Scifooza Number Two that as soon as she gets her "chemical balls" (admission: I have never heard this term before) she's going to get "my tits done", and "finally fucking get myself a fucking husband because all they want is fucking D-cups". Sciffoza One apologizes profusely for using such language in front of My Sons. There not my Sons, they're my Nephews, but it's okay. I'll just tell them to ignore you.
"Do you think my tits are alright, or should I get 'em bigger?" Sciffooza One asks. Scifooza Number Two feigns being flabbergasted. One gets the impression that Number One asks every random man she meets this question, and Number Two is obliged to pretend to be embarrassed, even though she's probably shown her tits to twice as many random men. And she might get paid to do it, too.
"Nah, nothing wrong with what you got. They're just fine."
"You boys are soooo lucky! Your father is such a nice man..."
"He's not my father, he's my uncle."
"He's soooo nice!" I'm now having my shoulders and biceps felt up and pinched as if she were looking for a ripe cantaloupe in the supermarket. She apparently likes my hair, too. I'm about to smack this bitch.
"I'm not married, you know...", She says.
"No? You? Can't imagine why not..."
"You have beautiful sons. I wish I had a son...."
"They're my nephews."
"Really? I thought they were your kids..."
"If you could shut up about your tits for three seconds you would have realized you were told otherwise three times. Maybe that's why you're not married: you can't shut up about your tits, you're pushy, and you don't listen very well."
Number Two finds this uproariously funny. We leave. If I ever wanted the local equivalent of Trailer Trash, I now know exactly where to find it. I wouldn't marry this chick for a Green Card and a mention in her father's will. It took near an hour to reach the schoolyard, if only because the five year old has little legs that don't carry him so fast. Twenty-five minutes after we get there they want to go home. Another hour back. And...
There's the FUCKING SWING...naturally. And a crowd of neighborhood kids all waiting for their turn. Mommy Dearest is apoplectic, and on the verge of having puppies. I figure if she does manage this astounding feat, it ought to look like something out of Aliens, only with fireworks and more gunfire. It's now all my fault that this happened because I was away for three hours doing GOD-KNOWS-WHAT-STUPID-SHIT-YOUR-BROTHER-IN-LAW-IS-AN-ASSHOLE-FOR-SHOWING-THEM-THIS-SHIT-GODDAMMIT-WHERE-IS-YOUR-SISTER-THAT-INCONSIDERATE-BITCH-THEY'RE-DRIVING-ME-INSANE.
And people wonder why I am the way I am? If you had my life...
Anyways, here's what I mean by 'losing their childhood".
In my day, if we were told 'you can't do that', we simply found something else to do. And since we didn't have a billion beeping-and-bright-lights-electronic geegaws, we had to make due with whatever was at hand, and somehow manage to have fun with it. Worse, I grew up in Brooklyn, and there wasn't a front lawn, an open field for miles, or a swimming pool in the back yard. We didn't even have a back yard worth the appellation. In those days, we played a lot of wiffle ball (no one plays wiffle ball anymore), and a ton of stickball. These were games that were pretty cheap, and in which you could improvise equipment if you didn't have any, and play for hours. In winter, we played tackle football -- in the street -- and during the fall, we played tackle football...on the concrete in the schoolyard. Hockey was played year-round, either road hockey or roller hockey, ice hockey being something extremely rare: skates were super expensive (your parents might blow a week's salary on skates then), and the only ice was at Coney Island, which required a death-defying trip on the B or D train, dodging muggers and streakers. We used a roll of electrical tape worn smooth on the sidewalk for a puck. It works remarkably well on the well-worn blacktop of a city street.
Protective equipment, if you could find any, usually consisted of a mish-mash of catcher's gear, baseball gloves, football helmets and shoulder pads, and the simple expedient of stuffing magazines into your socks to serve as shin guards. A hockey stick in those days cost about $10, and that was a ton of money, so no one took slap shots -- the best and easiest way to break a stick on blacktop.
There were exactly seven television channels -- and one of them was PBS. Video games consisted of Pong, and if your family could afford it, you might get lucky and have an Intellivision, Atari -- or the Cadillac of them all -- a Commodore 64 with something like 3 really crappy games. Otherwise, you needed to scrounge quarters to go to the local candy store to play pinball, or maybe Space Invaders or Asteroids. When PacMan came around, kids seriously considered taking up a life of crime to support their habit. You dreamed of the days when you had enough quarters to just play a few games of PacMan AND get an Egg Cream. That was like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to us.
We played a lot of common childhood games: Johnny-on-the-Pony, Red Rover, Stoopball (kind of like baseball, only with 'phantom' runners, where you tossed the rubber ball with all your might against your front steps when you were 'up'). We played handball and basketball in the schoolyard, boxball on the sidewalk (like tennis, using the square sections of the sidewalk as a court). When your rubber Spaulding ball split at the seams (they always did) from all that stick- and boxball, you simply took the two halves and played Halfball (a variant of baseball, played with the half a ball and a short length of thick rubber hose).
When you didn't even have a ball, you played Skelly. In this game, you shoot bottlecaps that have been filled with melted wax around a square 'board' drawn on the sidewalk or street in chalk. If you were really serious about your Skelly, you carved your Skelly Board into the hot asphalt of the street in summer with a screwdriver. Kids got very creative with their carved Skelly boards. Some were really intricate and quite challenging.
We didn't have trees to climb, so we climbed fire escapes and 'laundry ladders'. These were skinny, metal ladders, often 30' or more in height -- and not always anchored very well -- that one found behind most houses or apartment buildings, and to which tenants attached clotheslines from their back windows. Climbing a laundry ladder was usually something you did when playing 'War', in which we ran around the streets and the back-alleys in mock combat with toy guns. Try that today, and the local authorities will drag your kids off to a mental institution, just in case they want to grow up to shoot a Democrat. Any fence was like an open invitation to 'come climb me', and it didn't matter if there was barbed wire or razor wire, or even if it was rusty; we climbed them, especially if there was something 'cool' on the other side...like access to Tar Beach (the roof of an apartment building from where one could launch water balloons, or watch the local girls sunbathe).
Bikes and skateboards were rarities. In the Brooklyn of that time these things were likely to get stolen. At knifepoint. I was mugged at knifepoint, twice, before my thirteenth birthday. Nowadays in Brooklyn, they definitely would be stolen, only you'll receive multiple gunshot wounds and might get your house burnt down just so there's no witnesses to the crime for good measure.
Everyone played with matches. Everyone played with magnifying glasses and anthills. Everyone played with magnifying glasses, anthills, model glue and a can of hairspray. You circled the anthill with the glue, set fire to it with paper and magnifying glass, and when the ants came up to escape, you used the hairspray can like a flamethrower. We knew how to make slingshots, and makeshift crossbows with a piece of two-by-four, a thick rubber band, wood staple and a clothespin.
Disputes between kids were always settled with fisticuffs, or a wrestling match, and three minutes after someone got his ass kicked everyone was friends again. We collected comic books, baseball cards, bottlecaps and Matchbox Cars. We 'flipped' baseball cards, we pitched pennies, we played a lot of catch, Tag, Dodgeball (or a rougher variant, Kill the Man With the Ball), Red Light-Green Light, Ringolerio and Bulldog. We built model airplanes and ships. We knew how to build and repair our own toys, or adapt them to other uses. We did it in the CITY, too, with a lack of open spaces and grass, and with what nowadays would be considered Third-World-level disposable incomes.
In short, we knew how to be BOYS. We never had 'NOTHING TO DO'.
