#RASP - Rant Around Several Paragraphs #1 - Idiocy

I’m starting a new subsection I’m titling RASP, an inspiration from @mallow610’s YouTube video channel-based RISS (Rant in Sixty Seconds, with its haunting, awesome intro tune), in which I get things off my mind that otherwise would stick there until the end of time.

Speed Limits
The United States has speed limits, and as much as especially these stupid-asses that don’t think there are any, or there is any need for any, there are speed limits. There was this guy who – and I don’t even know how he got a driving license, but he was driving – crossed a double yellow line to pass me.

Driving 101: double yellow lines demarcate a separation of traffic lanes that go in opposite directions that standard and commercial drivers should never cross in order to pass another driver (i.e. the diagram showing "Yes" and "No").

This is different from the diagram with the solid line and the dashed line. These also separate opposite traffic lanes, but one can pass another person with caution if everything is clear on the opposite lane!
So I beeped him. This should be another rant, but the point of this one is simply that speed limits exist. On Cooledge Road between US Road 78 and US Road 29 is 40 MPH. Not 50. Not 55. Forty. One the entire stretch of GA Interstate 285 – until such a time as they decide to enact the proposed digital variable speed limit signs that will change during based on DHSMV’s volition/judgment, the top speed limit is 55 MPH and the bottom speed limit is 40 MPH. Georgia State Road 20 has had a speed limit of 45 MPH since the SPLOST-funded renovation of the Loganville-outer Loganville stretch had completed. It’s no longer 55 MPH, people. They put tax-funded signage saying 45 MPH for a reason!

You – sorry – lazy-ass, law-flouting fuckers that don’t feel there should be a speed limit, move your asses to fucking Deutschland. Get over yourselves. I drive the speed limit, y'all should too.

Patents on Genes
The only reason people seem to want to patent genes is monetary. I keep hearing that not patenting stifles innovation; bull! If you can tell me that the drug companies researching the existence of the gene – and then locating it – created the gene as well as the method to detect it, go ahead and patent it. If you have a means of modifying the gene so it doesn’t cause breast or ovarian cancer, go ahead and patent that technique. If, though, that gene in all ovarian and breast cancer sufferers is exactly the same in all of them, and you didn’t do crap to make it so, you have no right to patent it. Sure, patent to Hell the means of detecting the gene, because The Lord knows there are alternative means of detecting anything, but you have no right to patent the gene.

The only reason they want to patent the gene is because licensing it out will yield more profits that getting a Nobel or some other prize in chemistry or genetics or whatever for discovering the actual gene.

Greed will kill the bearers of these genes faster than the genes will while you all sit on your asses trying to patent something you had no hand in creating, only discovering.



That’s all.

GEICO Dough Boy Commercial - Happier than the Pillsbury Doughboy on His Way to a Baking Convention

http://youtu.be/EvFul32xKCs

This has to be one of the cutest commercials ever! No one cannot laugh during this!

Then they have the doughboy humming to the guitar/ukelele tune at the end! Precious!

Marketing Milo

My mother got back from a trip to Jamaica yesterday, and quite typically she'd brought back stuff. Among the items were eight packs of Milo, a Nestlé product I grew up having. Granted, it wasn't a frequent part of my childhood, but it's something I knew about.

So, the thought of this blog post came earlier in the week as I was looking at a can of Milo mummy had bought here in the US. Me knowing Spanish, I was comparing the English to the Spanish translation (or the Spanish to the English interpretation, whichever it is).

The Spanish translates literally as "Chocolate-Flavored Fortified Food", which is vastly different from the English. In Spanish, it makes the product to seem as if it's a meal replacement; in English, it's just something recreational to drink, a nice-to-have.

So, mummy coming back with Milo from Jamaica now, both the English and Spanish are a little more in line together, but in the islands they market it as something that can replace a meal as well, or at the very least it's something one can drink when you can't eat at the time (such as while at play).

That's interesting marketing, actually. Why would you market a product as a drink for one set of people and as a food for another? I'm certain that those who use it as a food can't be doing quite as well in all their health numbers, especially with the amount of sugar per serving. Is it a disposable income matter, that those who would use it as food have less money to spend, and so this is their quick-fix meal?

I really don't know, but marketing a beverage like that as a meal just doesn't seem right to me.

