You know when you don't really have to go number one, and you don't really have to go number two, but instead it's like you have to go one and a half? I hate that.

Simpson's Skateboarding was just given GameInformer magazine's lowest score ever, as well as the lowest score possible: a 1 out of 10. Even the second opinion reviewer gave it a 1.

Now they're saying it's a shoo-in for worst game of the year, but I have to wonder if they didn't go a little overboard in their dismissal of it just so they could use the tagline, "Worst game ever.", which of course they did.

Oh man, I just had an argument with my co-worker over whether Superman was an alien or a human with super powers. Specifically, whether or not Superman could breed with human women. Obviously, if Superman is from another planet, he is not human and cannot have children with homo sapiens.

...

It's a good thing I already have a girlfriend.

(Thanks to Jen for the link.)

WARNING: Ranting and sudden tangents ahead.

Are fundamentalists, conservatives, gun nuts, and politicians really stupid? Are they evil? Do they genuinely think that they are doing the right thing? Does our president really think he is doing us a service by gving us general warnings to be on the lookout for possible terrorism maybe sometime in the near future? Or is he just consciously trying to keep us in a state of constant panic so we're more likely to support him attacking whoever he says is the biggest threat to the U.S.? Does Falwell seriously think that he's voicing the opinions of god? Do tobacco institute scientists really believe that their research has even an iota of credibility? Does the NRA honestly feel that America needs more handguns and assault rifles? Why does the U.S. government repeatedly fund bad guys to kill bad guys we don't like, then fund some other bad guys to kill those bad guys, and repeat ad infinitum?

Are there genuinely evil people in the world who would do anything, hurt anybody, and discard all vestiges of honor, dignity, or morality for just personal gain?

Yes there are.

For the longest time while growing up, I'd thought that truly, genuinely evil things were fictional. Like they had to be supervillians, Martians, demons, dragons, or warlocks. And if there's anything that playing all those video games and watchign all those movies and cartoons and reading all those books taught me, it's that the good guys will always win in the end. I suppose the end of innocence comes when you realize that humanity has all the evil it needs in itself, and that the good guys generally lose, or weren't good guys after all. After a while you wonder if maybe that since you aren't really doing anything to combat the evil in the world, you're not that good of a guy yourself, but then you figure that at least you're lessening the evil in the world by not being evil yourself.

I personally may not be making the world that much significantly better, but I am certianly not making it that much worse. I think if I can leave here knowing that, however miniscule the amount might be, I left the world slightly better than if I had never been born at all, then I'm a good guy.

More and more I feel like there are people in this world that the world in general would just be better off without. Not that I'm about to go on a killing spree or anything, for there's really no way that I can judge whether or not the world would be better off without someone, unless they do something really obvious like cut me off in traffic. Then it gets me to thinking that maybe I really am better than some people. Of course, there are many people I'm worse than too, but this is a pretty dangerous way of thinking. So, I shouldn't be able to decide who lives and who dies.

...but I can.

I could go out right now and buy a gun and I bet I could kill at least 10 people before they got me. I re-iterate, I'm not going to do this, but I could. I coudl do it very easily. I've been trained by the vioent video games. I've been properly desensitized to violence by years of action movies and rock music. I'm willing to bet I'm a pretty good shot, too, but I don't have a gun. I could get one, though. No past history of pyschosis, no criminal record, I've got enough money for a weapon or five and thousands of rounds of ammunition, and I know where a gun store is.

In case you couldn't tell by now, I went and saw Michael Moore's amusing, depressing, upsetting, and thought-provoking Bowling For Columbine last night.

Maybe it is a miracle of judicious editing, but pretty much everyone Moore interviews looks like a complete and total idiot. I mean, can the Lockheed Martin executive really not see the irony of standing in front of a gigantic missile being constructed and saying that he doesn't understand why the Columbine killers would think that weapons were the answer to their problems? Does Charlton Heston really know how much he looks like a dick holding pro-gun rallies in a town where a few days earlier, a six-year-old shot another six-year-old?

Anyhow, Bowling for Columbine was really good and portrayed America as a full of scared people, which it is. Our news media focuses more on violent crime than anything else. We're afraid of our neighbors. We're afraid of strangers. We're afraid of our children. We want to blame ervything but ourselves for our problems. We have a terrible history of interfering with other countries and then interfering with the bloody results of our interference. It's all old news, but Moore presents it in a way that is extremely entertaining and makes you not sure if you're supposed to laugh or not.