My nephews, for all the love I have for them, would have been lost in that world. They would have been constantly bored because no one would be giving them anything. As it is, they get so bored despite all they have, that they become single-minded of purpose when it comes to a tree swing that even in my day would have given Evel Knievel second thoughts. Now, granted, there's some creativity and a sense of danger involved in that swing, but the point is if we were told 'don't do that', we found something else to do, and we had enough of a store of made-up/improvised games/activities at our disposal that it wasn't difficult.
Nowadays, kids seem incapable of doing this. Try to teach these things to them, and they look at you as if you've just emerged from a spacecraft with three heads, green skin, and antennae. They aren't interested unless there's a flashing light, a large price tag, a beeping sound, or a degree of extraordinary, bound-to-end-in-the-emergency-room danger -- they call these things Extreme Sports nowadays, but in my day, they were simply the things The Stupid Kid Who Always Had a Broken Bone did.
There was a degree of danger in what we did, too, but it was always a calculated danger (kids were smarter then, I think). We knew the limits. An equivalent to this swinging between traffic and a great fucking tree trunk in my day was called 'Skitching'. In Skitching, one either wore roller skates, or did it in winter when the streets would be full of packed snow that you could slide on. You simply grabbed onto the back of a stopped bus or truck, and got low where the driver might not be able to see you easily, and got yourself pulled along as if water skiing. At least until the vehicle stopped, and you didn't...you usually only stopped when you got a face full of back bumper. The worst cases saw the Skitcher eat the bumper and then slide under the now-stopped vehicle, and being too stunned to move, get trapped under a wheel to get themselves run the fuck over. Never did it myself, never wanted to. It was just too stupid and dangerous.
But such was the life -- and the joys -- of a city boy in the 1970's, and amazingly, we did these things with no adult supervision, whatsoever. Makes you wonder just what the hell happened to the world and what happened to the Spirit of Boyhood. These kids today are such pampered, spoiled, over-supervised, whining little pansies who don't get beaten on a regular basis for their misbehavior, and who don't know how -- and who can't be trusted -- to play on their own. And who suffered for it all this fine day? Why... I did.
I'm not even their parent, either.
I had to listen to a Screaming Banshee who turns my insides into a knotted mass, and who could curdle used motor oil with her voice alone. I had to hike two hours to and from a schoolyard I didn't want to go to, and we barely stayed. I was nearly sexually assaulted on the street by a bimbo I wouldn't screw with a stolen penis, and who didn't even have the courtesy to offer me a drink before putting her hands on me. I had my nephews actually tell me to do something anatomically impossible -- twice -- and I'm not allowed to feed them their teeth. When my sister finally gets home, she wants to know why I 'didn't do anything to stop those kids from putting up the swing' and has the nerve to ask me if I'll watch them again the following day.
It's a good thing it was supposed to be Doomsday, and there was a 'We Didn't Die' party later that evening. I managed to play a few other games that night that also don't require flashing lights and electronics, or adult supervision...only adult participation.
That was something else we learned to do in the schoolyard, too.
Here's how I spent what was supposed to be our Final Day on Earth. Except for the Happy Ending, I found myself that day fervently hoping the planet would, indeed, split wide open and burn to a cinder. It started with my nephews.
I feel somewhat badly for today's children, mostly because they have been robbed of all the things that I believe should make up childhood.
I've been thinking about this notion this past week because of what happened last Saturday...
I have four nephews, aged 14, 13, 11 and 5. They're great boys, and by that, I mean that I love them very much, not that they're the best behaved. In fact, my nephews have the manners of a pack of wild boars...wild boars with toothaches and hemorrhoids, I mean. They can be a touch ornery and rambunctious, to say the least. Part of this is just The Age; two teenagers, busily exploring the boundaries, pushing every envelope. The two younger ones, naturally, mimic what they've seen the older ones get away with, which is quite a bit as my sister and brother-in-law are a bit lax in the discipline department. When I was their age, if I pulled half the stuff they did -- and got caught -- I'd be on the phone looking for organ donors, just in case I needed them in the aftermath of the truly horrendous beating I was going to get.
Worse, I grew up in a house with my grandparents and my uncle and his family. Stepping out of line -- and getting caught -- meant, potentially, three beatings. Even worse, I went to Catholic school, which meant stepping out of line included a bonus beating from the nuns, then three beatings when you got home. Considering that I was a beastly little swine as a child, I'm amazed that I was able to survive a John McCain-like experience of near-constant physical torture. Fortunately, for me anyway, I seem to have gotten away with just enough to avoid permanent brain damage.
My nephews have, thus far, been spared the experience of a truly epic beating at the hands of their belt-and-wooden-spoon-wielding grandparents, wooden-hanger-wielding mother, and the open-hand buttocks assault of an ex-Marine Uncle, and in today's Catholic schools you couldn't find a Shao-Lin- ruler-wielding nun if your life depended upon it. Besides, they all go to public school, except the oldest, and the Catholic school he attends is generally regarded as 'soft'. I went to grammar school with Dominican Nuns who moonlighted as hand-to-hand combat instructors with the Green Berets, and a high school with Black-belt Christian Brothers, half of whom seemed to be tough Hell's Kitchen Irishmen, and every last one of them claimed to have been a Golden Gloves boxer in his youth.
Suffice to say, short of being raised by the Spanish Inquisition, with alternate weekends at Gestapo Headquarters, very few people know physical discipline like I know physical discipline. Today they'd call this 'child abuse', but back then, it was just what parents did to straighten their kids out when that was necessary.
But, I digress...
Anyways, I had occasion to 'babysit' my nephews, despite the fact that none are babies anymore, but the oldest are certainly too irresponsible to be left to care for the younger two when their parents are away. Their father had pulled a weekend overtime shift. Their mother was dragooned by the Little League they've all played in to do her 'volunteer' service. My mother, a woman whom God certainly sent to annoy the living shit out of every other living being on Planet Earth, came along. Heaven forbid she should have to sit at home and rely upon her own wits to keep herself entertained for a day. It began, predictably enough, with constant complaints about 'the Sciatica', her back hurts, her legs, her knees, her sinuses, and even her fucking ass. It's all an act, by the way, it's all a play for attention because she's sympathy junkie and a drama queen.
This is the First Indication that I'm going to have trouble at some point. But I'll get back to that in a moment. Let's start with the Second Indication that it's going to be One of Those Days.
If there's one thing I really dislike about Modern Kids, it's the silly whining they all engage in about having 'nothing to do.'
Mind you, my nephews live in a house which has FIVE televisions, all with cable access including 150 channels and On-Demand programming up the Wazoo, two DVD players (with an extensive library), a Playstation 3, an X-Box 360, and a Nintendo Wii, each again with an extensive library of games. The garage is simply overflowing with bicycles, skateboards, kick scooters and roller blades, not to mention a bewildering array of portable ramps and rails for them. All my nephews play baseball -- Little League, High School, and Travelling Teams -- so there are enough bats, baseballs, and gloves laying around to equip a Major League Team. The only things missing are Buck and McCarver, chewing tobacco, and Yankee Stadium.
There are two computers in the house, both with internet access. I know they have internet access because guess who installed the cable modem and Wi-Fi router (that would be...Me)? There is a vast array of computer games available, as well, not to mention two or three Nintendo DS consoles. There are enough Lego bricks (the five year old is a Lego junkie who might soon require methadone treatments to wean him off of them) to build a life-size replica of the Manhattan Skyline.
