Sdtrk: ‘Silver line’ by Birdie

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t go round attacking or sniping at people left and right in ‘real-life’ situations, as not only do I have that much time on my hands, but most people really aren’t worth the effort. But I felt it necessary that I wrote this post, much in the same way that the body rids itself of toxins by vomiting. So at this point, you should probably step back a couple of feet, so you don’t get any on ya.

At this point, I’m certain that over the course of the past week or so, you’ve seen various posts all round the World Wide Wet dealing with the Salon.com article. If not, merely fire up Technorati, and search for any conjunction of the words ‘Davecat’, ‘Sidore’, ‘iDollator’, or ‘creepy’, and you’ll have several sites to choose from. Many of those posts are less than charitable, and all of those happen to be written by closed-minded arseholes.
Now, the curious thing about seeing these excoriating posts, is that 95% of them are written by politically-motivated individuals. When I say that, I mean that a lot of these blogs are normally filled with content dealing with social issues, impeaching Dubya, etc etc. That, in and of itself, is odd enough, as what does a Doll and her husband have to do with a blog of that nature? But the really strange thing is, most of these politically-motivated bloggers? They’re liberals. Or, at least, so-called liberals. You would think that a person who stands for racial equality, the elimination of societal classes, gay and lesbian rights, etc etc, would be pro-Synthetik; or, at the very least, not entirely against the idea.

Over at pandagon, where they practically had me on the gallows, it seemed that a prerequisite of writing a response that would gain you their favour was to call me a misogynist. For those of you who don’t want to wade through the 400+ responses to the post concerning Meghan’s article, basically, I am a creep/loser/sexist/misogynist/tool of the patriarchy (choose one) because not only do I own a RealDoll, but I’ve given her a personality. Giving her a personality, or even referring to Shi-chan as ‘her’ rather than ‘it’, means that I hate women, but since I’m a loser, I still want sex, but having my ‘overpriced fucktoy’ means that I don’t have to deal with a ‘real’ woman’s opinions, likes, dislikes, etc. So obviously that makes me a creep/loser/sexist/misogynist/tool of the patriarchy (choose one)! It’s that simple!
There’s oh so many problems with that school of thought. So very many.

+ I wrote two responses on the pandagon post; in the first one, I’d said

So I would assume that no-one here has ever been rejected in their advances towards a partner? I assume every single one of you has been completely and utterly successful with their dating experiences? Moreover, the person you’re with is an absolute flawless joy to be around, physically, emotionally, and mentally? Well, congratulations to the lot of you! You’re extraordinarily lucky, each and every one of you. Really, I mean that.

It really doesn’t occur to a lot of iDollator critics that quite a few owners have their Dolls because they’re sick of being rejected, due to failing to meet the standards of whatever person they’re trying to romantically impress. After a few couple of times of falling off the romance horse, some people, like me, say ‘this really isn’t fucking worth it’, and stop. Our society places great pressure on people to get together and be in a relationship, but it requires a lot of time and energy that a lot of individuals don’t have, so they ‘settle’ for someone, and either compromise parts of themselves in the process, or consciously/subconciously try to change their partner. And then, there are times when the person you’ve linked up with turns out to be a vicious liar, as KrazyQ pointed out. The pandagon fuckwits have no idea what makes an iDollator become an iDollator, as there’s no one reason. In my case, one of the foremost reasons is that I was tired of being stabbed in the back by people I placed too much trust in.

+ Which leads up to a comment I’d made in my second post, which turned into some seriously miscontrued bullshit:

I’d rather be in a relationship with a Doll, rather than be in one with a real woman who’s possibly lying to meet her own ends. I’m sure that’s got the feminists here chomping at the bit, but as I’d said, I’m not misogynist; I just don’t like liars, especially when love is involved. Being with a Doll eliminates that possibility.

Of course, they read that as ‘Davecat thinks all women are liars’. Frankly, I think 99% of the population, male or female, are liars, with a few notable exceptions. I was saying that it concerns me more that a) the few dating experiences I’ve had were with a couple of liars, most notably my interactions with the Slag, and b) it’s going to affect me more if a woman that I’m interested in is lying, cos I don’t date men. But being psychotic, they added 2 with 2 and arrived at 22.

