Don’t Fire Until You See The Frights Of Their Eyes
Is it “legal?” Yee haw!!! Let’s do it!
A canned hunt is a trophy hunt in which an animal is kept in a confined area, such as in a fenced-in area, increasing the likelihood of the hunter obtaining a kill. According to one dictionary, a canned hunt is a “hunt for animals that have been raised on game ranches until they are mature enough to be killed for trophy collections.”
Source: Wikipedia
If, like me, you ask, “What the fuck is a trophy hunt?” here’s a little help:
Trophy hunting is the selective hunting of wild game animals. Although parts of the slain animal may be kept as a hunting trophy or memorial (usually the skin, antlers and/or head), the carcass itself is sometimes used as food.
Source: Wikipedia
Yup. There’s stuff going on in the world that I can’t possibly imagine.
Drunk Plank
Why do we tolerate? Why do we, as a society, utterly lack the spine to properly address the problem of drunk driving? Our inaction is basically a way of saying, “We accept the loss of innocent lives as an irrationality inherent in the system and one that we are powerless or unwilling to prevent.”
We are not powerless. More can and should be done. All we have to do is defeat the apathy that comes along with “it hasn’t affected me personally … yet.”
Some basic stats:
- Each day, people drive drunk almost 300,000 times, but fewer than 4,000 are arrested.1
- In 2011, 226 children were killed in drunk driving crashes. Of those, 122 (54% percent) were riding with the drunk driver.1
- Since 1982 fatalities have decreased by 51%. Since 1991 they’ve declined by 35%. However, fatalities increased from 2011 to 2012.2
- There are about 9,000 to 10,000 fatalities per year due to drunk driving in the United States.2
- Source: MADD – Statistics
- Source: The Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility
The other day I was reading about a famous U.S. bicyclist who traveled the world and “supported the message of peace” and had been killed while bicycling in Russia. Ron McGerity, age 60, had visited 61 countries over the past 15 years and logged more than 75,000 miles on his bike. He was hit and killed by a truck driver who fled the scene and was later located and suspected by police of being drunk. (Source: RT.)
In a different case, a young mother was killed by a drunk driver leaving two young children behind. The drunk driver also survived.
Far too many innocent lives are lost. Far too many innocent lives are irrevocably affected.
So why is this still such a problem? I believe it’s because we don’t do enough to stop it.
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Candy Crushing
Hey, have you heard the latest? There’s a game called Candy Crush Saga for your handheld device.
Behold! I give you the ultimate evil in the galaxy!
I installed the damn thing once. By doing so I think I earned a few “Dino bucks” in my dino wranglin’ game, but that’s another story.
I opened the game and played a level. I found the motif totally inane and annoying. The game itself was vapid and uninspired. I said to myself, “Hey, self! Isn’t this game just a rip-off variation of those 42 million other games where you match and line shit up so more shit will fall down?”
I promptly deleted it from my device. What a stupid piece of shit, I thought. Luckily I’ll never have to hear of it again.
Wrong!
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Widget Roundup
Hyper Transit Widget Spheroid Solids was a corporation operating in the great state of [withheld] that produced hyperbolic-related widgets. There was a certain segment of our population (dorks) that was thirsty for these widgets and the company did well.
The product was theoretically tightly regulated by the government’s Department Of Hyperbole (DOH) which maintained and enforced a complex set of legislation designed to protect public safety.
One of the selling points of the widgets is that they were the “shiniest DOH-approved widgets” available anywhere in the whole wide world.
It was true that they were indeed the shiniest widgets. There was no doubt about that. And based on that fact, the Hyper transit widgets sold like hotcakes.
The was one minor troubling nit of a detail, though. The widgets were never DOH approved. Not meeting government criteria went a long way in making it easier to make their widgets shiny. Other widget manufacturers made products that were less shiny because they were hindered by the fact they actually obeyed the law.
Widget-hungry consumers, if they had bothered to look, would find an online database of many widget violations and disciplinary actions taken by DOH.
The corporation just keep making and selling the widgets and playing games with the government. They were able to get away with it for an amazingly long time. It’s not like public safety was involved.
Then, one day, something happened. Hyper Transit Widget Spheroid Solids dissolved and ceased to be a corporation. Yeah! A blow was struck for truth, justice and the American way.
It didn’t last long, though. The very next day a new corporation set up shop at the exact same address. It was called Blongorgic Transit Widget Spheroid Solids and, amazingly, made the very same products.
Of course the two corporations had absolutely nothing do with each other. Legally they were two different and totally distinct entities. They did happen to have the same person who controlled 100% of the shares, though. Odd coincidence, that.
Now if you excuse me, I need to go buy a transit widget spheroid solid. Nice knowin’ ya!
A single gold star for me
The human race needed to survive so groups of individuals formed organizational units called “companies” that were then used to fuck everyone else. Viola! Stratification, and it was good.
Sure, not everyone survived or ended up better off but that was the whole point, wasn’t it?
Now a Virginia court has given companies just a bit more power. Yeah.
You’ve heard about Yelp? It’s one of the few places where disgruntled customers can strike back when they’ve been wronged.
The war between reviewers and companies is an old one. It turns out that businesses don’t like being criticized. In the old days reviewing was an actual profession and people were hired by newspapers to perform that function. In one case a food critic reported seeing an open can of beans in the kitchen in a restaurant that purported to only use fresh ingredients.
The restaurant flipped their lid.
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Skip to the Sue
As married people, my wife and I haven’t had all the conversations yet. But we’re getting close.
“Hey. I got a question.”
“Okay. Shoot.”
“Do you pick your nose?”
The pause wasn’t quite as long as you’d think. “Yeah. I do.”
Beat. Then, of course, the inevitable.
“Do you?”
“Fuck off! I ain’t answering that.”
Never underestimate the power of a fully-formed glare. “Yeah, okay. I do, too.”
The rest of that conversation, pertaining to the eating of said nose pickings, will not be published in this space. That’s premium content. We accept all major credit cards. But not PayPal!!!
Then, this other time, I turned to my wife and asked, “How many times, in your entire life, have you ever sued anyone?”
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Shouts from the Abyss 
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