There is a small library of age-and-theme-appropriate literature, and for good measure my sister has stocked the house with all manner of Art Supplies, colored pencils, sketch pads, crayons, markers, paints, and so forth, that would have made Van Gogh lock himself in her basement, and kept him far too busy with it all to even have time to think of cutting his own ear off.
Oh, and the three Big Ones have cell phones, too, and text message Lord Knows Who constantly. She just might be raising a passel of boys with the strongest thumbs on all of Staten Island.
I can understand the five year old complaining "I have nothing to do", because, well...he's five. Five year olds have attention spans measured in RPM's, although, like I said, he's a Lego junkie and when he's in his zone you don't hear a peep out of him for hours at a time.
And the Swimming Pool hasn't even been opened for the season yet. On a good day, my nephews will protest, loudly and in a manner which reminds me of a menstrual girl, if their mother suggests they go outside to play. They've been known to cry about 'how unfair' that is. Did you ever know kids to complain they're being sent outside to play? They'd rather ride their kick scooters IN THE HOUSE, on her marble-and-ceramic-tile floors, and she lets them get away with it.
So, who has 'nothing to do'? Well, the 13 and 14 year old, naturally. They're the biggest pests of all that way. They decide that since there's 'nothing to do' why not engage in a bit of absolute stupidity and build a tree swing?
Now, about this swing. It's my brother-in-law's fault. He decided one day that it would be a good idea to find himself a length of rope, toss it over a high branch on the tree out front of the house -- over 30 feet in the air -- attach the broken seat from an old office chair to it, and then encourage his children to swing from it. Even the Biggest Doofus. There's just two problems with this swing; the first is that once you're on it and gain any sort of momentum, you're swinging out into the street, and since there's about 20' of rope involved, you're swinging 20' out into the street and into traffic. The second problem is because of the peculiar position of the anchor branch, once you begin your 're-entry' from the street, you're likely to crash headlong into the trunk. If you're, say, 14, and weigh about 150 pounds and gather enough momentum to make the swing worth your while, if you hit that tree you're probably doing 20-25 MPH when you make contact.
Considering that the other three launch the 5-year old with enough force to loft the Space Shuttle, he's probably going to hit it at closer to 30 mph, assuming he manages to keep his grip at all.
For that reason specifically -- the five year old must be kept off of this dangerous contraption -- they are forbidden to do this thing without their father being there to supervise, so that they don't get stupid and carried away, and a 911 call has to be made. This Swing-erecting event also leads to the most inhuman arguing and crying you've ever heard over 'who's turn' it is; it's like listening to sorority sisters argue about who gets to use the Big Mirror, and there's no place for me to plug in my curling iron in the common bathroom with 12 other girls already in it. The whole operation is far more trouble than it's worth, if you ask me.
But this is exactly what they want to do, and they keep insisting they have the right -- and permission -- to do it whenever they fucking want to. Except that I know they fucking don't. So, I tell them; No Swing, find something else to do. This pronouncement gets the expected grousing, and unfortunately, no surprise at all, a lot of cursing.
I would have swatted them good for sassing me, but I'm not allowed to touch my sister's children that way. Consequently, neither does she...not until they've reached the point of being in close-to-riot condition. No wonder they push the envelope; there's no consequence for even having the audacity to dare it. Someone should smack them around. I took things from them I wouldn't take from a grown man without insisting he step outside and defend his honor.
The Law has been laid down. No Swing. I go back into the house. The The First Indication is now heard from, and you would think the Gates of Hell had just burst open and poured forth a vast horde of soul-stealing demons, red in tooth and claw, fire and brimstone flowing from their flared nostrils.
A bit about my Mother, first, so that you can get some idea of what's about to happen when I continue this story. My Mother is, without a doubt, the most disagreeable person in this Solar System. She's not a bad woman, she just has some rather strange ideas and an overly-inflated opinion of herself which is totally detached from reality. The first problem she has is that whenever she says something, no matter how stupid, how inane, how inappropriate, how non-topical, insulting, no matter how unasked for, she believes it should be treated as if Moses carried the decree down from the Mountaintop engraved in stone. As soon as the words are uttered, she either expects whatever it she wants to be done right this very second, or that it is to be regarded with the same reverence and respect that we have for the law, worthy of immediate attention and action, and we should all fall to our fucking knees and thank the shit out of her for having graced us with her words of wisdom.
I beg to differ. She was a rotten mother who offered no real guidance, and who's children suffered for her poor choices in husbands, and the bad decisions she made that ruined her life. These required her children to pick up the pieces for her, because that would require effort, and then support her for the last 25 years of her life. She's fortunate that we haven't taken her out into the woods, slathered her in animal fat, and left her there to face the grizzlies alone, or just tossed her off a convenient pier in cinderblock underwear, already.
As if this wasn't annoying enough, this distasteful personality trait is attached to a woman with an anxiety complex so monumental, and a variety of other mental issues of the Poor-Me type (the very worst), that it has kept the best therapist on Staten Island busy for 25 years...with no improvement to date, whatsoever. Which leads me to the question; just who the fuck was it who said she was the best in the first place? Because she's convinced that her every word should be an Imperial command, and because every second that passes between command and action builds up the cycle of anxiety and impatience, and because it all plays into this martyr complex of hers, nothing is ever simple. Everything is a fucking imperative, Earth-shattering emergency that is accompanied by That Sound.
That Sound. Look up the word 'cacophony' in the dictionary. Doesn't even come close to describing it. Imagine it like this: the sound of 4,000 cats being castrated simultaneously with a rusty, unsharpened garden scythe, set against the background noise of a pack of constipated wolves baying at the moon whilst being serenaded by some great locomotive that hasn't had it's moving parts oiled in a couple of centuries moving at high speed, which then tries to come to a screeching halt upon a dime.
That's almost it. But still not quite. You also have to imagine someone pouring table salt into your eyes when you're hearing it.
It's a terrible sound. Hearing it gives one the impression of great shards of jagged glass and ten-penny nails being pounded into your skull. The sweat breaks out on your spine. Your teeth are set on edge as if someone just slit your asshole with a razor blade and then poured lemon juice and Liquid Plumber into the open wound. You'd rather be sucked into a jet engine -- and survive -- than to hear that sound. You'd rather have someone open an umbrella up your ass repeatedly than to listen to it. You'd rather be the sex slave of some Al'Qada dude with a sandpaper and blowtorch fetish. It's a sound I've heard -- even in my sleep -- almost every day of my life for the last 44 years, and the amazing part of it all is that I haven't killed her yet.
MAAAATTTTYYYYYY! Come up here...NOW! Ohmygodohmygodohmygod....Look what that LUNATIC is DOING! STOP THEM!
The Swing is being set up. They can't even get the rope over the branch, and already, it's as if someone has just been struck by lightning, run down by a garbage truck and shot eleven times...all at once. And I absolutely HATE being called "Matty". I'm not a seven year old in short pants and knee fucking socks.
So, I tell them. No swing. Now knock it off. "But we have nothing to do." Bullshit, find something else.
Ten minutes later:
MAAAAATTTTTYYYYYY! LOOK WHAT THESE KIDS ARE DOING! Gooutthereandbreakhisass, goddammit!
Guys, I said Knock It Off. No Swing. Do us all a favor, and don't give that pain in the behind inside another reason to start wailing. I don't want to hear it, and it's pissing me off. Just shut her up and stop, or I'm taking this crap away from you.
Not two minutes later, it starts all over again:
So, I take the rope, the seat, and the garden tools they're using trying to get the damned thing over a 30' high branch. Find something else to do, fellas, because if I have to listen to that woman one more time, someone's getting killed, and it might not be just her.