+ I’m sorry, but if you are taking a paragraph, reducing it to its component sentences, and then chopping the sentences up to infinitesmally small thoughts that you don’t even fully comprehend, as you’re making presumptions to begin with, that is also a problem. People, especially high-minded individuals who consider themselves socially aware intellectuals, should know that sometimes the context of printed articles gets distorted. I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with Meghan’s article — it’s brilliantly composed, and I’m glad it was written — but part of the problem with the pandagon shits, and really, the other blogs ragging on me, is that the Salon.com edit is inferior to the original version. But everyone’s seen the Salon.com version, and as Salon doesn’t mention the existence of the original story, that’s all these people have to go on. Not only that, but as far as pandagon, most people didn’t read past the first page of the story, and quite a few people didn’t read it at all.

+ Brief thing: it’s great how they have a problem with me referring to Shi-chan as ‘she’ and not ‘it’. Is it just me, or wouldn’t referring to a female-shaped object that I’m intimate with as an ‘it’ be more offensive and sexist and dehumanising, than if I didn’t?
To the uninitiated, seeing the elaborate personality and backstory I’ve created for Sidore might seem weird at best, and creepy at worst. To be an iDollator, you do have to have your tongue planted in your cheek. Dolls are silicone receptacles that the more inventive of us choose to use as physical bodies for personalities. It’s called having fun. Yes, Sidore is not a ‘real person’; yes, she is a Doll, but giving her a personality is more of a ‘human’ thing to do, rather than seeing an expensive, beautifully-sculpted work of art as just a ‘fucktoy’.

+ Funny thing: In a phone conversation this Sunday past, Meghan pointed out that both of us had posted, and yet no-one actually asked us anything. Think about that. Both the writer and one of the main subjects of the story were there, and yet no-one actually asked us anything. Well, I take that back; one or two people asked Meghan a question, but all I received were sarky comments. That just solidifies everything as far as the mentality of people like that; the whole ‘it’s wrong because it’s wrong’, or ‘it’s wrong because I said so’, or ‘it’s wrong because it’s a lot easier for me to insult someone than to open my tiny fucking mind to questions that might shatter my fragile ideals’. It’s ironic and a little unsettling to me because those people are ‘liberals’. They’re theoretically supposed to be on my side.
Really, normal feminists I have nothing wrong with. I honestly believe that a lot of the reasons why society is as bollocked up as it is is because there’s been a male stranglehold on it for hundreds of years. But you’re a radical feminist, you say? O! You’re fucked up. You’re a bitter, scowling, sexually frustrated, morally confused, fucked up person. You are no better than the right-wing Republicans which you loathe, you are simply the opposite side of the coin. It’s like SafeT said, people like that drain any and all credibility from normal feminists and their sympathisers.

+ And as I, and a couple of other posters had attempted to convey (surprisingly, there were a couple of people on my side. Actually, it was more like Meghan, and a friend of hers were defending me there, and there were two or three people who were leaning towards my side): why is it such a monumental issue that some people have a Synthetik companion to begin with? Female detractors will say ‘You’re creepy, and I wouldn’t want anything to do with you’. To a Doll husband, not only is that not in any way a loss, but anybody who would say anything like that is the kind of individual that we would take pains to avoid — romantically, in a day-to-day context, whatever. It’s a sign of over-inflated self-importance that a person would say something like that, as well as a striking indicator of closed-mindedness. Personally speaking, the more closed-minded you are, the less I’m going to think of you.

At this point, I think that pretty much covers the lot. ‘Your friends don’t need an explanation, and your enemies won’t believe you anyway.’ But I do want to leave you with a link to a very beautiful post, written by one of my dearest friends, Penda. You know, my closest female friend that I’ve known for 25 years, which is quite remarkable for a misogynist like myself. With her personal perspective, she brings across in her eloquent way a more condensed version of what I’ve just written here. So go read that instead. 🙂

All done!