I've got the fear. I'm afraid of Americans. I think Bowling For Columbine hits the nail right on the head. I think it's okay for people to own guns if they really want, but it seems like an extremely bad idea for such a panicky nation of trigger-happy fools to have cheap and easy access to firearms designed to kill massive quantities of people, and cheap bullets. 9mm bullets cost only 17 cents apiece, apparently. I could buy 3 bullets and theoretically kill 3 people (in conjunction with a gun, naturally) for about than the price of a candy bar. I really like Chris Rock's idea that bullets should cost $5,000 apiece. "If I could afford it, I would kill you!" Brilliant. Our nation should be run by stand-up comedians.

Such cheap, throwaway ammuntion makes it easy for people to run around shooting up signposts, cars, televisions, computers, shopping mall, or whatever in a very carefree manner. You could put an entire TEC-9 clip into something for about $4.00. Maybe if bullets were more expensive, we woudltake them more seriously. After all, a bullet is supposed to be roughly equivalent to a life. The Columbine killers used over 300 rounds of ammunition in their spree (And just as a note to those who believe that they were made into efficient killing machines by playing Doom and whatnot: If you spend 300 rounds and only kill 12 people, that is extremely inefficient. Hell, you can only carry 200 bullets at a time in Doom.).

It's not any one thing that makes us a ntion of 11,000+ gun deaths a year, it's not just guns, and it's not just fear, and it's not just stupidity, it's a combination of all that and more. Our country is filled with nervous people with their finger on the trigger. I'm not going to run out and buy a gun. I'm going to run out and buy a bullet-proof vest. You should go run out and see Bowling For Columbine.

Okay, I'm only going to warn you this once: If you tailgate me while I'm driving the speed limit in the slow lane, or if I am driving in the slow lane at the same speed as the car in front of me and you get up close behind me and flash your headlights, you have just given me full permission to antagonize you to my heart's content.

Although I am the best driver in the whole entire world, I will, on occasion, drive in a way that really pisses other drivers off and makes me laugh. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Turning on my headlights, so that you think I'm braking all of a sudden.
• Gradually reducing my speed so that you finally decide to do the logical thing and pass me on the left, but it's too late for that, my friend. Then I speed up ever so slightly so that you can not get past the car in the left lane in time to pass me. Slow down again when you pull back behind me. Repeat.
• Leaving 15 feet between myself and the car in front of me at a long stoplight, then inching forward a feet once every 10 seconds, and laughing when you inch up a feet yourself, and I know you will, because you're the kind of guy who tailgates people in the slow lane who are going the speed limit.
• Giving you a huge smile and waving at you when you flip me off.

Got to pass the time stuck in traffic somehow. For a while I was wondering why traffic jams never happen in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, then I realized, "Oh yeah, it's because they SUCK!"
...

I might be playing GTA:VC a little too much, since sometimes when stuck in traffic, I start thinking things like, "I could just ram through all these cars... an if my engine explodes, I could just jack another car... like that big rig over there, I bet that'd work pretty well... Hunh, this is a lot of cars to appear at once." But I'm fine... really.

But if there's one thing that GTA:VC might be doing to benefit our communites it's helping to show a generation of kids whose musical collections consist exclusively of MP3's downloaded of off Kazaa that there is no such musical genre as "80's Music". Whenever I ask people what kind of music they like and they say, "80's Music", then I want to slap them and scream "80's WHAT?! New-Wave? Hip-Hop? Country? Cock-Rock? Commercial Jingles?!!" GTA:VC splits the genres up into their respective radio stations.

...But I generally feel like slapping people and screaming at them on a regular basis anyhow.

Maybe I've just been a little too stressed-out lately. I think I'll try and score a black market defibrillator to help me relax.

The new Cheery Coke (Oops, that's Cherry Coke. Although a Cheery Coke sounds very pleasant, too.) cans have a very similar color scheme as Dr. Pepper. I wonder if this was by design so that people may buy the Coke by mistake. The soda cans are evolving mimicry.

I've been reading Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene", and uhm.. I guess it was more revolutionary at the time, but I've always thought that survival of the fittest was gene-oriented and not species- or individual-oriented.

The other night, Ami and I were in bed and she couldn't remember which element the 4th element was, so she had to get up and go get her chemistry textbook out to look it up. Then we quizzed each other matching element numbers to their names. Is it weird of me to think that that's really hot?