At this point, the little guys want to go to the schoolyard and ride their scooters. Of course they do; it's only a mile walk, and naturally, the Big Ones don't want to go. I can only imagine what I'm coming back to when these two, naturally, resume their stupidity behind my back and Ye Old Nervous Windbag inside has several hours to witness and endure their nonsense and get progressively more aggravated, frustrated -- and even shriller -- because they ignore her repeated commands to stop it.
I take the Little Guys to the schoolyard, and we have some fun. They get to ride their scooters, they jump around on the playground, we play with a football they've found...and I get hit on by a chick. There's two scifoozas that we run into on the street nearby who talk as if they were taught to whisper in a sawmill, and use language that's...well... 'salty' is an inadequate description. It's even worse than mine.
Scifooza Number One can't stop talking about her boobs. In front of my two young nephews. She's telling Scifooza Number Two that as soon as she gets her "chemical balls" (admission: I have never heard this term before) she's going to get "my tits done", and "finally fucking get myself a fucking husband because all they want is fucking D-cups". Sciffoza One apologizes profusely for using such language in front of My Sons. There not my Sons, they're my Nephews, but it's okay. I'll just tell them to ignore you.
"Do you think my tits are alright, or should I get 'em bigger?" Sciffooza One asks. Scifooza Number Two feigns being flabbergasted. One gets the impression that Number One asks every random man she meets this question, and Number Two is obliged to pretend to be embarrassed, even though she's probably shown her tits to twice as many random men. And she might get paid to do it, too.
"Nah, nothing wrong with what you got. They're just fine."
"You boys are soooo lucky! Your father is such a nice man..."
"He's not my father, he's my uncle."
"He's soooo nice!" I'm now having my shoulders and biceps felt up and pinched as if she were looking for a ripe cantaloupe in the supermarket. She apparently likes my hair, too. I'm about to smack this bitch.
"I'm not married, you know...", She says.
"No? You? Can't imagine why not..."
"You have beautiful sons. I wish I had a son...."
"They're my nephews."
"Really? I thought they were your kids..."
"If you could shut up about your tits for three seconds you would have realized you were told otherwise three times. Maybe that's why you're not married: you can't shut up about your tits, you're pushy, and you don't listen very well."
Number Two finds this uproariously funny. We leave. If I ever wanted the local equivalent of Trailer Trash, I now know exactly where to find it. I wouldn't marry this chick for a Green Card and a mention in her father's will. It took near an hour to reach the schoolyard, if only because the five year old has little legs that don't carry him so fast. Twenty-five minutes after we get there they want to go home. Another hour back. And...
There's the FUCKING SWING...naturally. And a crowd of neighborhood kids all waiting for their turn. Mommy Dearest is apoplectic, and on the verge of having puppies. I figure if she does manage this astounding feat, it ought to look like something out of Aliens, only with fireworks and more gunfire. It's now all my fault that this happened because I was away for three hours doing GOD-KNOWS-WHAT-STUPID-SHIT-YOUR-BROTHER-IN-LAW-IS-AN-ASSHOLE-FOR-SHOWING-THEM-THIS-SHIT-GODDAMMIT-WHERE-IS-YOUR-SISTER-THAT-INCONSIDERATE-BITCH-THEY'RE-DRIVING-ME-INSANE.
And people wonder why I am the way I am? If you had my life...
Anyways, here's what I mean by 'losing their childhood".
In my day, if we were told 'you can't do that', we simply found something else to do. And since we didn't have a billion beeping-and-bright-lights-electronic geegaws, we had to make due with whatever was at hand, and somehow manage to have fun with it. Worse, I grew up in Brooklyn, and there wasn't a front lawn, an open field for miles, or a swimming pool in the back yard. We didn't even have a back yard worth the appellation. In those days, we played a lot of wiffle ball (no one plays wiffle ball anymore), and a ton of stickball. These were games that were pretty cheap, and in which you could improvise equipment if you didn't have any, and play for hours. In winter, we played tackle football -- in the street -- and during the fall, we played tackle football...on the concrete in the schoolyard. Hockey was played year-round, either road hockey or roller hockey, ice hockey being something extremely rare: skates were super expensive (your parents might blow a week's salary on skates then), and the only ice was at Coney Island, which required a death-defying trip on the B or D train, dodging muggers and streakers. We used a roll of electrical tape worn smooth on the sidewalk for a puck. It works remarkably well on the well-worn blacktop of a city street.
Protective equipment, if you could find any, usually consisted of a mish-mash of catcher's gear, baseball gloves, football helmets and shoulder pads, and the simple expedient of stuffing magazines into your socks to serve as shin guards. A hockey stick in those days cost about $10, and that was a ton of money, so no one took slap shots -- the best and easiest way to break a stick on blacktop.
There were exactly seven television channels -- and one of them was PBS. Video games consisted of Pong, and if your family could afford it, you might get lucky and have an Intellivision, Atari -- or the Cadillac of them all -- a Commodore 64 with something like 3 really crappy games. Otherwise, you needed to scrounge quarters to go to the local candy store to play pinball, or maybe Space Invaders or Asteroids. When PacMan came around, kids seriously considered taking up a life of crime to support their habit. You dreamed of the days when you had enough quarters to just play a few games of PacMan AND get an Egg Cream. That was like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to us.
We played a lot of common childhood games: Johnny-on-the-Pony, Red Rover, Stoopball (kind of like baseball, only with 'phantom' runners, where you tossed the rubber ball with all your might against your front steps when you were 'up'). We played handball and basketball in the schoolyard, boxball on the sidewalk (like tennis, using the square sections of the sidewalk as a court). When your rubber Spaulding ball split at the seams (they always did) from all that stick- and boxball, you simply took the two halves and played Halfball (a variant of baseball, played with the half a ball and a short length of thick rubber hose).
When you didn't even have a ball, you played Skelly. In this game, you shoot bottlecaps that have been filled with melted wax around a square 'board' drawn on the sidewalk or street in chalk. If you were really serious about your Skelly, you carved your Skelly Board into the hot asphalt of the street in summer with a screwdriver. Kids got very creative with their carved Skelly boards. Some were really intricate and quite challenging.
We didn't have trees to climb, so we climbed fire escapes and 'laundry ladders'. These were skinny, metal ladders, often 30' or more in height -- and not always anchored very well -- that one found behind most houses or apartment buildings, and to which tenants attached clotheslines from their back windows. Climbing a laundry ladder was usually something you did when playing 'War', in which we ran around the streets and the back-alleys in mock combat with toy guns. Try that today, and the local authorities will drag your kids off to a mental institution, just in case they want to grow up to shoot a Democrat. Any fence was like an open invitation to 'come climb me', and it didn't matter if there was barbed wire or razor wire, or even if it was rusty; we climbed them, especially if there was something 'cool' on the other side...like access to Tar Beach (the roof of an apartment building from where one could launch water balloons, or watch the local girls sunbathe).
Bikes and skateboards were rarities. In the Brooklyn of that time these things were likely to get stolen. At knifepoint. I was mugged at knifepoint, twice, before my thirteenth birthday. Nowadays in Brooklyn, they definitely would be stolen, only you'll receive multiple gunshot wounds and might get your house burnt down just so there's no witnesses to the crime for good measure.
Everyone played with matches. Everyone played with magnifying glasses and anthills. Everyone played with magnifying glasses, anthills, model glue and a can of hairspray. You circled the anthill with the glue, set fire to it with paper and magnifying glass, and when the ants came up to escape, you used the hairspray can like a flamethrower. We knew how to make slingshots, and makeshift crossbows with a piece of two-by-four, a thick rubber band, wood staple and a clothespin.
