New Year, Same Crap

Well here we are in the New Year, 2009 oh boy I can’t wait to see what stuff has happened already. Five days into a brand new year and already we have another conflict in the Middle East, a celebrity’s child died, and crappier customer service. I hope you all enjoy my thoughts on these subjects but in actuality I’ll be amazed that you’re still checking the blog site.


So just before the New Year some Hamas folks decided to lob a few rockets into Israel, this broke a cease-fire that had been in effect for about six months. It’s been over a week now and so far Hamas’ expert rocketry marksmen have managed to kill four people, only one of them a soldier. Meanwhile Israel has responded by “precision” bombing, artillery fire, and ground troops. In the same amount of time the IDF has managed to kill over five hundred people and wounded who knows how many in a response that is very similar to swatting a fly with a truck. Of course both sides have taken the moral high ground in this latest fracas; unfortunately both sides have taken their own moral high ground and fortified it with land mines, concertina wire, and machine gun bunkers. It’s times like this when Israel responds to the smallest thing with airstrikes and artillery that makes me think things that many people would think is just not believable. That thought is that Jewish and Israeli people of today can’t use the Holocaust of the 1930’s and 1940’s as an excuse to be rampantly violent as they are in this latest round of fighting. Thanks to the technological edge that Israel has over their opponents, who are lucky to have electrical power in their cities for more than an hour a day, the massive amounts of destruction that they can easily deliver makes them (in my eyes) appear as the aggressor and the big bully on the block picking on the poor kid who has nothing. More on that technological edge and the futility of it at a later date.


Jett Travolta died the other day after having a seizure while vacationing with his family in the Bahamas. It has been said that he hit his head on the bathtub either during or after the seizure which might be the actual cause of his death but hey I’m not a doctor so what do I know? I like his father’s work of late and my sympathy goes out to the family because of this. But a small piece of me remembers that the Travoltas are scientologists and as such are big fans of organized medicine and the bullcrap that ensues from such a group. But wouldn’t a little bit of medication avoided this seizure problem that Jett was known to have had?


Crappy customer service is what we all hope to have every time we go shopping. Just the other day the wife and I were at our local Wal-Mart Supercenter coupon shopping since we still have only one job between the two of us when we saw a neat little bobble-head stormtrooper. It was cool, a nicely painted 501st Legionnaire standing at attention with his blaster rifle at his side. Unfortunately there was no price to be found for poor lonely Trooper Denal so we went to check out with the hope that the register would solve the mystery. Nope it just created a confused cashier until wifey takes poor Denal to the customer service desk; here’s where it gets fun. The helpful people behind the desk told her, rudely of course, that the item wasn’t in the system and could not be sold. She asked to speak to a manager and instead a stock clerk came from the back to tell her the same thing and to add that the group of items shouldn’t have been on the shelf in the first place. So not only did these CUSTOMER SERVICE oriented people not help a customer be happy with a visit to their store, but they refused to sell an item that was no longer carried because it couldn’t sell in the first place. God Bless America and everything it’s turning into.

Sarcasm, yet another dish served fresh every day.