Government Intervention

Now, I can understand why some people are suspicious of the government. We've seen historically what can happen when one entity has too much power and/or control over a group.

Pogroms might occur, slaughters could happen, oppression can ensue, and sadness may run rampant. There could be little, if any, higher regulation or co-regulation.

It doesn't have to be that way, however, if we do it correctly.

What sparked this rant-of-sorts was me hearing on our local news station a few people expressing their gripes about the City of Atlanta possibly banning smoking in public parks. Some said, among other things, that the government is too big, that it should be smaller, and has no right to "meddle" or "infringe" in/on the affairs of the general populace's "right" to do as they choose with their lives.

My take is this:

Certainly, there are elements one most likely can govern by oneself.

The government doesn't need to tell you when you eat, if you eat, if you exercise, if you watch television, if you decide to dye your hair purple… This is because these are personal decisions affecting only you. If you eat sporadically throughout the day, that's your choice. If you decide to not eat because it's Ramadān, trendy, or you don't feel like it, that's your decision influencing solely your physical/mental(/spiritual) health and well-being in general.

If you don't eat and you're pregnant, however, that's different. You are willingly - though it may or not be wittingly - influencing another's life. This may bring in the debate on when that clump of mitotic cells becomes a cute bundle of joy, but that's another debate.

The point is, you're influencing another life.

Speed limits, traffic signs, signals, and regulations, and lots of other governmental interventions in these regards exist because somewhere along historically the "powers that be" left us to make "common-sense" decisions, we'd failed at it — perhaps killing someone in our devices-leaving — and so they left it *again* to us as a voting population, or those we'd entrusted to have our best interests at heart, to protect the majority of us from those who made the life-canceling (and, me judgmentally saying, stupid) decisions.

So, I think they should ban the smoking in public parks. People have been in the presence of smokers and have asked them to stop, and some graciously do or move to prevent further offense. From what I've witnessed, though, there is a strong, vocal subsection of smokers who believe they should smoke wherever they choose, and that those who don't smoke and feel uncomfortable around smoke should be the ones to move.

This insensitivity influences others. It's your personal right to smoke or not, because you are affecting your own life. You can smoke among other smokers because you each are willing participants unbothered that others are smoking around you. Smoking around non-smokers who do not wish smoke in their breathing space does affect someone else.

There is a half-joke in Loganville that the City and Gwinnett/Walton County doesn't do anything until someone dies. This seems to be true, because traffic light referenda don't seem to happen until someone dies. Special Local-Option Sales Taxes (SpLOSTs) don't go to ballot until there's a death, it seems.

Even one death.

If there is one person who feels the personal right to live healthfully is under threat because of another, and that other does not respect the first person's personal right — and that continues despite the sense of dignity/deference to all healthy personal rights, (quanti-/quali-)fiable over time — the government should intervene.

God knows, the petulant children harming others for their own comfort aren't making the right decisions themselves…

Ligature

It's funny how much I've been thinking about how often it seems we lump things with very distinct differences together.

It started Wednesday while I was watching Modern Family. Sofía Vergara's character Gloria couldn't think of the animal, so she said it in Spanish: ardilla. Me speaking and knowing Spanish, I'd always known ardilla to mean "chipmunk", so when Gloria's son translated it as squirrel, it surprised me. Checking the RAE's dictionary, I found it to be both chipmunk and squirrel. I thought this: how can Spanish lump together two similar but *very* different mammals under the same word? They share a kingdom, phylum, class, order and family. Close enough, but they can't interbreed viably, they look different, act differently. How can that be?

I brought this up with one of my Colombian co-workers/friends - Alix - and it brought up many trains of thought.

How, for example, do Spanish-speakers principally, from my experience, call all Asians "chinos"? Or after 9-11, I was hearing a lot of the Cubans around me referring to Arabs universally as "talibanes".

Backing to the animal theme, I'd brought up how dissimilar squirrels and chipmunks are, and asked if you would lump lions and tigers together. The response was, of course, no, because they're different. We kind of do the same thing in English quite a bit, like with turtles and tortoises.

I suppose I'm more sensitive to meaning in Spanish since it's my adopted language and not my main language, or I suppose because I'm me.

But chipmunks aren't squirrels, damn it!