Disputes between kids were always settled with fisticuffs, or a wrestling match, and three minutes after someone got his ass kicked everyone was friends again. We collected comic books, baseball cards, bottlecaps and Matchbox Cars. We 'flipped' baseball cards, we pitched pennies, we played a lot of catch, Tag, Dodgeball (or a rougher variant, Kill the Man With the Ball), Red Light-Green Light, Ringolerio and Bulldog. We built model airplanes and ships. We knew how to build and repair our own toys, or adapt them to other uses. We did it in the CITY, too, with a lack of open spaces and grass, and with what nowadays would be considered Third-World-level disposable incomes.
In short, we knew how to be BOYS. We never had 'NOTHING TO DO'.
My nephews, for all the love I have for them, would have been lost in that world. They would have been constantly bored because no one would be giving them anything. As it is, they get so bored despite all they have, that they become single-minded of purpose when it comes to a tree swing that even in my day would have given Evel Knievel second thoughts. Now, granted, there's some creativity and a sense of danger involved in that swing, but the point is if we were told 'don't do that', we found something else to do, and we had enough of a store of made-up/improvised games/activities at our disposal that it wasn't difficult.
Nowadays, kids seem incapable of doing this. Try to teach these things to them, and they look at you as if you've just emerged from a spacecraft with three heads, green skin, and antennae. They aren't interested unless there's a flashing light, a large price tag, a beeping sound, or a degree of extraordinary, bound-to-end-in-the-emergency-room danger -- they call these things Extreme Sports nowadays, but in my day, they were simply the things The Stupid Kid Who Always Had a Broken Bone did.
There was a degree of danger in what we did, too, but it was always a calculated danger (kids were smarter then, I think). We knew the limits. An equivalent to this swinging between traffic and a great fucking tree trunk in my day was called 'Skitching'. In Skitching, one either wore roller skates, or did it in winter when the streets would be full of packed snow that you could slide on. You simply grabbed onto the back of a stopped bus or truck, and got low where the driver might not be able to see you easily, and got yourself pulled along as if water skiing. At least until the vehicle stopped, and you didn't...you usually only stopped when you got a face full of back bumper. The worst cases saw the Skitcher eat the bumper and then slide under the now-stopped vehicle, and being too stunned to move, get trapped under a wheel to get themselves run the fuck over. Never did it myself, never wanted to. It was just too stupid and dangerous.
But such was the life -- and the joys -- of a city boy in the 1970's, and amazingly, we did these things with no adult supervision, whatsoever. Makes you wonder just what the hell happened to the world and what happened to the Spirit of Boyhood. These kids today are such pampered, spoiled, over-supervised, whining little pansies who don't get beaten on a regular basis for their misbehavior, and who don't know how -- and who can't be trusted -- to play on their own. And who suffered for it all this fine day? Why... I did.
I'm not even their parent, either.
I had to listen to a Screaming Banshee who turns my insides into a knotted mass, and who could curdle used motor oil with her voice alone. I had to hike two hours to and from a schoolyard I didn't want to go to, and we barely stayed. I was nearly sexually assaulted on the street by a bimbo I wouldn't screw with a stolen penis, and who didn't even have the courtesy to offer me a drink before putting her hands on me. I had my nephews actually tell me to do something anatomically impossible -- twice -- and I'm not allowed to feed them their teeth. When my sister finally gets home, she wants to know why I 'didn't do anything to stop those kids from putting up the swing' and has the nerve to ask me if I'll watch them again the following day.
It's a good thing it was supposed to be Doomsday, and there was a 'We Didn't Die' party later that evening. I managed to play a few other games that night that also don't require flashing lights and electronics, or adult supervision...only adult participation.
That was something else we learned to do in the schoolyard, too.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Baby Survives Eight-story fall Down Trash Chute...
The phenomenon of young girls hiding pregnancies, and then simply disposing of the baby within hours of birth is a frightening one. It is a striking reminder that in someprecints of America, Life is Cheap, and what value one does attach to Life is often conditioned by other cultural values of questionable origin or worth, which are more and more coming to be detached from a commonsense morality.
It's sickening.
Good thing this girl had access to Planned Parenthood, huh?
I hope they flay her alive on national television.
It's sickening.
Good thing this girl had access to Planned Parenthood, huh?
I hope they flay her alive on national television.
Sunday, April 03, 2011
I'll Bet They Saved a Polar Bear,Though...
French Vegans on trial; Child fed only on breast milk dies of malnutrition.
Some people are just too stupid to be parents. Then again, some people are just too stupid to be government officials. I submit:
"While anxious not to call into question the couple's lifestyle, Anne-Laure Sandretto, the deputy prosecutor, admitted: "The problem with a vitamin B12 deficiency could be linked to the mother's eating habits."
Right, because we should never question or investigate 'lifestyles' that lead to dead infants. That would be, like, all, oppressive, and junk. That vegan lifestyle choice and a dead baby are, like, totally unconnected.
Of course, we also shouldn't call into question the state of mind of two people who seem obsessed with cabbage and clay, even going as far as to use both as medicine, because then we might have to label them as stark, raving lunatics, and have to take their children away and perhaps lock them up in a place with rubber sheets...on the walls. That might ruin their self-esteem,and cost money that could be better spent on making certain the elderly, or prison inmates, have free Viagra and government maid service.
And this is the country that led President Odingbat into a kinetic-military-action-of-choice in Libya?
Here's why I don't understand the legal system, even though this is France you would assume the systems are somewhat similar to ours in the basics:
"Patrick Quenel, lawyer for the father, whose business has gone into liquidation, said the couple were "completely aware of the mistakes they made".
Isn't that tantamount to a confession? A recognition of responsibility or rather, irresponsibility? If so, then why is there a trial which appears as if it's entering it's third year? Oh, and nice touch with that 'business in liquidation' bullshit, councillor -- like that's going to gin up any sympathy when the jury gets shown photos of a malnourished, dead baby?
Some people shouldn't be allowed to be parents. Perhaps one day we'll develop some sort of test administered at at birth that warns us about just who the irresponsible, the stupid, the cruel, the monstrous and the insane are, and then we can spay or neuter 'em before they breed. One can only hope.
OMG,I just sounded like a Progressive Libtard there for a second! That was, in fact, the driving force behind abortion-on-demand and the Lynchburg Experiments!
Some people are just too stupid to be parents. Then again, some people are just too stupid to be government officials. I submit:
"While anxious not to call into question the couple's lifestyle, Anne-Laure Sandretto, the deputy prosecutor, admitted: "The problem with a vitamin B12 deficiency could be linked to the mother's eating habits."
Right, because we should never question or investigate 'lifestyles' that lead to dead infants. That would be, like, all, oppressive, and junk. That vegan lifestyle choice and a dead baby are, like, totally unconnected.
Of course, we also shouldn't call into question the state of mind of two people who seem obsessed with cabbage and clay, even going as far as to use both as medicine, because then we might have to label them as stark, raving lunatics, and have to take their children away and perhaps lock them up in a place with rubber sheets...on the walls. That might ruin their self-esteem,and cost money that could be better spent on making certain the elderly, or prison inmates, have free Viagra and government maid service.
And this is the country that led President Odingbat into a kinetic-military-action-of-choice in Libya?
Here's why I don't understand the legal system, even though this is France you would assume the systems are somewhat similar to ours in the basics:
"Patrick Quenel, lawyer for the father, whose business has gone into liquidation, said the couple were "completely aware of the mistakes they made".
