Humor Highlight of Friend’s Visit with His Family

It’s almost time for the paella to hit the table where oldest child is tutoring youngest child on fractions or something which I'm not sure is even legal on vacation. Exasperated father who feels kids aren’t moving quickly enough to set the table shouts at youngest daughter, “Stop doing math!”

I’m pretty sure that was the first time those words were ever uttered by a parent to a child.

Every time I hear those three words in my head I laugh out loud which has been about 30 times so far. This may be the funniest thing that I've ever written and all I did was a bit of journalism.

P.S. As I watched this morning while the parents got three kids ready to head to the train station I couldn’t help but make comparisons between this feat of logistics and the Normandy Invasion

Momento más gracioso durante la visita de un amigo con su familia

Es casi la hora de comer y el hijo mayor enseña a la hija menor algo de fracciones, cosa que probablemente es ilegal en las vacaciones. El padre está exasperado porque los niños no se mueven lo suficientemente rápido como para poner la mesa y grita a su hija, “Deja de hacer las matemáticas!”

Estoy seguro de que fue la primera vez que esas palabras fueron pronunciadas por un padre a un niño.

Global Climate Stupidity

Another of the great lies of conservative dogma is their insistence that doing anything to clean up the environment is futile and destructively expensive. That's the same as living like a pig because cleaning up is too much trouble.  How much is the improved health of the American people worth to Republicans? I already know the answer and it’s not much. When they talk about freedom for the individual what they really mean is freedom for wealthy individuals and if the poor don’t like it they should just work harder and if they want cleaner air they should vacation in Aspen.

From The Atlantic:

In some cities, policymakers have had success with creatively limiting the exposure of asthmatics to pollution. For example, in Stockholm, Sweden, a “congestion tax” levied by cameras on vehicles in heavy-traffic parts of the city reduced smog and emissions and in turn reduced asthma attacks among kids by as much as 50 percent.

But why should America let a 50% reduction in childhood asthma get in the way of your right to own a 12 cylinder automobile or force you to put a filter on your industrial smokestack that is puking out toxins into the community?

NRA Finds New Rock Bottom Miles Below Their Previous Rock Bottom

There’s a lot of talk recently (the 24 hour news cycle strikes yet again!) about a particularly vile National Rifle Association video. I won’t even link to it because it was too creepy for me to watch. I found the text and just read it. After a few small changes I think I’ve found the true message.

We use Fox News to assassinate real news. We use our religious and private schools to teach children that president Obama was another Hitler. We use a few stupid movie stars and singers like Lee Greenwood and Scott Baio (we take anything we can get) to repeat our vile and failed narrative over and over again. And then we use our propaganda mills like The American Enterprise Institutes, the Heritage Foundation, and the Discovery Institute—to name but a few—to endorse the “status quo” and by”status quo” we mean

All to make conservatives angry. Make them really, really angry even though they’re the ones who run the whole fucking show, control all of our government from top to bottom. Make them scream our brand of racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia…but mostly we just really hate poor people. Eeewwww!

And when that happens, we use it as an excuse for outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom from democracy, is to fight any sort of legal opposition with scare tactics and religious furor.

I’m the National Rifle Association of America, a few rich creeps who make a fortune selling guns and a bunch of ignorant hicks we’ve convinced to be on our side. Because gun control doesn’t work! Well, it works to lower the murder rate but it doesn’t work to make a few manufacturers tons of loot.

A Terrible Waste

So I cleaned my apartment this morning because I’m having people coming for a visit. I somehow screwed up the dates and they won’t be here until the week after next. I feel like such an idiot. That’s 10-15 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

Too Close for Comfort?

Is there a clinical name for fear of running out of coffee filters? I usually buy my filters in a supermarket chain here in Valencia called Mercadona but the other big chain, Consum, is downstairs in my building. I had thought about buying more filters the last 2-3 times I was shopping at Mercadona but forgot. I was beginning to feel very uneasy about the possibility of waking up one morning without a coffee filter. It was time for drastic measures which meant looking for filters in the supermarket in my building. If I had to pay an extra 20 cents or so then so be it. Can you put a price on piece of mind?

I looked around for filters the other day downstairs in Consum but I couldn’t find them, even after asking two people who worked there (I think they worked there). On my next trip to Consum I found them, not in the coffee section but in another area (why wouldn’t they be with the rest of the coffee products?). When I got home and put them away in my big cupboard I saw that I already had a back-up box of 100 filters. After a quick calculation I estimate that I don’t need to panic again for another 7 months or so.