Down with jogging!

 Posted by at 04:55  Down with
Dec 032012
 
USMC Marathon
Image via Wikipedia
“It’s unnatural for people to run around city streets unless they are thieves or victims. It makes people nervous to see someone running. I know that when I see someone running on my street, my instincts tell me to let the dog out after them.” Mike Royko

Jogging is just wrong!

There is just something terribly wrong about jogging. The only time it makes sense is when trying to escape from some pending danger like maybe your kid’s birthday party or your mother-in-laws visit. Any other time it just courts disaster. First, I don’t believe the human body was designed to run because if it were, humans would look a whole lot different. For example, no other humanoid runs on two legs. If they want to get somewhere fast they go down on all fours like all the other running animals. Just because of our insistence on standing upright we suffer back problems all the time. Now compound that with jolting the spine and bouncing a heavy head while running. Nothing good can possible come from all that stress. For that reason I contend that running is just plain bad for the body. Walking or standing is enough strain for a spine designed for horizontal activity. Add to that the pounding on knee and ankle joints and you have a recipe for total disability. It wears me out just thinking about it. Why do people do it? It is simple and obvious.  Humans are a perverse and destructive species.

Then there is the madness of marathons

Sprints or laps are bad enough but then there are the few that are the crazy (and I mean that literally) people who run marathons. Maybe there was some justification for the first one. The Greeks didn’t have cellphones or even automobiles and there was an urgent message to relay. They didn’t have much choice.   Send a runner! Nowadays there is absolutely no good reason to run 26 miles unless you are mad as a hatter. Today only masochists would put their bodies through all that stress just to gloat about their pis poor judgment.  These are fools, bragging to the smarter people who have better things to do. It is not just the time wasted in actually running the marathon and then recovering from the damage it does to the body. No, on top of the 4 to 8 hours of torture invested in running the marathon, these fools put in months training their bodies to withstand the malicious torture that a marathon inflicts. If they made other people run marathons, we could lock them up as misanthropic, sadistic torturers. Since they do it to themselves, we have to give them a pass. There is just no nice way to put it. It is an intelligence problem. I am convinced that marathon runners are either missing some critical component of intelligence or were tortured and insecure as children.  Nothing else makes sense.

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Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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DumbAss DA – Zero tolerance at work

 Posted by at 06:27  Bob's Politics, Down with, Plain 'ol Cantankerous, Podcast
Sep 032012
 

Well folks…I’m a day late…but better late than never.

Today we’ll talk about a district attorney in Cobb County, Georgia…a dumbass DA who is judgement deficient…who show as well as possible two things.

[powerpress]

1.) Zero tolerance is the same as zero thinking, zero intelligence, and…

2.) He needs to go in the next election.  Don’t worry…he’ll find work. He seems well suited to asking the question, “Do you want fries with that?

 

Do y’all have any zero-tolerance stories to tell?

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Bob@HayleStorm Interactive

Bob comes to us with a skeptical attitude and a full cup of Cantankerousness. He also writes about homesteading and yurts over at JuicyMaters.com and rants about politics at Common-Sense-Conversation.com Most of the time, though, you'll find him at HayleStorm.net, cranking out great websites for clients OR writing tutorials teaching them to build their own sites.

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Down with Advice. And Crap!

 Posted by at 10:26  Down with, Plain 'ol Cantankerous, rants
Aug 302012
 

 

United (States) Parcel Service.

Advice is like crap, everyone has some and wants to get rid of it.  Why should I be your toilet?

I am inundated every day with globs of crap on how to do this better, how to live better, how to write better, how to get people to buy your crap, how to take a crap, and how to make the crap more lucrative with marketing techniques that are stale and, well, crap.  Admit it, you didn’t know this would be a scatological post when you started.  Well it really isn’t.

What it is is a study of where we are in America.  It seems we can’t look at things and figure out how to make our own way any more.  Sure there are some things out there that I would be lost without learning, such as how to get a blog going, or keep it going.  But do I really need to have 47 emails a day about it?

Do I really need pharmaceuticals from Canada or Mexico that cure everything from baldness to impotence?

Continue reading »

Justin

Justin is the young Coot with a Cantankerous Soul who continues to be educated by older, more cootish Ralph and Bob. His Cantankerosity is his own.

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Down with the United Nations!

 Posted by at 11:35  Down with
Jun 102012
 
United Nations

Image by Ashitakka via Flickr

From the latest UN Report on  World Economic and Social Survey 2011

“Recently, a number of studies have put increasing emphasis on the fourth argument above for limiting growth in developed countries. To make their case, many of them presented evidence from cross-country data showing that the quality of life does not improve much beyond a certain level of per capita income. For example, taking life expectancy as an objective measure of the quality of life, it can be seen that life expectancy does not increase much beyond a per capita income level of about $10,000. Similarly, as indicated in chapter III of this Survey, cross-country evidence suggests that there are no significant additional gains in human development (as measured by the human development index.) beyond the energy-use level of about 110 gigajoules or 2 tons of oil equivalent per capita.

Quality of life does not necessarily increase beyond a certain level of material consumption …… suggesting that developed countries could focus on quality-of-life issues rather than on material growth.”