Isn't that tantamount to a confession? A recognition of responsibility or rather, irresponsibility? If so, then why is there a trial which appears as if it's entering it's third year? Oh, and nice touch with that 'business in liquidation' bullshit, councillor -- like that's going to gin up any sympathy when the jury gets shown photos of a malnourished, dead baby?
Some people shouldn't be allowed to be parents. Perhaps one day we'll develop some sort of test administered at at birth that warns us about just who the irresponsible, the stupid, the cruel, the monstrous and the insane are, and then we can spay or neuter 'em before they breed. One can only hope.
OMG,I just sounded like a Progressive Libtard there for a second! That was, in fact, the driving force behind abortion-on-demand and the Lynchburg Experiments!
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
She May Only Be 8, But What a Rack!
Abercrombie&Fitch develops push-up bikini top for pre-teens.
I think Mr. Steyn has said all that need be said here. Except this:
Abercrombie&Fitch is gay. Anyone who wears A&F is probably gay, or at least a dipshit metrosexual who one day hopes to finally make a definitive decision about whether he's truly gay, or rather prefers the ambiguity of being steadfastly androgynous. I would implore anyone who owns A&F stock to dump it, post haste, because it's no longer all about providing high-quality clothing (says who? You might put that shit on a Ken Doll, or maybe your poodle!) at exorbitant prices, and all about sexualizing children, because nowadays, pushing the envelope of common decency is how one promotes one's business, and gets all the favorable 'buzz' in the fashion world.
What's next? Jock Strap bathing suits for the Obese? Stirrup Pants for Double-Amputees? Dress slacks with an easy-entry, velcro-attached drop panel in the seat for that business-casual work environment? Split-crotch boating outfits? A line of Infant's clothes with built-in pacifiers...in the ass?
It's bad enough there's pedophiles running around loose (because shooting them is considered bad, for some strange reason) now someone thinks it's a good idea to dress little girls up like hookers? Don't get me started on the parents who would actually consider buying their little girl something like this...
I think Mr. Steyn has said all that need be said here. Except this:
Abercrombie&Fitch is gay. Anyone who wears A&F is probably gay, or at least a dipshit metrosexual who one day hopes to finally make a definitive decision about whether he's truly gay, or rather prefers the ambiguity of being steadfastly androgynous. I would implore anyone who owns A&F stock to dump it, post haste, because it's no longer all about providing high-quality clothing (says who? You might put that shit on a Ken Doll, or maybe your poodle!) at exorbitant prices, and all about sexualizing children, because nowadays, pushing the envelope of common decency is how one promotes one's business, and gets all the favorable 'buzz' in the fashion world.
What's next? Jock Strap bathing suits for the Obese? Stirrup Pants for Double-Amputees? Dress slacks with an easy-entry, velcro-attached drop panel in the seat for that business-casual work environment? Split-crotch boating outfits? A line of Infant's clothes with built-in pacifiers...in the ass?
It's bad enough there's pedophiles running around loose (because shooting them is considered bad, for some strange reason) now someone thinks it's a good idea to dress little girls up like hookers? Don't get me started on the parents who would actually consider buying their little girl something like this...
This Guy Knows His Shit...
Staten Island man defecates on his girlfriend's door, then sets it on fire.
Was I the only one NOT shocked to discover that this cretin's street name is "Illuminati'?
Observation:
If this man had smeared a mud monkey upon the front door of a democratic Congresswoman, the airwaves would be burning up about the fecocentric slant of our overheated political rhetoric, which encourages violence against pregnant women. Five minutes later, the Feminazis would chime in, and tell you that had His Main Squeeze simply had unfettered access to a free abortion, he wouldn't have smeared shit on the front door. The Safety Nazis will then get their two cents in, and decide that society is too dangerous to let people handle butane lighters, and then they'll demand that elevators be reduced in size so as to preclude the possibility of anyone stripping in them.
This brain surgeon was arrested by the police and placed in a cell, where he promptly shit again. In another eight or nine months when this guy finally goes to trial (because it takes that long for the District Attorney to sharpen his crayon to fill in the proper forms), his Public Defender will enter an insanity plea on his client's behalf, and our crack (-smoking) Judicial Lions will sentence the accused to about 30 days in a halfway house, because God forbid we label him a lunatic and stick him in a state hospital. That's damaging to his self-esteem, and costs money, you know.
Never mind the other potential charges (which the D.A. hasn't actually charged him with, you'll note): four or five counts of attempted murder, arson, creating an unsanitary condition, and being a complete asswipe (which isn't a crime, hence Sen. Chucky Schumer, but it should be), this man needs the sort of serious psychiatric attention that one simply can't get at a NY state institution because we have instead used the money the Loony Bin used to get to ensure that transgenedered illegal immigrants can get free falsies at state expense, and because Sanitation Workers need to be able to retire at 31 with a million-dollar pension, and free medical. Besides, Geraldo Rivera made sure the words "Mental Institution" are on par with what you can't say about certain minority groups here in New York, the asshole, so that Institutionalism is no longer the preferred manner of dealing with the batshit-insane.
Forget about shooting them in self-defense. Mayor Bloomdouche will get his panties in a knot, and the cops will charge you with all sorts of Terrorist Activities. Because if there's any real terorrists in New York, it's those people who insist on exercising their Second Amendment Rights. And even if you used the very gun you bought from the ATF here from Mexico with you, that's not an excuse.
On day 31, having been released on an out-patient basis to save money, The Turdbomber (as I call him) will be right back at his paramour's door, only this time determined to do the job properly. Because she's probably no smarter than he -- after all, she's having his child, and I'm certain this isn't the first episode she's witnessed -- and is probably dependant upon State Housing Assistance, to judge from the neighborhood (I know it well), she'll still be there, and all the restraining orders in the world not avail to keep her, and her children, safe from this genius.
Mark my words: a year from now, the headline will read "Insane Douchebag Smears Feces on Baby-Mama's Door, Burns Down Her Building, 24 Feared Dead. Judge says "Ooops!""
Forget the frickin' trial, it's a mere formality. Lock this lunatic right the fuck up and throw away the key.
Was I the only one NOT shocked to discover that this cretin's street name is "Illuminati'?
Observation:
If this man had smeared a mud monkey upon the front door of a democratic Congresswoman, the airwaves would be burning up about the fecocentric slant of our overheated political rhetoric, which encourages violence against pregnant women. Five minutes later, the Feminazis would chime in, and tell you that had His Main Squeeze simply had unfettered access to a free abortion, he wouldn't have smeared shit on the front door. The Safety Nazis will then get their two cents in, and decide that society is too dangerous to let people handle butane lighters, and then they'll demand that elevators be reduced in size so as to preclude the possibility of anyone stripping in them.
This brain surgeon was arrested by the police and placed in a cell, where he promptly shit again. In another eight or nine months when this guy finally goes to trial (because it takes that long for the District Attorney to sharpen his crayon to fill in the proper forms), his Public Defender will enter an insanity plea on his client's behalf, and our crack (-smoking) Judicial Lions will sentence the accused to about 30 days in a halfway house, because God forbid we label him a lunatic and stick him in a state hospital. That's damaging to his self-esteem, and costs money, you know.
