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The Destination is the Journey

I live in a rather small city. Small enough that most people rarely get to ride in elevators. Accordingly, we have a lot of etiquette problems relating to elevators.

For example, there are people who hold elevator doors for others who are not even close to being ready to get on. E.g., the people we’re waiting for are not even in the building yet. There are people who push and shove their way onto elevators slowing down the whole process. It’s simple people, the elevator is not going anywhere until those who want off get off. The longer that takes, the longer you’ll wait.

But this one from a secretary across the hall is just bizarre.

She entered the building on the first floor and hit the up button on the elevator. It immediately opened, which indicates it was already on the first floor.

She walked in and noticed a guy, in his early 30s, already standing there. He said,

I don’t think this elevator is working. It’s not going anywhere.

She looked over at the buttons and noticed that none of them have been pushed.

Did you push any of the buttons?

No answer.

You’ve got to push a button to make it go up.

No response.

What floor do you want?

I don’t know.

Where are you going?

I don’t know.

What do you need to do here today?

I don’t know.

We’ll, I’m going to the third floor. Let’s go there.

She got off on three and left him on the elevator with no other buttons pushed. The door closed behind her and she never saw him again.

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Do as I say, not as I say

I just love this one.

These speakers are very loud and sound great! They are in excellent condition as well! I am selling the speakers with a GSX3 amp and all the cords and mic too. The amp will not be sold separately but i will consider selling the speakers separately.

So if he does end up selling the speakers separately, does that mean he’ll refuse to sell the amp?

Heck, maybe he loves the amp, but his wife wanted it out of the house, and this is his way to ensure keeping it…

I tried selling the amp dear, but no one would buy it. By the way, I’m going to need to buy some new speakers to go with that amp.

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Raceless Movie: Like Mike

Yet another one of my movie non-reviews. This time it’s the NBA advertisement Like Mike.

The premise is that a 13 year old, black, 4 and 1/2 foot tall, orphan living at an evil orphanage, finds a pair of basketball shoes that might have been previously owned by Michael Jordan. He makes a wish on the shoes, gets struck by lightening, and suddenly he’s the greatest basketball player ever.

Through a series of events that could only happen in a movie underwritten by the NBA (seriously), the kid is signed to a play for the NBA.

He gets paired up with another player to mentor him, and you immediately know the kid will teach the mentor the real meaning of life, and eventually, the mentor will adopt him.

Anyway, the amazing thing about the movie is that is portrays an alternative universe wherein racism and even racial differences do not exist. In other words, the fact that the boy and mentor are black simply never comes into play.

The only other raceless movie I can think of involving a black main character goes back to Richard Pryor’s Brewster’s Millions.

I’m not a member of a minority. So I cannot fully imagine what it would be like to grow up subjected to racism. However, I certainly understand that if you grew up with racism and eventually became a movie director, you’d want to explore the problems with racism. Accordingly, you’d make films about the problems of racism.

However, maybe for us to get past racism we need more films showing us what our world could be like without it.

BTW, the movie was a contrived, ham-fisted, and utterly predictable piece of crap. My 10 year old son loved it, though. Which is not surprising as he was certainly a member of the intended audience for it.

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Is Reality Obsolete?

My son had the ATV out on the 80 acres of unplowed farmland behind our house. But he stopped to play the ATV racing game Pure instead.

When I was a kid I’d much rather have driven an actual ATV rather than a virtual one. However, back then video games consisted of indistinguishable blobs of pixels. And if an ATV game would have existed, it would have been a side scroller. It’s really hard to be immersed in a side scroller. Not to mention that it would have been played on a 27″ TV from across the room.

Have video games reached a point where they’re actually better than reality?

When I was a kid we’d play cops and robbers or war and run around pretending to shoot each other with toy guns. When we got older, we’d put on coats and sun glasses and do the same thing with BB guns.

I know kids still do similar things, because of the popularity of Nerf guns. But Nerf guns are not anywhere near as popular as Halo and or Call of Duty.

And what happens when virtual sex becomes mainstream? Will having pretend sex, where you can focus on any number of particular and obscene fetishes, be better than having real sex? Heck, maybe we’re already there. One common complaint I’ve been reading in advice columns are husbands who choose to masturbate to porn rather than have real sex with their wives.

And of course games such as the Sims and WOW are already replacing face to face friendships.

How long will it be until someone develops a virtual eating game which would lead to a situation where people would rather starve eating virtual food than eating real food?

On one hand, I’ll never be afraid of a time where people stop overeating or over-reproducing. Even if some people chose to do those exclusively in a virtual world, there will always be enough people to do it in the real world.

