A Grande Gesture, please.

Take a gander at this ad from Starbucks. I think it's just swell! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkC5qYH0ln0] So you're telling me that 5 cents from every espresso-latte-truffle-mocha-thingy is going towards some sort of charitable AIDS-related action? Holy jumpin' coffee bean Batman, that's like 2% of every order! Rather than acting like human beings the people at Starbucks, like every other corporation it would seem, manage to morph charity into commerce. Brilliant. Instead of just buying more of the produce (which the company's very existence depends upon) at reasonable and fair prices, they're going to perform a public relations stunt. Another alternative would be to just give AIDS foundations in Africa a lump sum of money, but would that get the same amount of media exposure? I would applaud their impressive dedication to callousness if only my hands weren't angrily clutching and shaking my keyboard. Underpaying poor farmers in the third world. Overcharging the working class in the first. No java in either world is as dark as their souls.

Back to you in the studio.

Dear television humanoids, please stop showing me weather reports all the time. For the love of all that is holy please stop! Neither I nor anyone else living in the 21st century has any use for them. Also, I have no idea what those little  arrows and lines on the map really mean. Is that the direction the weather is moving in? Isn't weather all around us all the time? Sort of like the Unitarian definition of God?

Weather used to play a huge part in the lives of everyday people. It dictated what you could do, and when you could do it. With little chance of escaping it. Man was subject to patterns of nature he couldn't quite understand. Over time we have tried to develop new ways of understanding weather systems and their causes. Doppler radar and incredibly complex computer models have given us small advances in our knowledge of these phenomena. But a modern person has no use for this information.

What the hell does any of this mean?

We live in houses, drive cars, wear proper clothing and work in climate controlled office buildings. A normal person does not spend hours a day outside exposed to the elements. That only happens if something has gone awry. Besides, chances are they won't remember what the weather man said this morning anyway. They were too busy trying to wash the vomits stains out of their dress socks. Big promotion coming up!

Unless it's a huge hurricane of shit heading my way it won't affect my life in any real way. And I think such an event would warrant a small segment of its own. Somewhere between the feel-good story of a kitten being rescued from a well and the sports results. I don't need to know the possible weather four days from now. For most of us simply looking out the window before deciding for or against wearing a jacket should suffice.

What's the weather going to be like tomorrow? More or less like yesterday. The earth won't suddenly start spinning backwards on its own axis. It's not going to start raining upwards. Hot won't be cold. And November is not going to be a pleasantly sunny month. Meteorology is mostly just guesswork in front of a green screen. Suit up and let's roll.

5 People.

This is a list of five types of people I wouldn't mind seeing dead. 5. Condescending Bisexuals Have you ever run into these people? Bisexuals who seem to think that because they find both men and women sexually attractive they somehow, in some mysterious way, are more enlightened then the rest of us. You know, us common folk that only want to fuck one or the other. Truly they are the chosen people! Why? Well because they've seen past gender and appearance and found that you fall in love, not with the gender but with the person. Wow, isn't that inspiring? Granted of course that this non-gender-specific person still conforms to our culture's perception of beauty. I'm sorry but penises, to me, look horrendous. I wouldn't want one anywhere near either my face or ass. In fact, the first time I saw my own I attacked it with a shoe. Sexual preference does not equal moral superiority you smug bastards. Another thing; you don't get more options because you're "playing both sides", so to speak. What it comes down to, in the end, is how attractive the other person finds you. Not just appearance wise although that is unfortunately the most important factor. 4. Young folk who act older than their age This is especially prevalent among university students. People approaching their mid 20s that act as if they were in their late 40s. Wearing boring "adult" clothing, sipping lattes, conversing about what table napkins would be the best for their next couples get-together/dinner party. You'd think they'd be talking about something like "the Geo-political situation in eastern Africa" but no. They have so perfected this act since high school that they've realized that older people don't actually talk about that stuff. More on shallow and stupid people in their 40s later on. What happened to the energy of these people? All I wanted to do when I was in high school was to fuck on the floor and break shit. Thinking about it, that's still all I want to do now. Alright, that may not be entirely true. I do like having a good deep, fervent and energetic conversation about an interesting subject-matter from time to time. But if you actually try this on these yuppie offspring you quickly notice they're incapable of such thought. I suspect they've developed this intricate and boring lifestyle full of little fetishes like napkins, home decorating, couples dinners and other mind numbingly boring activities as a subterfuge for their lack of depth and intelligence. Crafty scoundrels! 3. People who grew up in the 60s and 70s getting tough on kids This is as much an objection to the reasoning as it is to the rhetoric that these people use. I will grant them that kids are insufferable bastards and need to learn some discipline. Hasn't that been true in every generation since the dawn of man though? And shouldn't that be something for the parents to sort out? The schools can only do so much. The main problem with slipping grades in schools all over the western world lies not with the children but with the poor quality of the grownups, the teachers. How to improve that is a different rant entirely but suffice to say that improving the status of the teaching profession and holding them accountable for results may help. What really makes me want to go into a self-induced coma is when these people who grew up in the 60s and 70s use harsh rhetoric and language. Words like grades, expectations, discipline, control and uniforms get thrown around. While they were handed everything in their youth. EVERYTHING! So when these pampered to middle aged, fat, comparatively rich, white motherfuckers come along and say kids these days lack discipline I just want someone to invent cyborg warrior bodies. So that their 80 year old parents can rip their damn heads off! Call it a really really really late term retroactive abortion. 2. Subcultures Stop letting your entire identity be dictated by things other people have created. Be it music, clothing, books, movies or video games. You're being a shallow cunt, stop it. 1. Bloggers and the people who read them Most blogs are about absolutely nothing of worth. They're just some ramblings from some teenage girl (either physically or mentally) about what they did today. And I'm not even talking about exciting stuff like teenage sex and drugs. No, negative, denied. It's always some meandering post about what they ate or what clothes they wore. I have friends who do this, if you're one of them consider this my way of saying; I like you, but for fuck sake! I know these pointless blogs have been an annoyance to many people over the years. I'm certainly not the first to bring this up. I did it however to set up a point. Could we please, please agree to stop reading these "celebrity" bloggers? These wannabe socialite journalists who live these fabulous lives revolving around gossip, fashion, parties and one has to assume rather boring sex. Mostly implied, naturally. They just seem too neat and well scrubbed to be having anything other than dull repetitive sex. In their luxurious penthouse apartments smelling equally as sterile and unnatural as their genitals. It's bad enough that they can't quite seem to string together a complete sentence, they make money doing so. These blogs are essentially the same thing as other personal blogs, only infinitely more sad. For all of us. What sort of vapid, soulless, asinine existence is that? If you're asking yourself how I can rail against this sort of thing and then myself slip in bits and pieces of my own life in this blog, well...you're just going to have to figure that out on your own.

Plastic bags.

Returning to the topic of environmentalism. According to a poll in a Swedish evening newspaper (not the best source I know) 72.2% of people want to ban plastic bags. Apparently because they are bad for the environment. Why don't just those 72.2% stop buying the damn things and we wouldn't need a legislated ban. That even 1% of the population would want this is depressing. People in this godforsaken country really do want to be disciplined by the government. Like some stern father who lets them know what they may or may not do, in all aspects of life. I can only guess that they find some sense of security in that.

A menacing killer.

The scary thing is that people may actually believe in this sort of soft policy/journalism fluff. The planet will not go tits up because of some plastic bags, trust me. Maybe the fact that many industrialised nations still pump their sewage, mostly untreated, straight into the ocean should concern people a little bit more. Literally being up a shit creek some day doesn't sound too exciting to me.