Never mind the other potential charges (which the D.A. hasn't actually charged him with, you'll note): four or five counts of attempted murder, arson, creating an unsanitary condition, and being a complete asswipe (which isn't a crime, hence Sen. Chucky Schumer, but it should be), this man needs the sort of serious psychiatric attention that one simply can't get at a NY state institution because we have instead used the money the Loony Bin used to get to ensure that transgenedered illegal immigrants can get free falsies at state expense, and because Sanitation Workers need to be able to retire at 31 with a million-dollar pension, and free medical. Besides, Geraldo Rivera made sure the words "Mental Institution" are on par with what you can't say about certain minority groups here in New York, the asshole, so that Institutionalism is no longer the preferred manner of dealing with the batshit-insane.
Forget about shooting them in self-defense. Mayor Bloomdouche will get his panties in a knot, and the cops will charge you with all sorts of Terrorist Activities. Because if there's any real terorrists in New York, it's those people who insist on exercising their Second Amendment Rights. And even if you used the very gun you bought from the ATF here from Mexico with you, that's not an excuse.
On day 31, having been released on an out-patient basis to save money, The Turdbomber (as I call him) will be right back at his paramour's door, only this time determined to do the job properly. Because she's probably no smarter than he -- after all, she's having his child, and I'm certain this isn't the first episode she's witnessed -- and is probably dependant upon State Housing Assistance, to judge from the neighborhood (I know it well), she'll still be there, and all the restraining orders in the world not avail to keep her, and her children, safe from this genius.
Mark my words: a year from now, the headline will read "Insane Douchebag Smears Feces on Baby-Mama's Door, Burns Down Her Building, 24 Feared Dead. Judge says "Ooops!""
Forget the frickin' trial, it's a mere formality. Lock this lunatic right the fuck up and throw away the key.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
In Retrospect, Abortion Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea, After All...
...especially if it means that people like this aren't ever born, just so they never get to breed.
Stuff, and people, like this disgusts me. That some unfortunate children are in the position of having to depend upon such...I hesitate to call them 'parents'...is a national fucking disgrace. This particular child is fortunate in this regard, only: at least, so far as we know, she wasn't beaten or sexually assaulted, and some passsers-by with more compassion and responsibility than her gamete donors did the right thing.
And the so-called father has the nerve to complain that the Police are violating his rights by asking him questions? Go figure. I wouldn't have cuffed the stupid son-of-a-bitch, I would have shot him on the spot and saved the taxpayer the trouble and expense of a trial.
Stuff, and people, like this disgusts me. That some unfortunate children are in the position of having to depend upon such...I hesitate to call them 'parents'...is a national fucking disgrace. This particular child is fortunate in this regard, only: at least, so far as we know, she wasn't beaten or sexually assaulted, and some passsers-by with more compassion and responsibility than her gamete donors did the right thing.
And the so-called father has the nerve to complain that the Police are violating his rights by asking him questions? Go figure. I wouldn't have cuffed the stupid son-of-a-bitch, I would have shot him on the spot and saved the taxpayer the trouble and expense of a trial.
Monday, January 10, 2011
What's In a Name?
Last Friday was time for the regular medical check-up, which, truth to tell, has been extremely irregular in my case. I hate a visit to a doctor's office unless I'm bleeding profusely, or have internal organs hanging from huge holes in the central trunk, especially now that I'm at the age where "say Ahhh!" and "drop your pants and cough" is supplemented by "bend over and let me know when I've tickled your fancy" and the sound of a rubber glove being snapped into place. The same joke always follows this indignity, too: I guess this means we're engaged now? Snicker, chortle, guffaw.
You're a laugh riot, Doc. Don't quit your day job.
You'll be glad to know (like you care!) that I'm fine. I get the same advice I've gotten from doctors for the last 30 years: stop smoking, lose some weight, and get more fiber in your diet. Go exercise some. It's become a boring routine.
However, sometimes things sort of...happen...and the mundane often becomes a lot more interesting.
While I'm sitting around in the waiting room for my turn at the Spanish Inquisition, The Children came in.
The Children are a group of five young siblings, and their Mother. There are three boys, and a set of identical twin girls. They all appear rather healthy, and rambunctious, the first sign that the kids are armed with some lethal public-school-lavatory pathogen, if you ask me. You could hear them coming up the walk, through the front door, and those of us in the quiet waiting room were assaulted by a wall of noise the nanosecond they entered the room.
These little girls were something, though. Dressed in matching outfits, great big smiles. The boys were of the rough-and-tumble sort. The waiting room very quickly became an impromptu playground for them all, and no amount of admonition from their mother, or cross looks from the other patients waiting, was enough to slow them down. They were wrestling on the floor, chasing each other around, and just being kids. Personally, I think the girls were tougher and had more energy than the boys.
Really cute little rugrats, all.
The Mother was getting exasperated by her children's behavior. They were making a terrible racket, and she was repeating herself constantly: Don't DO that...Stop THAT...Calm DOWN...Watch your sister...She seemed really overwhelmed and frustrated, and you know how kids are: every "Knock it off" that isn't followed by the back of someone's hand is simply an invitation to more tomfoolery. But after a bit, it was starting to get positively annoying, and infinitely more dangerous as wrestling gave way to climbing on furniture and jumping off staircases, and throwing things across the room. Finally, Mom has had enough, and it was time to round this Flying Circus up, and this is where I finally lost it; because Mother had recited the list of ridiculous names she had given to her children.
I do not know what possesses people to do this to their children. I can understand how someone might find it "cute" or "unique" to name their children according to some personal motif, or theme, but there are some who either don't think this scheme through all the way, or simply get a really bad idea and run with it, no questions asked. This was one of those people. All of the children had been named according to a really bad common theme. I will change the names here, so that the kids may be spared even more embarrassment than they're already in store for, but you'll get the idea. Mom rises from her chair, and fairly yells:
"Diamonte, LeSabre, Camry! Cut that out, and sit your behinds down NOW! Don't you roll your eyes at me, boy! Shut it and park it!"
The Little Girls find the scolding their brothers have received to be quite funny, and they giggle and begin to tease them. Mom cuts this potential source of additional discord off at the pass.
"Chevelle and Chevette, stop that before I slap your behinds! Y'all need to learn to behave".
It was at that point that I burst out laughing. I couldn't help it. The children started giggling too, unaware of just what it was that I found so funny -- they just saw some dude guffawing and found it funny themselves -- I was, sadly, having fun at their expense. I'm such a louse. But sometimes, you just find your fun wherever it happens to be.
Mom stopped, turned, and bored two flaming holes right through me with her eyes. If she could have killed me with a thought, I think I would be pushing up daisies right about now. The rest of my wait to see the doctor was most uncomfortable, and it was all I could do not to giggle and titter myself. When I came back out into the waiting area after my examination, the entire brood was gone, although I could still hear the kids off in some other exam room.
I laughed all the way home, too, before I reflected on the fact that these children have a rather thoughtless parent who has cursed them with ridiculous names for reasons that I can only begin to guess at. It's got to be an interesting psychological/sociological question as to why parents do these kinds of things. I guess there's a desire to be original and unique within their circles, or perhaps, as a friend of mine once tried to explain, it's yet one more legacy of slavery; who wants to name their children Jack and Jill in emulation of The Former Slave Owners?
I don't know, but it makes me shake my head and wonder all the same. After I manage to stop giggling like a schoolgirl. Out of idle curiosity, if anyone can tell me why parents find it necessary to do this kind of stupid thing, would you please drop me a line?
Update: This post has garnered a couple of e-mails from irate readers who accuse me of the basest racism, and of making a cheap joke at the expense of African-Americans. Nothing could be further from the truth. The point of this screed was that there are parents out there naming children according to a screwed-up sense of personal taste, with no regard to the fact that some names, inavariably, come back to haunt their children as they grow up (seeing as how other children are often cruel).