Sdtrk: ‘At night’ by the Cure

This morning, I was awakened by my bloody phone ringing at sometime after 8.30am. I lurched out of bed, saw it was a number that I didn’t recognise, and switched the ringer off. Roughly three minutes later, I hear the beep that indicates that someone’s left a message, and I’m thinking, ‘who in fuck’s left me a three minute message??’ So I got out of bed again in order to check who it was, and it turned out to be D_____, a lass that was the receptionist at my last job who I was half-heartedly attempting to chat up. She was going on at length about how she’s just moved her computer into her new place with her current boyfriend, and they got into it this morning, as he had checked her AOL Inbox, and discovered, to his chagrin, several names of males that were not his own. Yeah, he’s one of those lovely, aggressively insecure types of blokes — he’s a cop, which pretty much says it all right there. D_____ had left a message wanting to know how exactly she could make sure she got rid of, or at least hide, any and all Emails from her other guy friends that she’d received, as well as pictures; as one time, I had gotten round to her old place and taken photos of her feet — yes, I’m a foot fetishist, we’ve covered this — and Emailed them back to her. He had asked who took them, and D_____ panicked and said some coworker had taken them, and when I rung her back at work, she said that he was probably going through her AOL account as we spoke. In short, the Gestapo was paying her a visit, and she wanted to know how best to effectively hide the Jews in her cupboards. I honestly don’t know how that analogy came about, but it’s making me giggle.

Basically, I’m sat here shaking my head. Why is it that people get into relationships, and knowingly stay in them, with fuckwits? I’m telling her, ‘well, D_____, if he won’t let you send and receive Emails from any one of your male friends, or he won’t let you give out your cellphone number to any one of your male friends, or if he won’t let you hang out with your male friends — in many cases, blokes you’ve known before you even met your prick of a boyfriend — then maaaybe that’s not the sort of relationship you want to be in?’ She’s saying that the arguments with him are stressing her out, which was audibly apparent in speaking with her the last couple of times after I was fired. I suggested that I take her out to dinner for a stress-free evening, but she claimed it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get away for any length of time, as she heads straight from work to pick her boyfriend’s son up from school, whereupon she heads back to her place and spends the rest of the eve with her prick of a boyfriend. D_____ apparently can’t leave her relationship, cos from what I see, she’s like thousands upon thousands of people who have a driving need to be with someone — anyone — even if that person has a couple of faults, such as being a suspicious little shit.

Now, I speak with some experience, as to some extent, that’s the way things were with my and my former housemate, the Slag. I was going to my job, being depressed there, coming home, having to drive her silly arse out to her stripper job or whatever cos she couldn’t drive, then hours later, having to get out of bed and leave a sound sleep behind in order to pick her up from said job, and then she would invariably chew me out because of something I did or didn’t do, either in real life, or solely in her deranged hallucinatory mind. I’m a person who believes that a home should not be a stressful place; it should be someplace where you can get away from virtually everything. After speaking to all manner of cunts from various states on the phone for seven hours, home should be a place where I really shouldn’t have to speak to anyone, if I choose not to. So one day, after of culmination of events that I’ll have to explain at a later date (that’s for the rest of the ‘I am not making this up‘ series, which I swear I’ll finish one day), I simply packed up my belongings and left. Good job on that as well, as it’s done loads for my sanity and well-being.
That caustic series of months where I lived with that so-called person pretty much solidified the fact that I can’t live with anyone. If they’re a friend before I lived with them, they turn into something entirely and negatively Other. Living by oneself, as I’ve said before, allows a person to actually develop their interests in their own time. It permits them to relax, and not be ‘on’ all the time. Most importantly, it allows them to see and do what they want, with whom they want, without having to field awkward and unnecessary questions from their roommate or partner. That’s one of the many reasons that I enjoy the company of my RealDoll Sidore. Rampant iDollatry aside, a Doll doesn’t care if you’ve had partners in the past, a Doll doesn’t care if you come home four hours later than you said you would, etc etc. It’s my goal to eliminate as much stress from my life as I possibly can, and being in the sort of relationship I’m currently in works toward that goal.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m writing this in the spirit of ‘ha ha, I’m better off than you are’, cos I’m not. I just completely and utterly fail to understand why people will put up with that sort of behaviour. It could be argued that there are a few advantages being in one-half of a relationship — doubled income; constant, relentless, non-stop companionship — but if you have to compromise your personal freedoms, then none of it’s worth it. Society dictates that to be ‘successful’ and ‘happy’, you should be in a traditional relationship, but the way I see it, just because society says it’s a good idea, then it most likely isn’t

