the tree of woe

Technology is good. It allows you to remain in contact with the world wherever you go, ensuring that no matter how remote your location, everyone you know will be able to maintain their death grip on your precious, precious time.

A Brief History of Technology

Technology is nearly as old as mankind itself. It started with fire. It progressed with fire 2.0. A recall was then issued for fire, as it had a tendency to catch on fire. The irony, as you can imagine, was delicious. Technology then took the following path:

• The Wheel
• Movable Type
• The Cotton Gin
• Nuclear Fission
• iPods

This is by no means a complete list, but it does represent the growth of technology over thousands of years. Perhaps you don’t see how an iPod is descended from the cotton gin. This is because you are stupid. It’s nothing personal.. I’m just saying.

Technological progress has enhanced human lives throughout history. It has made some tasks of everyday life easier, and has taken over other tasks completely. Just a few generations ago, people would rise before the dawn, work, eat a little, work some more, and then they would go to work. After coming home from work, they would do some work around the house and then go to sleep. It was a rough existence, as most of their day was consumed with growing or working for food, building or repairing shelters, hoping they would not be eaten by bears, and other mundane activities. As technological advancements began to progress more rapidly during the late nineteenth century, people’s habits started to change. The automobile, or “horseless carriage” replaced the “horsed carriage.” This allowed people to work further away from home, which was ideal, especially if they hated their families. The telephone increased the distance between people, while at the same time toilet paper brought them together. Not everyone, however, was ready for change.

Progress

Technological progress hasn’t always been welcome. Indeed, advances in technology have advantages and disadvantages. Every invention had its critics. Some people afraid of what the automobile might bring thought that the human body would explode if certain speeds were achieved. Others didn’t like the way autos spooked their horses. Such myths with no foundation in logic or reason abounded during this time. Opponents of Coca Cola wondered out loud if drinking all that cocaine was good for you. What a bunch of loons. As history has proven, progress does not stop for crazy people.

Even now, as you sit here reading this waste of time, other, more motivated people are working hard to advance technology. Technology, you see, is a living, breathing, pooping thing. It changes with time, adapts to new situations, laughs at you when you set your alarm for PM instead of AM. Technology has no heart, you see, and it hates you, specifically.

Technology Hates You

You can feel the contempt every time your Oldsmobile 88 says “Good Morning” to you in that synthesized voice, a pure hatred that becomes naked hostility when the car later informs you that “The key is still in the ignition.” You know the key is in the ignition. You left it there on purpose, I’m sure. It’s no good telling the car that, however. The car can’t hear or understand you. The car gets the last word, and you look like a moron for trying to talk to a car.

Final Verdict

Technology is as good or as bad as the people using it. We must decide which direction to go. Will we end up with a future similar to The Matrix, where machines have taken over the earth, or will we see a future like Star Trek, where they seem to be as obsessed with the “latter half of the 20th century” as we are with them? I don’t know. I plan to be dead by then, so I really don’t care, either.

I blame my poor eating habits on the lessons I learned from Hungry Hungry Hippos as a child.

Dungeness crab is a particular delicacy that is popular from the Pacific Northwest all the way down to San Francisco, where I have had the unfortunate experience of dealing with it.

It’s not that I don’t like crab. Crab is delicious. It’s the methods employed to actually get the crab meat that I have a problem with.

This website offers simple, straightforward, and unemotional methods of preparing dungeness crab. I will now offer you the real methods of preparing crab, the method no one tells you about until it’s too late.

Take several living animals, animals that could still have their entire lives ahead of them, and place them in a pot of boiling water. Count yourself lucky that they are unable to scream.

Once you have successfully boiled them alive, take the crabs out and put them on a serving tray. This is where the real fun begins.

Take a single crab and put it on your plate. Rip its legs off (legs that just hours earlier were engaged in a futile struggle for life), one by one, and suck out the sweet crab meat. If the legs prove too sturdy for you, simply use a nutcracker to smash them to smithereens.

After you’ve torn the poor animal limb from limb, crush its body with your bare hands. Rip out whatever is inside and stuff it indiscriminately into your mouth.

It’s not that I don’t like eating animals. Animals are delicious. The cuter the animal, the more flavor I find that they have. The difference is the level of violence involved. If every recipe for steak started with, “Go get a hammer, a hacksaw, and a rifle,” I’d feel the same way about cows.

I spent a lot of time playing Connect Four in my youth. I found the following video on the Internets.

Notice how at the beginning of this commercial, the young boy wins easily. The girl obviously has no idea how to play. Ray Charles, blindfolded and in a dense fog could have seen that coming a mile away.

Yet in the second game, she outwits him easily. The boy declares, “Pretty sneaky, sis.” It’s something he’ll say again later in life when he finds out he was written out of their parent’s will, thanks to his Machiavelli of a sister.

Easter is right around the corner (not literally. Easter is a designated unit of time of exactly one day each year, the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon which is the first moon whose fourteenth day is on or after March 21st. As such, Easter does not occupy three dimensional physical space, and therefore cannot be described as “around the corner” in a non-metaphorical way.)

… Yeah. Anyway, Easter is right around the corner (see above), and that means that you cannot enter any retail establishment on Earth without being immediately confronted by Peeps. If you follow the link to the Peeps website, you will have a virtual library of Peeps information at your fingertips, all of which will go unused as you sit mesmerized by the humorous and whimsical tuba solo they’ve wisely chosen to tightly integrate with their website. In fact, it has been playing in the background the entire time I’ve been writing this post. I’ve become somewhat immune to it, so I’ll go over some of the information that you have no hope of ever accessing yourself.

Some select Fun Peeps Facts. As the website itself claims, “If you love peeps, you’ll love these fun facts!”

Fact #1: “Loyal peeps fans love their peeps fresh, frozen, stale, and even on pizza!” Yes, loyal peeps fans aren’t discerning in the least! They’ll go to any lengths for peeps. You’d be better off standing directly between a momma bear and her cubs than getting in between a peeps addict and a disgusting, peeps-laden pizza.

Fact #2: “It would take over 172 million peeps bunnies end-to-end to circle the moon!” We know this because this is the most logical way to count peeps. Some companies sell their products in cases of 12, 48, even 144. Not us. When your local grocery store orders peeps, they order them by the lunar circumference.