Butt out, United Nations!

If you are as long in the tooth as this old coot, you probably remember when the UN was the hope of the world. Heck, the US practically created the UN as part of it’s missionary urge following the horrors of WWII. I was a kid then and I remember collecting money for UNICEF (The United Nations children’s Fund). It all seemed so wonderful, making the world a better place and all. That was then. This is now. It used to seem like a good idea for the US to pay for the UN in order to teach the world about civilization, human rights and democracy. Talk about pearls before swine!  The inmates took over the asylum, they turned on us and it’s been downhill ever since.

 

These days, the UN is nothing but an an embarrassment. It’s like your urbane, suave brother-in-law that can’t manage to hold a job. We’ve set them up in a posh, east-side skyscraper in New York City where they do nothing but embarrass us with stupid decisions and self-righteous pronouncements. Putting North Korea in charge of nuclear disarmament is a good example. You might as well put Casey Anthony in charge of a foster home.  So how could it get worse?   Stay tuned.

They want to pull us down to their level.

These days the UN is on a mission advocating nanny state hysteria and demanding frugality and green living. It won’t take responsibility for its own failures so it needs to force us to fail too.  Their latest report, World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation says we earn too much money and use too much energy and they want to make us reform using statist government mandates. (It worked so well in the Soviet Union.) They are going to solve all the worlds problems by reducing the developed countries to third world status.Why anyone would think that reducing our energy use to the level of Bangladesh would make the world a better place, beats me but that’s what they propose. We’re supposed to be embarrassed by success and go cower in a cave with the savages.  When they get the US down to subsistence, are they expecting China to drive the world economy? Why not?

To the UN, economic development is evil- or at least wasteful while they refuse to recognize and condemn real evil.  It’s time to stop enabling this nonsense and pull our support.  Let them set up shop in Bangladesh and keep the money here.  Applying that money to keeping our economy going will do far more to help the world than UN bureaucrats and their statist diktats.

 

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Down with Movie Multiplexes

 Posted by at 04:57  Down with
May 202012
 
Movie Palace

Image by Brendan Lynch via Flickr

kjkjk

Remember the Movie Palaces?

When I was a kid, movie theaters were magical. These days going to a movie is as thrilling as visiting the dentist. The first movie I remember seeing was Bambi. It was in a downtown movie palace (all the movie theaters were modeled on palaces in those days).  There were uniformed ushers with flashlights who would find you a seat and shush you if you got too noisy. There were always fancy architectural themes to the decor, lavish lobbies with grand staircases and plush restrooms. I remember the exotic patterned carpets. Going to a movie was very special and you dressed up, just like for Sunday School. (Oh wait, you don’t dress up for God anymore either.)

When we moved to the suburbs, we didn’t make the trip to downtown as much and most of the movies we saw were at the drive in but when we moved to the country, our small town had a movie theater which became a focal point of my young social life. The Vogue was no palace but it had it’s share of pretension. There was no grand lobby or stairs but there was a small lounge next to the restrooms and a separate balcony room for parents with noisy kids. On weeknights, they played current movie releases, usually in one or two night stands but on Saturdays, it was all organized for kids. There was always a double feature with westerns or pirate movies dominating. In between there were the previews, a cartoon, a newsreel and the highlight of the day, the serial. This was usually a very hokey science fiction story and it was always the excuse not to miss a Saturday. We lived five miles out of town and so my folks would drop me off at noon or so and pick me up at 5. I think the movie cost a quarter, popcorn was 10 cents and a candy bar 5 cents. You would meet your friends and enjoy the afternoon completely unsupervised. It was heaven.

In high school, the Vogue was a little too intimate and ordinary for a date. Going to a movie meant driving the 30 miles back to one of the movie palaces in the city. That was where you found the first run movies and got the glamor of big time entertainment.

Those palaces started to die in the 60’s with the growth of the suburbs. By the time I started my working life in Los Angeles, the movie palaces were largely abandoned or converted to porn venues. To survive, some were divided into two or more theaters just like the old mansions surrounding downtown were converted to dingy flats The last gasp for movie palaces in the movie capitol was built in the 70’s, The Plitt in Century City. It was a modern venue but with the grandeur of the old palaces and it was a palace that made great movies even greater. We say Jaws there and Star Wars and nothing compares to the grandeur of a great movie surrounding you in a grand viewing space like the old Plitt. Alas, the magnificent Plitt was only a moment in time and quickly replaced with some more profitable use.

These days there is no place to get an old fashioned movie experience. The new movie multiplexes have all the personality of a shoebox in spite of the comfortable reclining stadium seats and over-loud three dimensional sound.

I’ll still go to a movie from time to time but the thrill is gone. There is no magic to these shoebox venues playing social effects overloaded features with little plot and no human interest. I remember the days when going to a movie was an event. You would go to a movie just to get away from real life and escape to the fantasy. The old movie palaces helped with that escape. Maybe the movie was a dud but you still spent the time in an environment that made you feel special. A few hours in the movie palace and you could go back to your hovel knowing that it wasn’t who you really were. Going to a movie doesn’t do that any more. All you get it the movie.

 

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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