Sdtrk: ‘Hoffmann’ by Asja auf Capri

At this very moment in writing, it’s raining outside, which is a fact that pleases me to no end. I mean, I normally prefer the skies to be cloudy and grey, but the fact that it’s doing it right now today is making me giggle like a schoolgirl. Why, you ask? This would be the week-end of the non-event known to people in the Southeastern Michigan area as the Woodward Dream Cruise.

The Woodward Dream cruise, if you’re lucky enough to not be familiar with it, is basically an excuse for all the gearheads and nostalgia freaks in the state (as well as a couple from neighbouring states) to cruise up and down Woodward, which is the main drag of the Tri-county area, as well as the dividing line between the west side and the east side. It’s ostensibly a sad reenactment of the ‘good ol’ days’ of the Fifties and Sixties, when Detroit had both a functioning auto industry and places worth visiting, and young people would drive aimlessly up and down Woodward in their oversized automobiles. Now, once a year for the past.. however many years.. all those individuals who grew up during those years that have reconditioned ‘classic’ cars spend an entire week-end, driving aimlessly up and down Woodward, slowing traffic down, and being a general nuisance.

On the one hand, people who support the Dream cruise say that not only is it fun, but it brings business to the shops in the area, the area being from 8 mile, to several miles north to Birmingham. It’s a chance to get that ’57 Chevy convertible that you’ve been wiping with a cloth diaper once a week for twelve months out of the garage and back onto the road where it belongs, and hang out with other like-minded car enthusaists, and their accompanying beer bellies. On the other hand, it’s a fucking annoyance, especially to those who live around Woodward, or use it habitually. You’ve got very loud, large, and ugly cars taking up three out of four lanes, and driving at an average speed of 20 – 25 mph. Quite a few business owners hate the Dream cruise cos it prevents customers from patronising their stores, cos people want to do what they can to avoid the traffic slowdown, and if it means not going anywhere near Woodward, then so be it. My friend Jeff and his wife regularly either leave town that week-end, or spend the majority of Saturday in cities that are far away from the cruise.

Now, not only do you have to deal with the hundreds of gobshites with their aircraft carriers on wheels, but then there’s the crowds of lookie-loos that line Woodward, in order to gawk at the cars. That aspect gets so ridiculous, that people set up lawn chairs a couple of days in advance. It’s fantastic to see these people have no other excitement or meaning in their lives, except to sit on the side of a fucking major thoroughfare for the purpose of watching loud cars and their equally loud owners, days before the actual event is underway.
I’d also like to take a moment to mention that right now in Michigan, a single gallon of regular gas is almost $2.80. Can you see why the Dream cruise makes less sense with each passing sentence?

It can be argued that I’m a wee bit biased. For one, I don’t really like American cars, as you may have gathered, especially ones built during the Fifties and Sixties, as I find them to be too noisy, and graceless in design. Plus I live about a mile away from Woodward — although I reside just south of the ‘starting point’ of the Dream cruise, I still have to fight my way through traffic if I want to go anywhere this eve. However, I hope to be attending the Battle of the Brits auto show this September. The main differences between that and the Dream cruise are that 1) the vehicles are better (‘British Made by British Labour’) and 2) the cars are not obstructing traffic on the goddamned road. The BotB takes place at an open-air park, where all the cars and motorcycles are parked on the lawn, and people walk amongst them and whatnot. Rather nice!

