[aside:
r.i.p.
beardface mk. ii
may 2009 - june 2009
we barely knew ye
]

(it's all academic, dear reader. you weren't even aware of it. save us both some time and admit the fact.)

do not do it. without exception babies are a losing investment, for many reasons which i'll break down for you:

financially, gads, they're a nightmare. one baby will eat, wear, drive, and matriculate six figures of dollars of money before it is legally its own human and you can with good conscience stop pouring money down its maw. if you're to receive any kind of return on your money, you have to wait forty, fifty, maybe even sixty years and then your little youngster will gladly pay to lock you up in some geriatric warehouse that smells like hemorrhoid cream and old people's feet. great r.o.i. there, gramps.

their primary export is poop. actual no-fooling human poop. you are wasting good food by putting it into a machine that turns it to poop. there are starving children in africa, and you're making poop machines. bravo.

they have all kinds of compile errors. at first they sleep almost randomly and execute any dna they come into contact with. then they start blatantly doing the opposite of what they're told. (and have i mentioned the poop? I'M SERIOUS HERE. POOP.) they are congenitally idiotic; at some point in its debugging stage one will willingly jump off the tallest tree in the park and destroy every cell in its body requiring outlandish sums of your dollars to nurse back to health. (it won't die, though. they're robust little buggers; i have to give them that.) they are intolerably needy especially around late december, and when you get them what they think they want they will just break it and then want something else.

they get larger but their brains apparently do not, and the runtime errors continue. they will think they have this 'love' thing figured out and give it a shot for themselves, but of course they did not; they will eventually collapse into a sobbing puddle which you must mop up. they interpret neurological signals of fear and stress as fun and will drive your cars at too fast a speed and wreck two or three of them. they are bad with dollars themselves and will constantly beg you for yours. and when they finally stop exhibiting buggy behavior they leave, and will be totally normal for someone else. but not you.

and perhaps the most compelling argument is that everyone else is investing in them. there are plenty of (perhaps even too many) humans in the world already. do you remember what happened when all of a sudden everyone wanted a house? everyone started getting houses and then the economy exploded. there is no room for growth in the market. this is the reason eskimos don't invest in ice. or poop, for that matter.

p.s. poop. poop! IT IS POOP, HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY FAIL TO UNDERSTAND THIS

of course, this year's were not so bad, but not so good as to leave no room for improvement.

also! three cheers and a tally-ho for friends' free hot tub! ask him (or his personal financial assistant) how much this 'free' actually costs. go on, i dare you.

MORE NEED MORE

the good news is that it happened in 1939, and it's all over by now.

the rest of the good news is that the internet is awesome.

first, you will unwrap your product. you will take everything out of the packaging, place vital components in their long-determined places, drool over them. it shall be christmas-esque.

but wait! where are your speaker cord connectors? here are your speaker cords … here is the spot on the receiver for your speaker cord connectors, into which your speaker cords will inevitably plug …

you will diligently search the original packaging, the trash, under your couch, under your wife, in your hair, in your cat, and in your mailbox. you will not find them. resignedly, you will sit at your desk and type an email to the vendor who sent did not send your four speaker cord connectors.

patiently, and with hands tied, you will wait. for three days you will wait for the following response from the aforementioned vendor:

all missing part inquiries should be sent directly to kenwood at the following email address (…)

resignedly, you will sit at your desk and type an email to the company who sent did not send your four speaker cord connectors in the box they sent to the aforementioned vendor.

patiently, and with hands tied, you will wait. for three days you will wait for the following response from the aforementioned company:

replacement parts may be ordered through the kenwood authorized parts distributors (…)

you will browse through the multitude of options they will provide you. you will be overjoyed to learn that you have the opportunity to pay US$20 plus shipping and handling (no extra charge for dropping and being left in the sun) for four little nubbins of plastic and copper that should have been included with your original shipment. you will be so overjoyed that you will once again sit down at your desk and share your overjoyment with the people of kenwood themselves. you will most profusely thank them for the opportunity.

as you will now be a repeat contact, your message will be placed in a priority queue and beamed to the rings of neptune. there, the text of your message will be compressed and stored as crystals of methane and photographed by amateur astronomer philip drake of new guinea. phil will not at first understand what he sees, but after some analysis will decrypt the message and pass it along to kenwood support. here, it will be accidentally deleted, then accidentally recovered, then ignored, then finally misunderstood. by the fifth day you can expect the following response:

please reply with your mailing address and we will send you the speaker cords at no charge.

you will again sit down at your desk and very precisely explain the difference between the cords themselves and the speaker cord connectors, and clarify that it is not the cords you are missing, but the cord connectors.

as a third-time contact, this message will be printed out and fed to a bear in the san diego zoo while japanese tourists snap photos; the digital copy will then be deleted from the server (and the server itself burned). since no humans actually involved will actually read your most recent email describing the desired change, five days later you will receive two surround sound speaker cables.

you will curse.

now thoroughly miffed, you will call the number on the packing slip. this number, by design, will connect you to a latex factory in south wales. a bully chap whose welsh-accented name you absolutely will not be able to understand will answer, shout gibberish at you, and hang up. you will look up kenwood's number on the internet; you will completely fail to find it.

you will pay a shady figure a large sum of money to hack into the nsa's server farm and locate kenwood's true number, which you will call during their regular business hours of 0517 and 0518. the call will be answered by a finite number of monkeys who will attempt to connect you to the support department (the digits of whose extension map exactly to the letters of shakespeare's hamlet) by pressing number sequences at random. this will take several minutes. at the end you will be in touch with the gentleman who sent you the original emails. you will again explain to him the difference between speaker cords and speaker cord connectors until you are satisfied he sufficiently understands the distinction. you will then kindly ask him to send you four speaker cord connectors. he will concur and say you will have your speaker cord connectors before the week is out.

ten days later you will receive four surround sound speaker cables.

you will blog.

think about it.

the point is this: gah! i'm tired of being messed with. as i've whined before and will whine again (to anyone who will listen), daylight saving time is altogether annoying. it's a mightily dumb law and we don't really save any time no matter what we do with the clock.

unless, that is, we were really damned serious about getting more daylight hours, and did something really damned drastic. something like redefining the very notion of the 'hour.' we'd have to compress twenty-three hours per diem into the daytime, and expand the remaining hour to fill each night. think about it: we'd work eight hours (we, the soul-crushed wage slaves) daily and still have a monstrous fifteen daylight hours in which to play. we'd sleep a mere one hour a night and be fully rested! think of everything we could accomplish! … lan parties every morning … maybe some other stuff too …

or if we really wanted to shake things up, we'd launch into space a giant sunblocking obstacle, the shadow of which would bring a premature end to the day; complementary to this, we'd launch a giant mirror, positioned such that it reflected some otherwise wasted sunlight and hit the earth where it would otherwise be one hour pre-dawn. we wouldn't have to mess with clocks at all! i wave my magic wand of science, presto-chango!, and the semiannual temporal vertigo disappears into a very silly past.

or we'd just agree to get up earlier, but how lame is that? it doesn't even involve lagrange points. seriously.