So I've been quiet for a while, and thought it was time to update with a good old-fashioned JH rant.
As should be obvious by the title, it won't be the last...
First,
E! "News" online. I have Yahoo News set as my home page, and I keep
abreast of entertainment news as a matter of both personal and
semi-professional interest. One of Yahoo News' featured providers in
the Entertainment 'section' is "E! Online," propagated by the E!
Television Network.
I'm not sure who told these obnoxious,
smart-assed, snarky, insulting mouthbreathers that their uninformed,
uniformative, and insulting (both to their subjects and their readers)
excrement constitutes journalism, but whoever it was should be strung
up by their keyboard cable and beat to death with an attitude
adjuster. Nothing
published by this connection of bottom-feeding hangers-on escapes the
apparently insatiable need for condescension. For example, in one
article I caught today, a bit regarding a intellectual property
disagreement between blues-rock band The Black Crowes and country-pop
singer Gretchen Wilson contained not only the god-awful headline "Black Crowes Caw Out Gretchen Wilson for Alleged Song Stealing," but wrapped their piece with the following comment:
"On the bright side, should the Crowes' claims hold in court, at the
very least it would show that the band's peers, if not necessarily
their critics, actually do listen to their music all the way through."
Is
this supposed to represent wit? This is actually one of the more
ambiguous and less offensive examples; here, you can't quite tell if
they're trying to insult critics or the Crowes. Point is, it doesn't
matter: your job is to report
the news, not see how many hi-fives you can get from your little cadre
of suckups for writing the most obnoxious gutter-level attempt at an
insult. This crap is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who reads
it.
It goes further, though; all too often, the 'news' being reported is more along the lines of "Cursed Cast Members from American Pie: Our Top 9,"
in which we get to watch the "writer/s" revel in the career mishaps,
personal travails, and other voyeuristic tidbits related to the popular
late '90s teen comedy.
At long last, America, have you no sense
of decency? Who are the muck-dwelling Darwinian contradictions who sit
with their bag of cheezy poofs and orange genitals, anxiously awaiting
this particular brand of 'news?' What kind of pathetic mouth-breathing
moron derives such pleasure from the personal pain of other human
beings that they would ever allow this tripe to circulate beyond the
bathroom stalls of seedy Hollywood bars?
Maybe I'm missing
something, but I think if I were running the 'Entertainment Network,' I
would aspire to making it something more than the media equivalent of
an ill-maintained public commode. Grow up or shut up, E! Online.
Next
up: Websites, both government and private. I've got a long list of
complaints and logical anomalies regarding much of our government, but
there are a couple of particular types of boneheadedness I want to
address for now.
First: On both the North Carolina Employment
Security Commission website, and on the website of the company that
handles my parents' mortgage, a PIN is required to access basically
anything but the front page, including contact forms to report issues
with the website. In both cases, the issue at hand is that my parents
have never been given a PIN number for either site. On neither site is
there any indication of how one goes about getting a PIN, and here's
the kicker: in order to contact these people to request a PIN, you have to have a PIN to access the e-mail form.
This
isn't just bad web design, this is pure boneheaded stupidity at its
very finest. Whatever brother-in-law's cousin's sister's nephew bribed
the government to get this contract in the first place, and whoever
within the government approved it, should be forced to read Joseph
Heller's Catch-22 over and over and over again until they manage to learn how to think like a reasonably intelligent human being.
And
then there's the NC Child Support Enforcement website. I have an old
bill that I've been paying down forever, in very small increments. My
bill is due on the first. So, today being the 30th, I thought it was
about time to take care of it, and went to the website to use their
'convenient' online payment system. First off, it costs five bucks to
make a payment - in my case, this is a 25% surcharge. I fail to see
how this serves the interests of children. Secondly, it's not until
the payment is made, processed, and confirmed that you find out it takes two days for the payment to post.
This would be ridiculous in and of itself, given that I can process a
payment through my own website in about a nanosecond and have the cash
in hand and ready to spend immediately. What makes it absolutely
outrageous is that I am now at risk of a contempt of court citation
because I didn't pay 'on time'...even though I actually did. Payment's
due on the 1st, today is before the first, and I no longer have that
money. I have a confirmation receipt saying I paid...but of course,
it's going to end up with me having to argue about it in court again.
And
before I get hit with 'that's what you get for waiting until the last
minute,' to hell with that. The bill's due on the first. Not "the
first minus two business days for processing." And who is this money
being paid to? The state assesses fees to maintain the account;
additionally the entire division is allegedly tax-supported. So why is
there another fee tacked on
to this, that I have to pay? Especially when the system that this fee
allegedly supports is so clumsy and inefficient that it takes two days
to post a payment, when I can run to the corner store and buy a soda
with my debit card and the payment shows up immediately? My bank account certainly doesn't wait two days to post the payment, so why am I not credited for it?
There
are a million examples of this kind of stupidity, and I intend to run
through most of them here at some point. For now, just consider: If
"E!" news, websites that require PIN's you don't have to request the
PIN you don't have, and an electronic payment system that actually
takes longer than standard postal delivery to post a payment are the
best that we as a society can manage, then I respectfully submit that
we are, at this very moment, observing and participating in the final
decline of western civilization. When these are the examples of what
government and industry can do when given unprecedented access to
information technology, ladies and gentlemen we have failed and failed
miserably.