Right now, the rain has stopped. But it rained earlier this morn and stopped, so I’m hoping that it fires up again, and pisses all over the Dream cruise parade. Sorry, convertible owners! You’re probably gonna need more diapers

Sdtrk: ‘Little man, what now?’ by Morrissey

So recently I was ‘surfing’ the ‘Internets’, doing some research regarding a Japanese television show that Derek and I viewed a week or so ago, called ‘Densha otoko’ (‘The Train man’). What the show’s about is irrelevant to this post, but you can learn about it here. Needless to say, we got a big kick out of it, so Derek is going to download the rest of the series as the fansubbers release them. At any rate, in scanning various websites, I read an article from a 2004 issue of the Japan Times with a paragraph that really stood out:

[I am from the] analog generation, growing up only with television and land-line phones. In fact, an article in Spa (Sept. 7) informs us of digital gaps even between those in their 20s. Twenty-eight-year-olds are the pocket-paper generation; they tend to write long, letter-style e-mails. Twenty-four-year-olds were raised on cell phones (but during the transition period to broadband Net access), while 20-year-olds have only known fixed-fee, broadband access to the Net.

For the past couple of months I’ve been lamenting to mates about how I really don’t write Emails to people as much as I used to, cos I tend to write these rather long, detail-heavy affairs that take up quite a bit of time, so I urge them to read ‘Shouting etc etc’, and I try to ring them on week-ends, when my minutes are free. But I find it rather scary that there will be a whole generation of people who can’t form proper Emails or letters, let alone paragraphs, without ‘omg hi 2 u’ or some variant being in there somewhere, or worse. It’s not so much a feeling of ‘these consarned kids with their newfangled cell-u-lar phones,’ but more like, ‘As decades pass, future generations will be less and less capable of being able to write properly’. You know, when you’re in an English writing class, much like I was a couple of semesters ago, and the teacher feels that it’s necessary to point out that when writing papers, emoticons and Internet shorthand are unacceptable, and someone asks why, and you just want to stick your index finger through your eye, and into your brain, and swirl it around, just so you have something less painful to focus on.

I’d mentioned the quoted paragraph to Allison during one of our car rides in between shoots. She remarked that she’d read somewhere of an informal study that basically said that between the advent of Email and the beginning of text messaging, people were beginning to write on a regular basis. Their literacy levels didn’t necessarily go up (I’ve always said that the Internet is the largest bastion of illiterates anywhere — AOL, I’m looking in your direction), but people were actually getting back to writing. Of course, text messaging ruined all that for everyone, and now you have sites that look like this. That sure as fuck isn’t proper English. I’m not even sure it’s proper anything.

Now, as regarding my former style of writing (for examples, check any entry to ‘Shouting etc etc’ prior to Nov 2004), I knew that I wasn’t writing in standard English, and I was perfectly capable of doing so, but I was electing not to as an experiment. A ten-year long experiment, but nevertheless. That was the main reason I stopped it, as people would look at my writing style and say ‘well he says he’s a Grammar Nazi, but look how he writes,’ without knowing why I wrote that way. But I’d be hard-pressed to believe that that lass in the blog linked above has higher aspirations for her fast-and-loose take on English. Maybe she’s got the ESL (English as a Second Language) thing going, or you can chalk it up to ‘youthful rebellion’, but I’d say it’s a combination of the herd mentality and laziness. But that’s just me.

I’m at the point where I’m attempting to phase out Internet shorthand out of my own writing; after that, I’ll work on the emoticons. I do realise that language evolves over time, but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a good idea