In my own, Italian, family, a common theme runs through the naming of children, too. My family background is fairly lousy with Peters, Pauls, and Marys, andjust about every saint in the Catholic pantheon. I also know one white family that went absolutely apeshit in naming their children in a flowery motif (even the boys).
The children in question were all named with a "De" motif. If I remember correctly, the boy's names were DeCurtis, DeHoward and DeAntoine. This isn't so bad, even if it sounds tinny to my lilly-white ears. What made it so bad, and funny, was that the Mother was apparently so determined to carry this theme forward that she gave her daughters most unfortunate names.
The girls were named DeLicious and DeLuscious (I'm assuming these to be the proper spellings). Apparently, "Denise" and"Delilah", and so forth, didn't lend themselves to a stylized spelling or pronunciation. What made this funny to me, because my mind is permanently frozen in a 15-year-old state, is the thought soon followed "What would happen if these girls had an unfortunate surname attached to their terrible first names?"
How would you like to go through high-school with a name like "Delicious Cox", or "Delicious Cherry", and what do you think teenaged boys could make out of a girl with a porn-star-quality moniker like "DeLuscious Moorehead"?
Don't you think that's a terrible thing to do to your children?
You're a laugh riot, Doc. Don't quit your day job.
You'll be glad to know (like you care!) that I'm fine. I get the same advice I've gotten from doctors for the last 30 years: stop smoking, lose some weight, and get more fiber in your diet. Go exercise some. It's become a boring routine.
However, sometimes things sort of...happen...and the mundane often becomes a lot more interesting.
While I'm sitting around in the waiting room for my turn at the Spanish Inquisition, The Children came in.
The Children are a group of five young siblings, and their Mother. There are three boys, and a set of identical twin girls. They all appear rather healthy, and rambunctious, the first sign that the kids are armed with some lethal public-school-lavatory pathogen, if you ask me. You could hear them coming up the walk, through the front door, and those of us in the quiet waiting room were assaulted by a wall of noise the nanosecond they entered the room.
These little girls were something, though. Dressed in matching outfits, great big smiles. The boys were of the rough-and-tumble sort. The waiting room very quickly became an impromptu playground for them all, and no amount of admonition from their mother, or cross looks from the other patients waiting, was enough to slow them down. They were wrestling on the floor, chasing each other around, and just being kids. Personally, I think the girls were tougher and had more energy than the boys.
Really cute little rugrats, all.
The Mother was getting exasperated by her children's behavior. They were making a terrible racket, and she was repeating herself constantly: Don't DO that...Stop THAT...Calm DOWN...Watch your sister...She seemed really overwhelmed and frustrated, and you know how kids are: every "Knock it off" that isn't followed by the back of someone's hand is simply an invitation to more tomfoolery. But after a bit, it was starting to get positively annoying, and infinitely more dangerous as wrestling gave way to climbing on furniture and jumping off staircases, and throwing things across the room. Finally, Mom has had enough, and it was time to round this Flying Circus up, and this is where I finally lost it; because Mother had recited the list of ridiculous names she had given to her children.
I do not know what possesses people to do this to their children. I can understand how someone might find it "cute" or "unique" to name their children according to some personal motif, or theme, but there are some who either don't think this scheme through all the way, or simply get a really bad idea and run with it, no questions asked. This was one of those people. All of the children had been named according to a really bad common theme. I will change the names here, so that the kids may be spared even more embarrassment than they're already in store for, but you'll get the idea. Mom rises from her chair, and fairly yells:
"Diamonte, LeSabre, Camry! Cut that out, and sit your behinds down NOW! Don't you roll your eyes at me, boy! Shut it and park it!"
The Little Girls find the scolding their brothers have received to be quite funny, and they giggle and begin to tease them. Mom cuts this potential source of additional discord off at the pass.
"Chevelle and Chevette, stop that before I slap your behinds! Y'all need to learn to behave".
It was at that point that I burst out laughing. I couldn't help it. The children started giggling too, unaware of just what it was that I found so funny -- they just saw some dude guffawing and found it funny themselves -- I was, sadly, having fun at their expense. I'm such a louse. But sometimes, you just find your fun wherever it happens to be.
Mom stopped, turned, and bored two flaming holes right through me with her eyes. If she could have killed me with a thought, I think I would be pushing up daisies right about now. The rest of my wait to see the doctor was most uncomfortable, and it was all I could do not to giggle and titter myself. When I came back out into the waiting area after my examination, the entire brood was gone, although I could still hear the kids off in some other exam room.
I laughed all the way home, too, before I reflected on the fact that these children have a rather thoughtless parent who has cursed them with ridiculous names for reasons that I can only begin to guess at. It's got to be an interesting psychological/sociological question as to why parents do these kinds of things. I guess there's a desire to be original and unique within their circles, or perhaps, as a friend of mine once tried to explain, it's yet one more legacy of slavery; who wants to name their children Jack and Jill in emulation of The Former Slave Owners?
I don't know, but it makes me shake my head and wonder all the same. After I manage to stop giggling like a schoolgirl. Out of idle curiosity, if anyone can tell me why parents find it necessary to do this kind of stupid thing, would you please drop me a line?
Update: This post has garnered a couple of e-mails from irate readers who accuse me of the basest racism, and of making a cheap joke at the expense of African-Americans. Nothing could be further from the truth. The point of this screed was that there are parents out there naming children according to a screwed-up sense of personal taste, with no regard to the fact that some names, inavariably, come back to haunt their children as they grow up (seeing as how other children are often cruel).
In my own, Italian, family, a common theme runs through the naming of children, too. My family background is fairly lousy with Peters, Pauls, and Marys, andjust about every saint in the Catholic pantheon. I also know one white family that went absolutely apeshit in naming their children in a flowery motif (even the boys).
The children in question were all named with a "De" motif. If I remember correctly, the boy's names were DeCurtis, DeHoward and DeAntoine. This isn't so bad, even if it sounds tinny to my lilly-white ears. What made it so bad, and funny, was that the Mother was apparently so determined to carry this theme forward that she gave her daughters most unfortunate names.
The girls were named DeLicious and DeLuscious (I'm assuming these to be the proper spellings). Apparently, "Denise" and"Delilah", and so forth, didn't lend themselves to a stylized spelling or pronunciation. What made this funny to me, because my mind is permanently frozen in a 15-year-old state, is the thought soon followed "What would happen if these girls had an unfortunate surname attached to their terrible first names?"
How would you like to go through high-school with a name like "Delicious Cox", or "Delicious Cherry", and what do you think teenaged boys could make out of a girl with a porn-star-quality moniker like "DeLuscious Moorehead"?
Don't you think that's a terrible thing to do to your children?
Friday, January 07, 2011
Mental Illness as Your Gateway to Stardom...
Dr. Drew Pinsky is a pimp. He's not peddling flesh, as much as he is human misery. He's the Jerry Springer for the New Millennium. If he isn't exploiting teenaged mothers on MTV, then he's taking the piss out of people with serious mental and substance abuse problems, and calling it "reality television".
A despicable human being. He's not worthy of the honorific "doctor".
It's gotten out of hand. It's not fair to people who have real issues, and it's making addiction and teenaged pregnancy seem glamorous, and to be a really good career move.
Andrea Peyser in yesterday's NY Post says it all.
A despicable human being. He's not worthy of the honorific "doctor".
It's gotten out of hand. It's not fair to people who have real issues, and it's making addiction and teenaged pregnancy seem glamorous, and to be a really good career move.
Andrea Peyser in yesterday's NY Post says it all.
Thursday, January 06, 2011
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