But I hope we never lose our sense of awe about the world. The beauty of a waterfall or a tree swaying in the wind. If we ever become more fond of a virtual world over our world, we’ll have even less incentive to make our real world a better place to live.

If we stop giving a fuck about trees, why would we ever protect forests? A society obsessed with a virtual world would clearly let the real world go down the drain.

This shouldn’t be too surprising as we’re already destroying the planet without an alternative virtual world in which to live.

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If a Corpse Falls in the Woods…

In Michigan it’s against the law for a mortician to swear in the presence of a corpse.

MCL 339.1810(1) A person shall be subject to… penalties… if the person commits 1 of the following: (e) Using profane, indecent, or obscene language in the presence of a dead human body…, whose body has not yet been interred or otherwise disposed of.

How the frick is this law ever enforced?! And what facts transpired to get the state legislature involved?

My guess is that a highly influential money-bag overheard a mortician swearing in the backroom and threw a tizzy-fit. “How dare you swear in front of my dead mother!”

And FYI, this isn’t some bizarre law from the 1800s, it was enacted on Oct. 21, 1980.

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Not exactly a selling point…

Someone is trying to sell a “FIRST ACT GETAR” on Craigslist. S/he wrote the following:

I CANT PLAY THIS IT COMES WITH HAND BOOK AND NICE CASE IN TOON AND IN EXLENT SHAPE.

I’m not a grammar Nazi, so I’ll leave most of this alone. The part I’ll focus as is that fact that the guitar is in tune.

Previously I’ve criticized sellers who advertise that their guitars come with picks or new strings. Those aren’t actually selling points. People don’t buy guitars because they need picks or strings. Real guitar players already have picks spread throughout their house and generally buy strings in bulk via Amazon or the like.

The same is true with a guitar being in tune. Guitarists know that a guitar being in tune is only temporary. The minute you take it outside in the cold or heat and transport it to your house, it will be out of tune again. Claiming that the guitar is in tune is simply asinine and shows your complete ignorance about what you’re trying to sell.

And furthermore, on a side note. Any First Act brand instrument is a toy. Don’t waste musician’s time trying to sell toys in the music section of craigslist. Sell them in the toy section where they belong. Over there some ignorant mom would be ecstatic that the toy guitar you’re selling is in tune.

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How to win $10 million in a slip and fall case

Slip and fall cases are usually the bottom of the barrel for lawyers. But every so often an attorney gets a good one and wins big. This is such a story. You can download the PDF of the opinion here.

Back in 2007 Holly Averyt was a truck driver delivering goods and merchandise to a Wal-Mart store.

She slipped and fell on a grease spill and ruptured a disc in her spine. She was unable to work as a truck driver after that.

She and her attorney went to trial and was awarded $15 million dollars. The state’s supreme court reduced the amount to $10 million. Which is still pretty damn good.

So how did Averyt’s attorney win so much money from a slip and fall case? It’s not like she’s quadriplegic or anything. She can still walk, lift stuff, and get around. She just can’t work as a truck driver.

Well, sometimes the plaintiff’s attorney wins the case. And sometimes the defense attorney loses the case. While the plaintiff’s attorney certainly did a great job, the blame for the size of the award falls onto the defendant.

Wal-Mart’s entire defense was that there never was a grease spill. In Wal-Mart’s opening statement to the jury their attorney adamantly denied that a grease spill ever occurred. He stated to the jury that the evidence admitted at trial will confirm that a grease spill never occurred.

But Averyt’s attorney didn’t give up. He had an apparent epiphany where he realized that someone must have cleaned up the spill, so he decided to track down that entity. It turns out it was a local government department. He contacted them and they emailed back an official document explaining what they did to clean up the spill.

Wal-Mart’s manager took the stand and testified that there was no grease spill. Averyt’s attorney used the document to contradict his testimony. The shit hit the fan.

To make a long story short, suddenly Wal-Mart’s manager and attorney remembered that, yes there was a grease spill. And suddenly they found tons of documents concerning the clean-up.

Wal-Mart’s new argument was that, there was a grease spill, but “boy oh boy did we do a great job in cleaning it up.”

Needless to say, the jury saw through their attempt to outright lie to them.

What’s funny is that Wal-Mart tried to blame the whole thing on Averyt’s attorney for ambushing them during the trial. Exactly how was Wal-Mart ambushed? They knew damn well that the grease spill actually occurred. It’s not like they were surprised by the government document. It’s not like they couldn’t have prepared for the contingency that the truth would be revealed at trial.

As the supreme court pointed out, Wal-Mart decided on trial strategy that failed. That’s no one’s fault but their own.

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