Sdtrk: ‘The Black Angel’s death song’ by the Velvet underground

Well! I was going to announce two pretty ace pieces of news on Thursday, but as it turned out, things just didn’t work out the way I wanted them to. For one, I had high hopes that I would have a job today. I’d signed out with a temporary agency on Tuesday, and went in for a battery of tests that I did pretty well on. My agent told me that a local branch of the Muscular Dystrophy Association was hiring, and that they needed people with good phone voices, which is something I’m thankfully equipped with. So I was rather confident when I went in for the group interview this Thursday morn, despite being wedged in a small office with nine other people; the one directly to my left smelling rather like a toilet. Over the course of the debriefing process, Pam, the office manager, handed us each a copy of the script that we were supposed to recite, and she would be playing the Person On The Other End of the Line. Going first, I was fairly spot-on with my reading, and managed to get a couple of rebuttals in when Pam presented them. The debriefing was over in about an hour, and Pam told us that she would be calling our temp agencies, after which she would call the people back who MDA would be hiring. Guess who didn’t get a callback? I spoke with my temp agent, and she said that Pam said that I was very articulate, but I, quote, ‘wasn’t aggressive enough’. Ah. I see.
Perhaps I should’ve screamed the script at the top of my lungs while bashing Pam’s face in with the metal stapler I spotted on the desk next to me, and for the coup-de-grâce, I would hurl her headlong through the nearest closed window into oncoming traffic, my MDA script howlings ringing in her bleeding ears. THEN I WOULD BE INSTANT MANAGEMENT MATERIAL.

As far as I see it, the reason why I’m so inefficient with sales and all things of a persuasive nature, is that ultimately, I don’t care if you accept or reject what I have to ‘sell’. Due to years and years of having my father force me into doing things I was never keen on, I decided that since I try to treat others they way I’d wish to be treated, the last thing I want to become is some salescock leering an inch and a half from someone’s face, whether on the phone or in person, shouting ‘HEY! HEY! HEY! WON’T YOU LISTEN TO WHAT I’M TELLING YOU? HEY! I HAVE SOMETHING TO OFFER! I KNOW THIS ISN’T A GOOD TIME, BUT HANG ON FOR JUST A COUPLE OF MINUTES! HEY! HEY! OH, YOU’RE NOT INTERESTED? WELL, LET ME JUST TAKE MORE OF YOUR VALUABLE LIFE AWAY FROM YOU AND KEEP TALKING AT YOU, EVEN THOUGH I KNOW YOU’RE NOT BOTHERED! HEY! HEY!’ etc. Cos I have no tolerance for that kind of behaviour, and I’d be a hypocrite if I were to act like that. However, the job did pay $12 per hour..
So my agent said to ring her back next week. I told her that I’d be better off in data entry, or any phone-related work that didn’t require me to sell anything. We’ll see how that goes, if it indeed does go.

And the other piece of shit luck is that I was outbid on a Stylophone. I’m less upset about that, as surprisingly, you can still find plenty of Stylophones in relatively good / not-too-expensive condition on the Bay of e, as Pulp is still on their extended hiatus, and hardly anyone remembers Rolf Harris anymore. Once I’m ‘gainfully’ employed, though, I’m feckin’ getting one, by hook or by crook.. In the meantime, I’ll have to do with a virtual version. But it’s just not the same..

Switching gears momentarily: Marika and I caught ‘Charlie and the chocolate factory’ Monday eve, which we both dug. Sure, Gene Wilder’s Wonka had more of an overt sinister menace, whereas Depp’s Wonka seemed like a deranged individual with a serious case of arrested development. Which worked for me, especially when you see the Burton-added bits with Wonka’s father. I don’t know, I was giggling throughout most of the fillum. There was a bit of a sense of this version not really bringing anything new to the table, but it was Tim Burton, so we were happy. Don’t know if I’d buy the DVD, but we enjoyed the fillum with great pleasure. When’s ‘Corpse bride‘ making its debut again?

So yeah! This is why I don’t announce most of my plans to people until they’re finalised and done-with, cos if and when they end up going agley, I don’t end up looking like a gobshite. Heh. Too late for that

Sdtrk: ‘To Alison’ by Ecstasy of St.Theresa

You know what I like doing? Getting into the left-hand lane in front of an SUV and driving slowly. The feckers deserve it, frankly.

I’ve never liked sport utility vehicles. They’re overly large, horribly inefficient with fuel, and 95% of them are just plain ugly (with the exception of the Aztek and the H2O, both of which somewhat resemble vehicles that SHADO would’ve used). However, it’s recently struck home with me why so many people feel compelled to purchase the damned things. I was showing my friend Mari some pictures of the various pre-2000 Mini Coopers, and she was astonished at how small it was. ‘How could you drive something that small?’ she asked. ‘I’d be afraid that I’d get crushed under somebody’s tires!’ However, that whole mindset really came screeching to my attention when I happened to catch something on a local newscast recently:

Smart Car Promotion Draws Criticism

You’ve seen the ads where Casino Windsor is giving away three smart cars, but did you catch that tiny print? Right at the bottom, the ad says “not street viable in U.S.A.”

The smart car, sold in Canada, has a small diesel engine and a little motor that does not meet U.S. emissions regulations, and U.S. Customs won’t let it in the country.

In Detroit, there are signs advertising the promotion, but if you win, you won’t be able to drive your prize in the United States. Casino Windsor said despite all the advertising, the rules are clear.

If an American customer wins the car, he or she has an alternative to take $14,000 in Canadian money instead.

There were plans to import the cars at one time, but right now, the plans are on hold.

Now, I’m seeing the sentence ‘The smart car, sold in Canada, has a small diesel engine and a little motor that does not meet U.S. emissions regulations’, and reading it as ‘The smart car is not vast and heavy enough to compete with our ridiculously large vehicles, and as we don’t really want people to be flattened like pancakes by an Escalade, the US cannot allow it on the roads’. They could’ve added ‘Three days’ worth of fuel for an SUV would keep a smart car running for three months,’ but that wouldn’t be entirely professional.

It’s really struck me why most Americans just don’t buy smaller vehicles. They want something larger that they’ll feel ‘safe’ in. You’ve got some tosspot going, ‘Well, if I don’t drive something that takes up one and a half parking spaces, I won’t feel safe from someone else driving an SUV.’ So that tosspot buys an SUV, wherein someone else says, ‘Well, if he has a huge vehicle, I want something equally huge, otherwise I’ll get crushed under his wheels’. So that person buys an SUV. And so on, and so on. It’s the Arms Race, only on four wheels.

As far as I’m concerned, the argument ‘what if you need to haul around a family, or a lot of people?’ no longer applies. Go buy a station wagon. Remember those? They looked rather like long cars — I know it seems fantastical, but it’s true, they once existed, you can see them on Google. Besides, I’m fairly certain that most people who own SUVs probably don’t have more than five people in their family, anyway.

I suppose you could reason that I wrote this post due to the fact that I was shagged off that Smart cars aren’t street legal in the United states. But it just goes to show what kind of mentality we have driving round on the roads today. I guess people really dig having to spend $40 – $50 to fill their fuel tank each week. Reason no.478 to move to Toronto: Smart cars are legal.
If I had that kind of crazy disposable income, however, I’d rather buy a pre-BMW Mini, or a Fiat 500. I’d love to drive a smart car, but even I think they’re too small to own

Sdtrk: none, oddly enough. You’ll have to provide your own

Something occurred earlier this evening that was so irritating to me, that I delayed bedtime in order to post it and get it off my chest.

So earlier, I was on the phone with a (for the sake of argument) friend, that we’ll call Spike. Over the course of the conversation, he mentioned that he had given something that I bought as an Xmas present for him — a pair of action figures — to someone else. Heh.

As far as I’m concerned, this is something you do not do. You do not tell someone that you’ve given something that they bought for you to someone else. Perhaps if he hadn’t been born in a barn and had some sense of etiquette, manners, and common sense, he would’ve had the presence of mind not to blurt that out.

I can understand receiving something that you don’t necessarily want, and surreptitiously getting rid of it; that’s happened to all of us. But for fuck’s sake, you don’t tell the person. I’d like to give Spike the benefit of a doubt and say that he forgot that I picked it up for him, but still, that’s just fucking idiotic.

That was good that I typed that out, as I’m no longer shagged off about it. I feel pretty confident that Spike will never see this, as he never reads ‘Shouting etc etc’ anyway. And he no longer has to worry, cos he won’t be getting anything from me ever again. ‘O, your Xmas present? O, I’m sorry, squire, I was too busy to pick one up. I’ll get right on it.’ Give me a fucking break